This paper investigates the controls on the currency flows in Anglo-Ottoman trade to expose how different actors at a central and local level in both empires confronted the challenges of international trade during a period in need of further study. Both British and Ottoman historians have recently chafed against what they perceive as unrealistic depictions of early modern state power. The actual implementation of controls on currency flows constraining the trade as well as the official regulation will be glimpsed through the Levant Company papers. The sources reveal how vying interest groups shaped debates over monetary flows in the Ottoman Empire and Britain. Then the paper examines the local institutions and social networks that determined their implementation. The British merchants were prohibited from exporting money from both the Ottoman and British states, a serious impediment in the face of a volatile and diminishing trade. In order to avoid a shortage in the money supply, the Ottoman state banned the sending of coins out of the empire. The Levant Company, to curry political approval, agreed also to prohibit its merchants from sending coin, bullion, and bills of exchange to the Ottoman Empire. The British merchants mostly seem to have adhered to these restrictions, although they complained about them bitterly. Their French competitors, however, regularly purchased Ottoman goods with French gold and, when necessary, could smuggle large amounts of money out of the Ottoman Empire. While the British traders were forced to barter, the French merchants adjusted to price and commodity fluctuations through the use of money, contributing to their success at the British merchants’ expense. The implementation of the Ottoman prohibition was incomplete and affected rival trade groups differently. To circumvent the Ottoman prohibition, the French merchants required the connivance of imperial or local officials. By contrast, the British merchants’ practices suggest a group of traders largely isolated from the Ottoman community. They were hesitant to engage in moneylending and selling on credit despite these being common business practices for British traders elsewhere. The British merchants’ inability to smuggle as their French competitors did, speaks to their political position and inferior local knowledge. Too often, studies rely on the tidy ambitions of states rather than their often messy and inconsistent implementation. By examining monetary flows in the 18th-century Ottoman Empire, this paper reveals how the implementation of ambitious state policies was socially, as well as economically and politically determined.