In the few remaining passenger records of the late Ottoman port of Beirut, one finds the pastoral nomads seeking to escape forced settlement, the Muslim youth evading conscription, along with peasants from the Armenian provinces or Mt Lebanon Mutasarrifate, on their quest for a better life. They are all but scattered among consular correspondence, police and customs reports in the aftermath of the migration crisis of 1890s, which suspected, if not indicated, that hundreds of fugitives sought an exit from their "duties" and "liabilities" as Ottoman subjects. In this paper I will look at how rural-urban and inter-continental migratory patterns and changing structures of loyalty allowed the Armenian and the Jabali migrants, the multiple, "fugitive" subjects of the Ottoman Empire, to delineate a subjecthood based on negative obligations. The different modalities of governance through which they moved had allowed the fugitive subject to define their place in the Empire through exemptions and exceptions of tax, conscription and jurisdictional obligations. I intend to retrace the trajectories from the Beirut, the port of call from which they took off to become peddlers, workers, and immigrants in the Americas, to show how their relation to the sovereign, the Empire, was mediated through structures of communal, provincial, and urban governance. Based on the trajectories of these 'fugitive' subjects, I want to lay bare the implications for the historiography of migration and diaspora in the Lebanese context in particular, and Ottoman Levant in general. The first implication is the fact that, both the early Armenian and Lebanese migrants took the same routes and rubbed shoulders with each other in their way into and out of Beirut, as well as Alexandria, Smyrna, or Marseilles onwards. I will argue that their shared trajectories warrant a transnational historiography, to understand the conditions within which 19th century diasporas emerged from the Ottoman Empire. Secondly, to better account for the role of maritime cities played as refuge for fugitives, I will then move from the example of Beirut to explain the structures of urban autonomy in the Mediterranean littoral. Last of all, I will argue how the ways in which the Syrio-Lebanese migrants related to the Empire in late 19th century cannot be explained in a singular logic, neither of decaying Empires, nor of ascending Nations.