According to one view, most Tanzimat Period (1839-76) reforms failed because a weak, patrimonial state could not achieve its will by fiat. Yet, the Tanzimat was not a futile exercise in centralization. The impact of reforms was greater than the sum of its parts, and one gets an entirely different view of them from the ground up. A critical examination of local ?er‘î court records indicates that a dialectic existed between the central state and provincials about the nature of property relations, local administration, and civil rights. This presentation would show how this process played out in the ?er‘î court of Tokat in the later Tanzimat and early Hamidian years (c. 1860 – c.1880). The central state learned to ask Tokat’s notables to countenance modest new powers for its bureaucratic branch managers in exchange for prestigious official titles, powerful administrative roles, and lucrative property deeds. Furthermore, the state deferred the specifics of rule making to local deliberative bodies. In all this, local leaders recalibrated events to suit both their narrow corporate interests and broader collective ones. Such a reallignment of provicial milieu was in tune with the strategic interests of the state, because prestigious notables could bring with them with them the support of household retinues, clientele networks, and sometimes whole villages and towns. The study would be in keeping with the aims of your panel. Many have presumed that the Ottoman sultanate held a mythic prestige among subjects of the realm. Moreover, this assumption allowed statist thinkers to label ex officio provincial notables as illegitimate usurpers and interlopers out of hand. Yet, the state’s struggles to reform imply that early on it had failed to cloak legislation within the “legitimate” sanction of notables. The Tanzimat represented a new compact between two normative orders of legality: the theoretical legitimacy of the sultan and the actual power of notables. Ultimately, a new constellation of power relations emerged across the empire, and the period ushered in a new era of participatory politics in the modern Middle East.