This paper examines a little-studied proposal for the administrative reorganization of the Ottoman Empire which found a growing number of adherents among the Ottoman Turkish political and intellectual elite in the period following the Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War in late 1912. This proposal involved the division of the empire into six ‘general inspectorates’ (umumi müfettişlikler), each to be headed by a general inspector equipped with wide-ranging powers to govern the territory under his control in accordance with the ‘needs and characteristics’ of the local population. This proposal was passed into law by the government of Said Halim Pasha in July 1913, but its implementation was prevented by the outbreak of the First World War. This paper draws on Ottoman state documents and contemporary Ottoman print publications to trace the origins and evolution of this proposal, as well as the circumstances surrounding its implementation and eventual abandonment. This paper argues that the proposed division of the empire into general inspectorates constituted a novel attempt to reorganize the Ottoman state on the basis of the imperial rule of difference, at a time when the future shape of the Ottoman Empire was the subject of considerable debate. It thereby contributes to an emerging challenge to the historiographical consensus regarding the final years of the empire, which has long held that the Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War led the Ottoman Turkish governing and intellectual elite to embrace Turkish nationalism and to implement a series of homogenizing policies which culminated in the demise of the empire in 1922 and the subsequent foundation of the Turkish Republic. Challenging the teleology inherent in this narrative, a number of historians have recently argued that we should instead view the period following the Ottoman defeat as one of intellectual ferment and confusion, in which multiple visions of the Ottoman state – national, federal, imperial – were articulated and competed with one another. By highlighting one particular proposal for the reorganization of the Ottoman state which emerged during this period, this paper aims to broaden our understanding of late Ottoman visions of the state, and to complicate the narrative of the transition from empire to nation-state.