This paper analyzes the implementation of the Mecelle (Ottoman civil law code) and other codified laws governing tax farming, debt contracts and property relations in Ottoman Nizamiye courts.  The promulgation of these laws and their implementation in new courts embodied Ottoman lawmakers’ attempts to transform expanding rural credit markets into a revenue source and re-organize taxation in the context of the global fiscal crises of the 1870s. The paper conceptualizes the production and implementation of Ottoman law codes as part of a broader economy-making project through which lawmakers tried to more closely monitor and govern the movement of capital within and across the empire’s borders. These attempts occurred in a global crisis context of elite capital accumulation, increasing inequality, and intense interstate competition. Alongside law codes and commentaries, the paper uses civil (hukuki) Nizamiye court records from the Eastern Mediterranean districts of Homs and Kisrawan. It focuses on disputes over rent and credit contracts between cultivators and tax farming investors on the one hand, and disputes over debt contracts between tax farmers and government collection agencies on the other.  The paper compares cases from courts in different administrative jurisdictions (the province of Syria vs. the special district of Mount Lebanon) that adjudicated disputes involving different temporal and ecological patterns of production (interior grain-producing plains vs. coastal horticulture-focused hills).  Disputes in both settings revolved around guarantee requirements for debt, the practices and parameters of charging interest, and the form and verification of contracts. The paper shows how the Nizamiye courts’ practice of referring exclusively to codified Islamic legal categories and requirements for guarantee, interest and contract created a shared language for the empire’s diverse credit ecosystems. At the same time, ongoing and widespread practices of concluding and adjudicating disputes over debt contracts in both Sharia courts and extra-court settings contested this process of standardization. I argue that these contestations contributed to defining the meaning of newly codified and generalized legal categories for governing public and private credit relationships that endured in the twentieth-century contexts of French and national sovereignty in the Eastern Mediterranean. This was partly due to the continued enforcement of Ottoman civil law in Lebanon until the 1930s and in Syria until the late 1940s.  However, it was also related to the foundational moment of Ottoman economy-making in which the terms of diverse regional credit markets became expressed through the language of legal categories standardized across the empire.