The socio-economic history of Syria in the nineteenth century has often been studied in relation to Europe and separately from its Ottoman context. In particular, this scholarship has understood non-Muslim commercial and financial elites as essentially external to Ottoman political, economic, and social structures, often portraying them as agents of European imperialism, as pre-modern usurers or as proto-nationalists. My paper will challenge these common portrayals by discussing the role of Christian and Jewish merchant-bankers in the financial administration of Damascus and in local and trans-regional credit markets. These business elites sought to seize the new opportunities offered by the rapid increase in grain export in the Damascus hinterland in the middle of the nineteenth century as well as the introduction of new methods and instruments of credit and revenue-raising by the provincial treasury of Damascus, such as paper money and treasury bonds. As the economy of Damascus came to rely extensively on short-term credit, non-Muslim merchant-banking families managed to use their expertise and access to local and trans-regional financial markets to emerge as a new class of speculators and investors whose services became crucial to the provincial economy and financial governance of Damascus. Drawing on a broad range of sources, many of them previously unused by scholars, including Ottoman official correspondence and reports, peasant petitions, Arabic-language court records and European consular records, my paper will focus on the activities of these Christian and Jewish financiers in the rural periphery of Damascus as tax-farmers, land-owners, and money-lenders. I will examine the various ways in which they sought to extract debt from peasants, including common channels of litigation in the shar‘i and commercial courts, as well as drawing on connections with Ottoman officials and/or on consular representation, and even forced payment and violence. The cases I will present suggest that although these families enjoyed the status of European protégés, drawing on consular intervention was not necessarily the most efficient or preferred course of action in their business and legal activities; rather, more often, they relied on their close connections with Ottoman officials and business partners and on Ottoman legal institutions. By using an imperial framework of analysis and by drawing primarily on Ottoman sources, my paper will reconsider more broadly the position of non-Muslim elites in the Ottoman Empire, and will challenge still-influential Eurocentric assumptions concerning the extent of foreign power in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Middle East.