In the late summer of 1910, Hüseyin Kazim Kadri, the new CUP governor of Aleppo arrived in town to take up his post. His approximately one-year term would be a short and contentious one as local, landowning elites who felt threatened by his reforming zeal would eventually cause him to depart. In particular, they considered his ideas about agrarian reform to be at odds with their own interests. This paper proposes to use Kazim’s tenure as governor in the post-1908 period to explore how battles over land reform and changing agricultural practices encompassed conflicting claims to and notions of authority, expertise and justice. For almost two decades before Kazim became the governor of Aleppo, officials from the Ministry of Agriculture had been working to establish model fields and farms in the region and gradually encourage institutionalized agricultural education. These efforts actually tended to favor large landowners with capital and land on which they could experiment. Kazim himself was very much a proponent of these changes and had even been instrumental in trying to contribute to these developments more generally with the publication around 1900 of an extensive book on agriculture. As governor he continued to pursue this passion and took a very hands-on approach to his rule of the province—from locusts to farm machinery, he was keen to institute reforms and apply new techniques. Nonetheless, he found himself frustrated, despite support from large portions of the local population, by various obstacles, namely corruption and inability to exert his authority as governor over powerful local, landed interests. Using documents from the Ottoman Archives as well as published materials from the period, this paper will investigate how Kazim championed the cause of a number of discrete individuals whom he considered to have been unjustly treated in matters of land ownership or registration, particularly after efforts to improve their property. It will trace his attempts to apply the CUP’s ideals of freedom, equality, and justice to argue for these cases and demonstrate how local elites thwarted his attempts to exert his authority. Ultimately he found himself confronted with powerful, entrenched interests, whose control over the land would prove too tenacious even for his own tenacity. Nonetheless, the records he left paint a rich, colorful picture of his efforts as governor to negotiate and navigate this post-revolution moment in which he claimed so fervently to believe.