As part of the panel’s objective to challenge notions of premeditated and uncontested commercial policies, the paper examines competing understandings of belonging and exclusion in the Mediterranean trade. The expulsion of the prominent Ottoman Jewish merchant Haim Camondo and his family from the Ottoman Empire in 1782 and their subsequent claim of Habsburg subject-hood, offer intriguing insights into the messy regulations regarding transimperial actors. How did the Camondos negotiate different understandings of commercial affiliation and protection? What were the challenges for Ottoman and Habsburg authorities in dealing with the Camondos’ shifting claims of belonging? By working with Habsburg, British, and Ottoman archival sources, the paper shows that the family exploited the ambiguous notions of subject-hood and diplomatic protection to safeguard their possessions and foster their businesses. It further demonstrates that also governments, striving to gain access to the merchants’ wealth or networks, resorted to similar tactics and contested their narratives. Another goal of the panel is to further complicate the notion of clear-cut differences and speculative similarities in the Ottoman-European contacts. Thus, the paper focuses on intermediary activities of the Camondos, which connected as much as defined the commercial and financial spheres. What can their activities teach us about the forces shaping the trade between the Ottoman and the European worlds? What was the family’s significance for the Ottoman political economy? Before their expulsion, the Camondos had been trading in European countries with legal and commercial privileges of Ottoman subjects. In the Ottoman Empire, they relied on alternating French, British, and Habsburg protections, but also offered the protecting powers their intermediary services. Even after Haim Camondo assumed Habsburg subject-hood and escaped Istanbul to the port city of Trieste, he and his family members continued trading as Ottoman subjects rather than as Habsburg Jews. Ultimately, after over two decades of exile, his sons returned to Istanbul and established one of the first Ottoman banks, which would significantly contribute to the family's prominence in the nineteenth century. Through the Camondos’ peregrinations, it becomes apparent that authority over commercial and financial policies pertained as much to the merchants as to the governments. The negotiations of these authorities, as the paper finally argues, formed an intermediary field of connections and exclusions between the Ottoman and European spheres.