In the late nineteenth-century, Benghazi, along with other port cities in the African Slave Trade, became a site in which British representatives and local Ottoman officials collided over the fate of captured or runaway slaves. Such disputes always found their way to the higher echelons of the state bureaucracy and produced a network of documentation. In this paper, I look closer to the practices of documentation in the Ottoman archives. Rather than seeing diplomatic disputes between the British and the Ottomans as instances of diplomatic maneuvering, I see them as practices that mediate a culture of imperial rule. During the nineteenth century, diplomacy became a standard tool for the Ottomans to protect the empire against both internal and external threats. A similar case exists on the issue of slavery and slave-trade as well. In my paper, I take the case of a report written by the local authorities in Benghazi that refutes the British accusations. The back and forth movement of information between the imperial capital and Benghazi is not only about the production of imperial know-how; it is also about the creation of imperial subjectivities. By critically interrogating the ways in which documents are produced, classified, disseminated and stored in the Ottoman bureaucracy, I see archive not as a place in which truth is revealed but as a critical space in which truth is fought over. Hence, it is crucial to dissect the myriad ways knowledge is documented. To do so, I propose to watch for the language called for in such instances closely. Colonial studies have taken a keen interest in such processes of knowledge production in other contexts. In doing so, they have illustrated how power is lodged in relations between the governor and the governed. Such undertakings, most importantly, have tried to analyze the specific regimes of truth that govern what can be said and not said, that govern what fact and fiction are. I read these regimes of truth by looking at how a specific network of documentation (Ottoman) crisscrosses another one (British); how the presentation of the self, and the performance of being Ottoman and Muslim, find expression in the differing concerns and comportments of the state officials in Istanbul and Benghazi.