How can historians reconstruct informal economies of the early modern period, and what can informal economies tell us about early modern societies and empires more broadly? Taking heed from studies of early modern informal economies in Europe and the Atlantic, this article shows how an eighteenth-century Ottoman shadow economy of horse-traffickers sheds new light on commercialization trends and state transformation. It analyzes a series of fifty-one imperial decrees concerned with fixing the problem of missing horses at Ottoman post stations and examines the shifting, contradictory diagnoses of why, and how, horses went missing. To make sense of this discursive instability, this article first reads these decrees chronologically to delineate the fitful expansion of central bureaucratic knowledge about the pan-imperial post station system, an exclusively official communications network. Then, the article switches gears and reads the decrees against chronology. It places a range of discrete, illicit activities within the same analytical frame to reveal the existence of a shadow economy that had mushroomed around post stations across the empire and diverted horses towards profit-making ventures. By piecing together qualitative evidence of this shadow economy, this article reveals evidence of intensifying overland commercial activity, demonstrating that early modern connections were not solely maritime phenomena. It further argues that central bureaucrats were unable to recognize and stamp out horse-trafficking despite having information about them because they lacked a “unifying matrix” to parse the numerous, but discrete, reports that flowed into the capital. In this way, it highlights the structural blindspots of state formation.