Drawing on primary sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, and English, such as governmental correspondence, petitions, and consular reports, this paper examines the impact of Ottoman governmental practices on an important aspect of the Red Sea slave trade, namely the trafficking of slaves from the Horn of Africa to the Ottoman Province of Yemen from the 1880s to the beginning of World War I. While historians have argued that during this period the Zaraniq community in Yemen’s coastal plain (Tihama) and the expanding French colonial state in what is now Djibouti were instrumental in shaping and controlling the slave trade between the Gulf of Tajoura and Southwest Arabia, the role of Ottoman governmental practices and policies in this context have remained entirely unexplored. I argue that the slave trade with Ottoman Yemen remained significant throughout the 1880s and 1890s, in large measure because Zaraniq slave traders maintained alliances with powerful Yemeni-Ottoman elites who were at the same time an integral part of the apparatus of Ottoman governance in the Tihama. More specifically, I show that for a share in the profit, the major of Hudayda, Sayyid Ahmad Shura‘i Pasha, as well as prominent sayyid families in the town of Marawa‘a (to the north east of Hudayda) protected Zaraniq slave traders by informing them about imminent Ottoman and British military operations against them and by allowing them to hold a slave market in Marawa‘a. While the Ottoman government was aware of the involvement of these elites in the slave trade, they tolerated these practices because Shura‘i Pasha and the sayyids of Marawa’a, in their capacity as tax farmers, army contractors, and mediators between the provincial government and the Zaraniq, were simply too central to a form of governance meant to preserve a limited but vital degree of state control over the Tihama. I show that on one level the slave trade between the Horn of Africa and Yemen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was shaped by a form of imperial governance that reflected the fragile position of the Ottoman state in this part of the empire’s frontier: in Yemen the state was unable to implement the centralizing practices of the Tanzimat and depended on the cooperation and knowledge of local elites to uphold its sovereignty and to harness the resources necessary for the war against its most prominent local opponents, the Zaydi imams.