This paper explores the expansion of Ottoman state power over the territory of the Jazira region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The paper describes a trajectory of greater control over the arid space stretching across the provinces of Aleppo, Diyarbak?r, and Mosul and the special administrative district of Dayr al-Zur. It also follows a number of paths not taken. In addition to tracing the bounds of an aborted plan to form a massive Desert Province in this region, the paper also follows a case in which officials proposed forming a “moving administrative district” not corresponding to land but instead to the nomadic Shammar group. The paper thus introduces a tension between whether the Ottoman state derived its power and extracted value from people or place. It considers this dynamic with respect to a broader context in which some officials attempted to use grain to supplement and, in other cases, supplant pastoral nomadism in the Jazira, and thereby improve governance. It moreover illuminates cases in which these approaches by the state offered openings for local actors to resist control and, indeed, the very labels of state and local in the first place. Relying on archival materials from the Ottoman archives in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic as well as European consular records, the paper intervenes in questions related to global histories of the period as well as those more particular to late Ottoman history. The late nineteenth century was a period of agricultural expansion globally, particularly in the wake of the American Civil War and railroad expansion across North America. As a result, low grain prices prevailed worldwide. The paper thus considers how Ottoman strategies of governance related to these broader fluctuations in commodity prices. Moreover, the paper joins a new wave of scholarship on motion in the Ottoman Empire, highlighting how migrants, refugees, and nomads have acted as engines of the state and capitalism. Altogether, the paper explores how new ideas about managing people and land emerged in this context of global connection and disconnection.