From his office in Istanbul in the late seventeenth century, the English merchant Peter Whitcomb orchestrated a vast financial network, sending bills of exchange to Ottoman officials in Aleppo, Baghdad, Beirut, Crete, Cyprus, Edirne, Thessaloniki, and Tunis and painstakingly recording his transactions in an Ottoman letter book. His bills of exchange, like those of other English merchants, transferred tax revenue to the central Ottoman treasury in Istanbul and provided short-term financing at a high rate of interest to local officials. Other English merchants in the Ottoman Empire also supplemented their trade through service to the Ottoman state. They swapped tax-farming shares contributing to a secondary market in Ottoman state debt, imported currency that served a legal tender, and provisioned Ottoman troops with food, weapons, and gunpowder. The enterprise of British merchants in the shadow of the Ottoman state prompts us to consider where the division between commercial and political power lay in the early modern Ottoman Empire. In their role as fiscal agents, English merchants could be compared to other agents in the early modern world like the famed “portfolio capitalists” of South Asia. These “portfolio capitalists” were large-scale entrepreneurs who farmed state revenues, participated in commerce, and supplied military resources. Like these merchants, English merchants in the Ottoman Empire moved smoothly between the world of commerce and the world of state finance. Unlike the “portfolio capitalists,” however, English merchants’ financial activities did not translate into considerable political sway. In asking why, this paper confronts the structure of state finance in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It reveals the capacity of Ottoman outsourcing and the power of the Ottoman credit system tied to tax farming to reconcile divergent interests through bonds of reciprocal obligation even during the tense political period of the late seventeenth century.