This paper will explore the reorganization of the legal infrastructure and the concurrent emergence of a new understanding of “commerce” in late Ottoman Egypt (1841-1876). Two historical phenomena constituted the background for this process, namely, the prominence of European extra-territorial rights and the attempt to consolidate the domestic Egyptian legal order. Starting the early 1840s, the number of European merchants operating in Egypt increased dramatically as a result of the abolition of state monopolies. The incoming merchants enjoyed extra-territorial rights that often rendered them immune from prosecution in local courts. Meanwhile, the nineteenth-century Egyptian state was the site of numerous attempts to synchronize various contemporaneous legal institutions and codes: imperial, state-enacted, religious and consular. In light of this background, conflicts between local and European merchants were irresolvable through legal means. Hence, the Egyptian state and various European consulates cooperated to establish mixed merchant courts. These courts were presided over by an equal number of local and European merchants, deployed Ottoman, French and Egyptian state-enacted commercial laws (in this order), and enjoyed jurisdiction over most merchant legal disputes. The paper argues that the attempt to govern the commercial sphere through newly introduced legal practices resulted in a substantive redefinition of “commerce” as a concept. In building this argument, it will demonstrate how certain activities, such as specific kinds of exchange and money lending were excluded, while others, like inheritance, were included into the new commercial sphere. Furthermore, it will touch upon the question of who had access to this commercial sphere. For example, did a merchant’s specific trade or legal status affect his access into the commercial sphere? Three sets of sources will serve as the foundation for this paper: 1) the proceedings of the Cairo merchant court (circa 1856-1876). These proceedings record the details of thousands of merchant disputes and how they were adjudicated; 2) (Near) contemporaneous encyclopedias such as Philip Jallad’s Qamus al-Idara wal-Qada‘, which define “commerce” more explicitly. These works reveal which definition became widely-accepted toward the end of the nineteenth-century; 3) The commercial laws that informed nineteenth century merchant courts, including several versions of the French and Ottoman codes of commerce.