This paper examines the relationship between public debt and territory in the late Ottoman Empire. While credit is often conceptualized as an essentially transnational instrument, a motor of economic integration and globalization, one of the most significant aspects of the late Ottoman state’s reliance on foreign loans was a solidification of the empire’s borders. The paper makes this case through a study of the Ottoman salt monopoly from the 1890s to World War I. After the state’s default in 1875-1876, and the creation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA) in 1881, the backbone of Ottoman state finance was the OPDA and Tobacco Régie’s administration of the so-called “indirect revenues” on behalf of the empire’s creditors. The largest of these revenues was derived from the salt monopoly. Although at first somewhat less than the revenue derived from the tobacco tax, salt consistently dwarfed other revenue sources (such as the stamps and spirits taxes) and overtook tobacco in the 1890s. By World War I, salt accounted for 57% of the revenue administered by the OPDA, and almost 40% of the revenue administered by the OPDA and Tobacco Régie combined (Owen 1981). The growth of Ottoman salt revenue flowed from a pair of strategies that the OPDA pursued vigorously beginning in the 1890s: the development of an export market, and a crackdown on smuggling, especially around the Black Sea but also in the Eastern Mediterranean (Birdal 2010). This paper focuses on the OPDA’s efforts to police the empire’s borders, including the relationship between anti-smuggling operations and sanitary cordons, the kinds of social activity that these efforts targeted, and the forms of resistance they engendered. Rather than thinking of debt as a transnational vehicle, I suggest we think of debt as an instrument that opened certain borders by closing others.