Nationalism as a category of analysis in imperial frameworks is essentially a necessity to establish a coherent teleological narrative that conditions historical analysis to the end of the empire and birth of nation-states. Nationalism in the end suggests a rupture in political ideology that does not belong to imperial settings. In a bid to avoid teleology, available scholarship has thus far highlighted the fluidities of ethnic identities and loyalties in the provinces as well as the attachment of the late Ottoman statesmen to the Ottomanist ideals in the final years of the empire. Taking into account this body of recent scholarship, how can one rearticulate the political ideology of the Ottoman state and its elites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the absence of a teleological reading? This paper argues that empires in Europe and elsewhere that ruled over multi-ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities responded to the rise of linguistic and religious nationalisms since the 1820s through a similar, albeit not uniform, formulation of an official nationalism that would function as a supranational identity and accordingly co-opt nationalist currents. The Ottoman response, formulated by its own intelligentsia, was no different. By utilizing Ottoman newspapers, memoirs, and archival material, I accordingly suggest reading the late Ottoman history through the prism of an Ottoman official nationalism which was essentially an ideology of conservation characterized by its emphasis on bureaucratic perfection, cultural assimilation into the imperial polity, and interventionist measures of modernization that were to inculcate loyalty on the ground. Yet, various communities that were at the end of the assimilationist Ottoman measures had protection and backing abroad, minimizing the Ottoman state’s capacity of coercion (and thus success of integration/assimilation) and accordingly forcing its ruling elite to bargain and negotiate with diverse political factions, whether revolutionary or those of the ancien régime. While Ottoman official nationalism proved a futile attempt of saving the state, the legacy of the late Ottoman political experience continued to be as pronounced in the articulation of subsequent nationalist arrangements, whether Turkish or Arab, in the post-WWI period, just as other continuities in architecture, cuisine, administration, law, language, and culture came to mark the transition from empire to republic.