n 19 October 1911 Ahmed ‘Izzet Pasa, the commander in chief of the Ottoman military forces in Yemen, and the Zaydi imam al-Mutawakkil Yahya ibn Muhammad (d. 1948) signed an agreement at Da‘‘an that made Yahya a dependent ruler and Zaydi community leader under Ottoman sovereignty. This agreement brought to a close more than two decades of fi erce confrontation between the imam and his predecessors on one side and the imperial government in Istanbul on the other. Historians of Yemen have interpreted the Da‘‘an agreement as Imam Yahya’s fi rst step toward building an independent Yemeni state, a goal that he would eventually realize in the years following the withdrawal of the Ottomans from southwest Arabia in the aftermath of World War I.1 In this article I demonstrate that this agreement and the political arrangements it ushered in also tell us something important about imperial governance in the late Ottoman Empire. More specifi cally, I argue that the negotiated settlement with the imam as well as the political struggles, controversies, and alternative schemes that preceded it were all integral parts of those politics of difference that came to demarcate the Province of Yemen as a subordinate, colonial space within the Ottoman imperial system. From the 1860s, the Ottoman central government and its representatives made unprecedented attempts to implement throughout the empire a uniform system of administration, taxation, military recruitment, and education in order to ward off both the encroachments on the part of European imperial powers and separatist challenges at the domestic level. These efforts intensifi ed during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909). Under the auspices of Ottomanism, which has often been interpreted as a form of offi cial nationalism, the objective was to forge a population of loyal Ottoman subjects or protocitizens in order to make the empire more resilient against these external and internal pressures.2 To be sure, these attempts