This paper explores the intersection between kinship, property, and politics in the Ottoman province of Tripoli in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Through an investigation of investment and inheritance strategies employed by members of the ‘askeri class, it aims to complicate two major trends in the field. The first of these is the decline-cum-decentralization paradigm based on historians’ conception of Ottoman state rule in the provinces as a zero-sum game between ‘state’ and ‘local’ actors. The second is an orientalist holdover by which historians continue to accept the paradigm of the Ottoman Empire as an agrarian empire whose ruling idiom and strategies rested upon a peasant taxpayer class of subsistence agriculturalists. This focus on agricultural land as the foundation of social structure and administration has tended to obscure the diversity of local political economic contexts within which state representatives and institutions came into contact with local social orderings. Taken together, these two issues will be addressed through an examination of the ways in which the distinct, local political economy of the Ottoman province of Tripoli was implicated in networks of property and inheritance among ‘askeri families of both local and imperial extraction after the ‘reconquest’ of Tripoli and Mt. Lebanon from the Ma’n dynasty in 1635. Ultimately, by highlighting kinship structures within the ‘askeri class (which is broadly and porously defined to accommodate individuals and families hailing from a range of ranks and backgrounds) and investigating transfers of property within and between families in Tripoli, this paper highlights the need to understand the political class as socially embedded in networks of social capital and material support, rather than as independent political or economic actors. This study is based on the sijills of the local Ottoman court of Tripoli from the 1660s to the 1710s, and traces the changing composition and fortunes of families affiliated with the state as they appear through dealings with their local property holdings. In the case of Tripoli, these were largely holdings in mulberry trees and orchards, indicating an important alliance between the local court, Tripoli’s booming silk industry, and families with a stake in Ottoman provincial government in Greater Syria. This paper thus seeks to understand the nature of Ottoman state presence in a provincial context marked by a distinctive and under-analyzed political economic regime based on ownership of trees as an essential link in luxury production in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean.