In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire contended with a myriad of challenges to its fiscal sovereignty and solvency, including encroachments on various financial assets, territorial losses, and unfavorable trade policies. To mitigate these challenges, the empire sought ways to carve out spheres of financial sovereignty and sources of revenue that would be independent of obligations to foreign powers while simultaneously mediating or preventing attempts by foreign concerns to intrude on Ottoman resources. The Sultan’s Privy Purse was one of the institutions that attempted to fulfill this objective. After suppressing the first Ottoman constitution in 1878, in 1879 Abdülhamid turned to substantially expanding the holdings of his Privy Purse, established initially in the 1850s to maintain the sultan’s properties. Often involving resources whose development required considerable capital outlay and a capacity to sustain losses, but promised substantial revenues if these efforts were successful, those who agreed to exploit these properties received special concessions, while substantial sums were lavished on making them productive using the latest technologies. In Aleppo, one of the main resources incorporated into the Privy Purse were lands in the province’s east and southeast that lay in areas along the fluctuating boundary between cultivated and pasture lands. In the aftermath of territorial losses in the Balkans, it seems likely such resources were viewed as crucial to making up lost revenue. This paper focuses on the acquisition and administration of these lands. By examining the socioeconomic and ecological ramifications of these efforts to shore up imperial finances, the paper argues that in addition to expanding the Privy Purse’s resources, acquiring these lands provided a means for the state to appropriate a source of provincial elite capital accumulation, while transforming the desert borderlands with the assistance of rural communities. The paper also considers the repercussions of the reversion of these lands to state control after the CUP revolution. Lands with a similar status in Egypt, such as Khedive Isma‘il’s Daira Sanieh, have been extensively studied, but work on such properties in the empire’s European and Asian provinces are only now beginning to emerge. Using documents from the Privy Purse’s administration in the Ottoman archives, the paper examines the role of this property regime in Aleppo and its contribution to Ottoman efforts to carve out spheres of fiscal independence even as it also provided a mechanism to disrupt elite capital accumulation and intervene in rural communities and borderland environments.