This chapter engages with social sciences theories about ‘institutions’. It illuminates not only the resilience but also the intensification of overland caravan trade thanks to an efficient organised system involving traders, Bedouin and Ottoman officials. The chapter tries to rely as much as possible on the viewpoint of caravan traders. It offers insights on historiographical debates about the changing roles of state institutions in the Late Ottoman Empire, the State’s legitimisation and its echoes among urban and nonurban caravan practitioners, and the economic and political competition by political entities that are built on the monopolisation of trading routes. The aim is to introduce a new panorama of the political economy of the Middle East that does not focus on the coastal and urban societies but on the hinterlands and steppes and considers theses spaces as elements of a region, that is, the intermediary space connecting the local and the world, on the one hand and connecting cultural affiliation with economic exchange on the other.