Autonomous Ottoman province carved out of the Mount Lebanon hill country after the 1860 Druze-Maronite civil war and massacres, created under the 1861 Reglement Organique and guaranteed by the six European powers (France, Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and the Ottomans); governed by a non-Lebanese Christian Ottoman-appointed mutasarrif (governor) advised by a multi-confessional administrative council, widely seen as the institutional seed of modern Lebanon.
Collapsed amid the Ottoman Empire's WWI-era administration, wartime blockade, and the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915-18), which killed a large share of the population; occupied by Allied forces in 1918 as the Ottoman Empire fell, then absorbed into the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, which proclaimed the State of Greater Lebanon in 1920.
Focused scholarly study of the 1860 civil war and the Mutasarrifate system it produced, covering exactly this polity's origin and character.