This paper is part of a chapter in my dissertation on the formation of the Qajar state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The dissertation argues that the Qajars established a government and consolidated their rule in Iran through political patronage, and were not simply a “tribal” power whose political ascendancy can be attributed, as the historiography often does, to military conquest. Although the Qajar state faced significant challenges in ruling over a vast territory, it nevertheless did manage to do so even in areas geographically distant from the capital. This paper focuses on the question of how Qajar rulers governed the provinces in the face of both domestic and international challenges. It uses the case of a local uprising in Fars in order to illustrate the political and diplomatic strategies that provincial leaders used to pacify social unrest and sustain relations with European powers – in this instance the British – while at the same time maintaining their own political authority. In February 1827 a local Arab shaykh in Bushehr staged an insurrection that threatened the safety and security of both the town and the British residency. The rebellion does not appear in Qajar chronicles, so this paper first re-creates the events that unfolded during the course of the uprising by drawing on correspondence between Qajar leaders and the British resident, as well as on the Bushehr residency reports. It then proceeds to use royal decrees (farmān) and political correspondence to examine relations between central and provincial rulers in early nineteenth Iran and gauge the extent to which provincial leaders were permitted to govern their own affairs and handle diplomatic matters. The response to the Bushehr uprising highlights the relative autonomy of Qajar provincial leaders, but importantly, it also demonstrates that Qajar administrators in Tehran had a keen interest in distant and local matters. By utilizing little or never used sources, this paper provides a micro-historical approach to understanding center-periphery relations and the nature of governance in the early Qajar state.