The prominent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has famously described the mid-nineteenth century as “the age of capital.” This paper starts from the premise that it was also the age of market standardization. Focusing on Egypt during the 1850s-70s, the paper seeks to capture the dynamics of this process of standardization. Specifically, it searches for instances of this process in merchant court records as well as in actual business correspondence. The nineteenth-century Ottoman world, including Egypt, was the site of sweeping efforts to introduce codified laws and rationalize court operations. In the realm of commerce, this movement took the form of a seemingly comprehensive commercial-legal infrastructure, including novel market regulations, commercial laws and legal institutions. Notably, new standard mechanisms meant to resolve cases of insolvency were put in place. Furthermore, merchants who wished (or needed) to gain access to this increasingly litigious commercial realm standardized their record keeping practices making them legible for auditors and court officials. The significance of their records is best exemplified by the fact that they came to constitute admissible legal evidence in merchant courts, at times even overriding other forms of evidence, such as oral testimony. This paper argues that behind this veneer of uniformity, the process of market standardization was uneven and multi-directional (rather than linear). Specifically, it shows two unrelated instances of these uneven qualities. First, it relies on merchant court records from mid-nineteenth century Cairo to show the coexistence of and tension between two conflicting ideas about the problem of imprisoned debtors. In spite of the apparent comprehensiveness of the legislation, insolvent merchants continued to pose a problem to this commercial-legal infrastructure, which dealt with them at once as criminals who ought to be punished, and as victims who deserved forgiveness if not help. Second, it explores a set of private business correspondence and other related records from an Alexandria-based merchant to show how market-related decisions were embedded in a larger social context in which personal relations and political developments were crucial.