Drawing on primary sources on Ottoman Turkish and French (such as local petitions, inspection reports, correspondence between local officials and the Ottoman central government as well as consular correspondence), this paper examines the protégé [or: protection] issue in the early 1860s with reference to governmental practices and the application of Tanzimat reforms on non-Muslim borderland subjects of the Ottoman Empire in Liyubuşka (Ljubuski in today’s Bosnia-Hercegovina). Historians of the Late Ottoman Empire have argued that the protection (himaye) issue was a consequence of external factors: it was because of their growing military and economic power that European empire states like Britain, France, or Russia were able to renegotiate the Capitulations from the late 1700s and to expand their influence within the Ottoman Empire by issuing berats (certificates of protection) to (mostly non-Muslim) Ottoman subjects. By contrast, this paper focuses on Tanzimat state building, that is, internal Ottoman factors, as a crucial bone of contention of the protection issue. I explore Ottoman government efforts in the early 1860s to return to the status of Ottoman subjects non-Muslims from the Bosnian town of Liyubuşka who had opted for Austrian subjecthood (tabiiyyet) but continued to live on the Ottoman side of the Habsburg-Ottoman border. I argue that local non-Muslims went further than seeking Austrian berats. Rather, they took the more radical step of acquiring Austrian subjecthood (tabiiyyet) to benefit from the favorable economic conditions of the Habsburg Empire (i.e. paying less or no taxes) and thus to avoid the pressures of an increasingly intrusive Tanzimat state, especially high taxes, the requisitioning of pack animals by the Ottoman provincial government and forced labor (angarya). As the Ottoman central government strove to make these new protected subjects of the Habsburg empire return back to their ‘principal nationality’ (tabiiyyet-i asliyye), inspector Ahmed Cevdet Efendi (1823-1895) suggested not only to eliminate forms of injustice and maladministration at the provincial level but also assure those people that these would not re-occur under the auspices the Tanzimat reforms. Further, Cevdet Efendi argued that unofficial concessions such as lowering the taxes for these borderland peoples and not levying the military service exemption tax (iane-i askeriyye) would encourage them to return to Ottoman subjecthood. Thus, the protégé experience in this imperial borderland in the early 1860s suggests that both the causes of and solutions for the protégé ‘problem’ lay at governance practices and reforms of the empire rather than external factors.