In the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the Arab territories belonging to the Ottoman Empire were organized as autonomous provinces. Autonomy spelled out different arrangements in different provinces, with autonomous prerogatives ranging from minor privileges to full-fledged hereditary rule. Although the institutions and practices pertaining to Ottoman autonomy varied greatly from province to province, the political language and conceptual framework underlying it remained very much the same. This paper examines the conceptual repertoire of Ottoman autonomy in the Arab world through a close reading of a corpus of appointment (tevliye) and confirmation (ibḳā ve taḳrīr) decrees issued by Ottoman sultans to provincial governors in Algiers (prior to 1830), Tunis, Egypt, Syria, as well as Jeddah and Mecca. In particular, it focuses on concepts pertaining to the delegation of sovereign power (iḥāle, tefvīż, tevkīl) to local governors and to the duty of good governance (ḥüsn-i idāre, ḥüsn-i ḥimāye) which Ottoman sultans impose on them in return. Most of these concepts originally belong to the semantic field of the economy and, more specifically, to the legal terminology pertaining to the transfer, management, and distribution of land, debt, and revenue. The paper attempts to make sense of this semantic affinity, exploring the parallel between the transfer of property and the delegation of rule.