This paper examines the role of men known as the “Egypt Merchants” (M?s?r Tüccar?) as creditors to the Ottoman state in the eighteenth century. Recent scholarship has emphasized how the Ottoman central government, like other modernizing states in the eighteenth century, turned to non-traditional “partners” in governance, including financiers and subcontractors for revenue collection. The valuable province of Egypt, where the Mamluks and Mehmed Ali Pasha emerged as some of the strongest challengers to Ottoman rule, has appeared to fit poorly within this model of imperial partnership. By exploring layers of social and political power beyond the arena of high politics in Cairo, I argue that the Egypt Merchants began to draw on their trans-regional networks to act as imperial financiers around 1720, in response to Mamluk dominance in Egypt’s political sphere and emerging French dominance in the Mediterranean commercial and financial spheres. With increasing frequency as the eighteenth century wore on, men identified as Egypt Merchants underwrote Egypt’s annual tax remittance (the irsaliye hazinesi) to the Ottoman state. Ottoman treasury records reveal how Egypt Merchants with business interests in the market districts and caravansaries of Istanbul moved money from the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, and to the imperial capital through the use of promissory notes and other financial instruments. Closer to the ground, Islamic court records demonstrate how many of these men also leveraged their influence with the imperial government into control over landed wealth and commercial agriculture in Egypt through administration of tax farms and pious endowments. The Egypt Merchants were not a guild, and would not have recognized themselves collectively. They did not necessarily live in Egypt. Rather, the M?s?r Tüccar? were loosely designated as such by the Ottoman bureaucracy in recognition of their common function: they could leverage wealth and influence amassed in Egypt into financial assistance to the Ottoman state. Triangulating between Ottoman financial records, the Registers of Important Affairs in Egypt (Mühimme-i M?s?r Defterleri), and registers of Islamic courts and the municipal councils (diwans) of Alexandria and Cairo, this paper maps the relations of credit, debt, and guarantorship that produced the category of the “Egypt Merchant” as an unstudied Ottoman intermediary. In so doing, it probes a mutually constitutive relationship between a state on the cusp of dramatic transformation and a socially embedded group of Ottoman Muslim subjects who helped shape the empire’s response to political and fiscal challengers in the Mediterranean.