In the first years of the Turkish Republic, one of the major concerns was the construction of transportation infrastructures that integrated different parts of the country economically and culturally. One of the construction projects that the state undertook in these years was a railroad to Ergani. Located at the headwater of the Tigris River in Eastern Asia Minor, Ergani was home to a copper mine operated since the early eighteenth century. With the discovery of chromite deposits in the late nineteenth century, it became a valuable mining site for the nascent republic. In the minds of the mining engineers, bureaucrats, and members of parliament, the construction of the railroad was a crucial step in the development of modern mining in Turkey. Connecting Ergani by railway to the existing tracks would facilitate the transportation of coal, heavy machinery, and workers to the mines. At the same time, it would allow the extracted ore to reach the domestic and international markets with greater ease. The plans for the railroad emerged concurrently with the government’s adoption of increasingly protectionist economic policies, which barred foreign investments in the mineral sector. To fund the railway, the state initiated the first domestic borrowing campaign in its history. While making citizens investors in the mines, it also paved the way for future domestic borrowing schemes that would repeat until the liberalization of the Turkish economy in the 1980s. However, the construction of the railroad hit many roadblocks as a result of Kurdish resistance against Turkish state-building in the area. Based on research in the Turkish State Archives, records of parliamentary discussions, newspapers, and early-20th-century geological literature, this paper reads Turkey’s transition to state capitalism through the Ergani Copper Road project and the extractive economy it supported. It argues that extractivism was an essential element in the development of state-capitalism in Turkey and the extension of the state's power into Kurdish-majority areas.