This paper will reinterpret the late Ottoman fiscal crisis from the perspective of ordinary people who worked in the mining, distribution, and sale of salt in the Ottoman lands. The story of the Ottoman loans is conventionally told as a story of financiers and statesmen in Istanbul and the Great Power capitals. However, the Ottoman government’s ability to secure external financing came to depend heavily upon new commodity taxes that profoundly impacted certain kinds of agriculture in the countryside. Thus, as part of the security for a set of loans in the 1860s, the Ottoman government established a new state monopoly on salt. This monopoly would only become more important to state finances after the imperial default of 1875-76 and the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA) in 1881. The salt monopoly was the largest of the revenue sources ceded to the OPDA; by World War I, it would account for over half of the administration’s total revenue. This paper will argue that the experience of salt workers offers a new perspective on how fiscal crisis reconfigured Ottoman society from the ground up. Making the salt monopoly profitable entailed vast and continuous anti-smuggling operations, which targeted both the sale of “unlicensed salt” within the Ottoman lands, and the transportation of such salt whether into or within the Empire. These efforts left a broad trail of documents across the late Ottoman archives, including reports on individual smugglers and salt depots. Building on the work of Batman (2016) on tobacco smuggling in the Black Sea region, this paper reads such state-centered documents against the grain, to recover the perspective of people who worked in the salt trade: how their livelihoods changed with the establishment of the monopoly, what circumstances drove them to resist the monopoly, and the means they employed to do so. The paper will show how the creation of “unlicensed salt” as a legal category led to the emergence of an illicit economy that (unlike the case of the tobacco monopoly) was centered on a basic necessity that all people and animals consumed.