In the early 1880s, Ottoman modernizers dreamed of implementing an intrusive governing structure in the interior lands of southern Syria and the northern Hijaz, in the expansive region bordered by the settlements of Karak in the west, Jawf in the east and al-Ula in the south. This arid landscape had been under Ottoman sovereignty since the sixteenth century, but the imperial administration had not attempted to govern it as landed property. This paper considers the role of the tent-dwelling Bedouin inhabitants of this region in Ottoman attempts to create an intrusive administrative framework for taxation, policing and infrastructural development in a global historical context. Among expansive contiguous empires in the late nineteenth century, including the American and Russian, Ottoman attempts to more intrusively govern “empty lands” inhabited by populations they categorized as economically underproductive were hardly unique. In the American West, like in the Syrian interior, increased federal control over interior spaces was to come with railroad construction. From this global perspective, I argue that the particularity of the Syrian interior lay in the active role of its tent-dwelling populations in the transformation of the landscape. Ottoman officials’ hopes for extracting revenue from and developing the arid interior regions of southern Syria and northern Arabia rested on successful reform and administration of the livestock tax, a process that closely involved tent-dwelling individuals with local connections. At the same time, the Syrian interior was becoming a borderland, with administrators anxious about the British occupation of Egypt and the consolidation of the Wahhabi and Rashidi emirates in the Arabian Peninsula. Using archival records and politically-engaged Nabati poetry, I argue that the transformation of the Syrian interior into a borderland space granted tent-dwellers further leverage with Ottoman officials, who were painfully aware of the active attempts of their new neighbors to gain tent dwellers' political sympathies and tax revenues. The paper follows the story of the Bani Sakhr community, whose prominence in Ottoman administration dates to their salaried involvement in the pilgrimage route in the early modern period. The partnership between Bani Sakhr elites and Ottoman officials was most directly contested by the construction of the Hijaz railway, which cut directly through lands the Bani Sakhr claimed. The paper shows that the Bani Sakhr’s ability to use their historical ties with the Ottoman administration to maintain political privilege set the stage for their territorial dominance in the twentieth century.