While the literature on nationalism, imperialism and spatial imagination in the Middle East is rich, there are comparatively few studies concerning how other trajectories, such as that of capitalism, have remade the dominant geographical constructs of our field. During the late Ottoman period, the lowlands of the Cilicia region, fertile and well-watered by large rivers and tributaries, were hailed as a “Second Egypt” that possessed the agricultural and commercial potential that Egypt had realized over prior decades. This late 19th century making of the southeast Anatolian crescent-shaped area as a region, named alternatively Adana Ovas?/Çukurova/Cilicia by different actors at different times, entailed diverse processes of settlement and migration that cannot be adequately explained by either the imaginaries of the central and local state or imperial refashioning of such national imaginaries. Crucial to this process were the different groups of tribes and merchants, landholders and industrialists whose accumulations of agricultural production, commerce and industry revolved around a single crop: cotton, the much wanted and valuable crop in the second half of the 19th century. Yet the commercialization of the crop’s agriculture in the 19th century did not simply depend on the world’s growing need for cotton. Neither did the resultant regional economy based on large holdings of cotton cultivation and textile industry arise simply as a response to the Ottoman imperial legal framework through which private property was constituted. Instead, the story of cotton production in a landscape like Çukurova was very much a multilevel regional history of capitalist transformation. Inasmuch as the later 19th century was/is conducive to paradigmatic frameworks of imperial and national construction of the state, indeed, the study of intra-imperial and national spatial differentiation does not readily render Çukurova as a region. Instead the Çukurovan region can be “constituted as an effect of analysis”(D. Massey) of capitalism as manifested through the various activities of state and commercial actors. For, in this region “potentialities of capitalism” (I. Habib) underlined the massive transformation of human geography, without assigning disaggregated imaginaries to the state and social actors. This paper studies how such imagination turned potentialities around when multiple actors interrelated to produce an economy that sustained growth that shaped the notion of Çukurova as Second Egypt, imagined so both by the Cotton Supply Association of Great Britain as of 1857, and the Ottoman central state that exhibited Çukurovan cotton at international fairs as a competitor to Egyptian cotton.