This paper examines efforts by the Ottoman state to centralize and institutionalize access to credit in rural areas of the empire, appropriating for a state institution a more substantial role in rural moneylending. In particular, it focuses on the changing legal frameworks that governed the operations of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank during the last decades of the empire and assesses the challenges the bank faced in implementing its policies in rural credit markets. Prior to the creation of the Agricultural Bank in 1888, rural credit had primarily been the purview of private (typically urban) moneylenders. The Agricultural Bank, in contrast, was a state institution with capital derived from a local tax. Albeit conceptualized as an institution that would specialize in loaning to farmers to facilitate more capital-intensive agriculture, the bank’s resources were often diverted to finance a myriad of projects only tangentially related to agricultural production. Collecting the monies allotted for its capital or reconciling its lending policies to local land tenure practices proved challenging. Notably, in lending to rural communities, the Bank confronted the issue of how best to secure and maximize loans that used land or, more precisely, usufruct rights to land as collateral. Chain guarantees offered one option. But land held in shares posed a particular conundrum to administrators seeking to maximize the rights to land that were legible to capital investment. Furthermore, as demand for the bank’s capital outstripped its supply, the government turned to foreign sources for additional funds. Given the rights to land used as collateral and their alienability under the Agricultural Bank’s statutes, these new sources of capital raised questions of sovereignty for the Ottoman government. The historiography has tended to emphasize the Ottoman Empire’s loss of economic sovereignty as a result of the creation of the Public Debt Administration or has focused on the activities of the foreign-capitalized Imperial Ottoman Bank. Examining the evolving statutes regulating the Agricultural Bank and Ottoman archival documents concerning its operations in the provinces of Syria, Aleppo, and Beirut provides another perspective on capital circulation in the empire. I argue that not only was it an institution through which the central state sought to exert greater control over rural credit markets, but also one through which the empire asserted its sovereignty vis-à-vis the encroachments of foreign capital while also experimenting with loan policies aimed at maximizing the legibility of value embedded in existing landholding practices.