Scholars of the Ottoman Empire had long interpreted the eighteenth century as the age of decentralization due to the rising power of provincial notables (‘ayān) and privatization of the state lands, which was prompted by a new tax system (mālikāne). Historians of the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire studied the actors of this new tax system, such as the provincial notables who facilitated tax collection, merchant-bankers who provided the necessary credit to the provincial notables to acquire the right to collect taxes, and the vizier households who consented to the nomination of any notable to the ‘ayānship. However, an important actor of the eighteenth century, the ‘ulemā families, was overlooked in the historiography despite their growing authority in high politics and significant enrichment. The proposed paper analyzes the role of the ‘ulemā’ families in the life-long tax farming system. As chief jurists (şeyḫ’ül-islām), judges of Anatolia and Rumelia (ḳāḍı‘asker) and judges (ḳāḍı) of major cities across the empire, ‘ulemā’ played a vital role in the execution of the mālikāne regime. In addition to their legal standing enabling this tax regime, their financial expertise and practices reflect the Ottoman administration’s broader transformation. Focusing on one of the eighteenth century’s major ‘ulemā’ families, this paper suggests that the ‘ulemā’ should be considered a central figure shaping the central and provincial economic policy. The members of the ‘ulemā’ family established an endowment cluster that functioned as a business facilitating the life-long tax regime. This paper adopts a long-term approach to the functioning of the institution of the endowment within the mālikāne regime. By consulting the endowment deed, various kinds of petitions, account registers, and estate inventories, the paper unearths the links between ‘āyān households, ṣarrāf and ‘ulemā’ families, which premises an alternative narrative to the decentralization paradigm whose critics have failed to argue otherwise convincingly.