My paper aims to examine the experiences of rural population in Diyarbekir within the context of the changing land regime after the Tanzimat reforms and specifically the Land Code of 1858. I will look at the conflicts revolving around the ownership, use, possession, and dispossession of land in the region. By looking at two interrelated processes, I intend to examine how land relations were redefined, challenged and negotiated among central authorities, local notables, and commoners. To do so, first, I will look at how growing world-wide trends towards the legal recognition of the private ownership of land materialized in the region. In the Ottoman Empire, the Land Code represented the most important episode of the legal regulations on land relations in the nineteenth century. However, the reflections of this empire-wide trend towards private land-ownership on the eastern provinces have not been examined in Ottoman historical writing. Second, I will examine the causes and forms of rural discontent among the commoners in the face of rising claims of both Kurdish notables and the Tanzimat authorities over land. The literature on the social discontent in the Kurdish areas focused their attention solely on the conflicts between the Kurdish notables and the Ottoman state. (Jwaideh 1960, Özo?lu 2004). The commoners who constituted the producing sectors of rural society appear only as the loyal supporters of the Kurdish chiefs in their revolts against the central state. My paper proposes to examine the ways in which introduction of new land tenure and new ways of surplus extraction by Tanzimat regime transformed the livelihoods of the commoners. This also entails an analysis of the ways in which commoners articulated their discontent about rising claims over land and agricultural surplus. Overall, my paper aims to challenge the constraints of the hegemonic center-periphery paradigm and also bring a bottom-up approach to the Tanzimat project by integrating the experiences and the agencies of the commoners into the historical analysis.