The 1780s and 1790s remain critically understudied in Egyptian history. Narrative sources cast these decades as a period of unrelenting crisis and upheaval, as the grandees of the Qazdağlı household monopolized political and economic life leading to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the rise of the centralizing governor, Mehmed Ali Pasha, by 1804. This paper posits that the Ottoman imperial framework continued to represent a source of status, wealth, and security to a range of commercial and political actors in Egypt through the turn of the nineteenth century, but that the nexus of Ottoman provincial administration shifted from Cairo to Egypt’s primary long-distance port of Alexandria from at least the 1780s onwards. To illustrate Alexandria’s heightened political significance, this paper introduces and analyzes a previously unused source for the study of Ottoman imperial governance in Egypt: two surviving registers from the Municipal Council (divan) of Alexandria covering the critical years from 1788 until 1804, held in the Egyptian National Archives. The divan of Alexandria was formed from a cross-section of port officials around 1750. Its highest-ranking member was a judge appointed directly from Istanbul, one of the few imperial appointees remaining in Egypt by the second half of the eighteenth century. The divan registers are largely dedicated to recording the activities of local officials, merchants, and ship captains in Alexandria who performed vital duties of Ottoman governance in Egypt. Local grain merchants directed foodstuffs to sites of shortage in Egypt, Hijaz, Anatolia, and the Balkans; Mediterranean ship captains carried imperial orders (fermans) as they shipped cargoes to Izmir, Istanbul, and Salonika; and officials helped to provision the Ottoman navy with valuable materiel during wars with Russia. An empire-wide grain crisis in 1794-95 and the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 generated legers of local inhabitants and Mediterranean merchants who, willingly or under threat of force, mobilized their wealth and networks in the service of the state. This paper uses the divan records, along with chronicles, sharī‘a court registers, and registers of sultanic decrees to Egypt’s administrators, to bring Alexandria out of Cairo’s shadow as an alternative locus of political and fiscal legitimacy at the end of the eighteenth century. Alexandria provides an alternative lens for understanding how provincial spaces, actors, and networks operated within an Ottoman imperial framework at a time when the traditionally dominant spaces and networks in Cairo presented unprecedented challenges to imperial rule.