A Fine-Grained History: Socio-politics of Rice Cultivation in 18th-century Ottoman Egypt Egypt’s role in world history has been recounted often and well as the story of wheat and, in the nineteenth century, of cotton. This paper explores a chapter in Egypt’s early modern history through the lens of rice: I argue that the particular exigencies of rice cultivation and trade in the Egyptian Delta placed a subgroup of provincial society––great rice merchants and brokers––at the nexus of production, commerce, and Ottoman politics in the late eighteenth century. Cultivable in only a few locations in the Ottoman Empire, rice was the primary cash crop grown in the well-irrigated lowlands of the northern Egyptian Delta until the rise of the cotton economy in the mid-nineteenth century. Requirements of irrigation and multi-stage processing made rice cultivation a capital-intensive endeavor. Meanwhile, the grain’s caloric density and long shelf life relative to wheat made rice an item of strategic demand and luxury consumption for Ottoman officials in Istanbul. This paper explores the socio-politics of rice cultivation in late-eighteenth century Rashid (Rosetta), an important Mediterranean port city at the western edge of the Delta where local capital met imperial demand. Recent scholarship in Ottoman studies has taken a renewed interest in the actors, ideologies, and institutions that helped maintain imperial integrity in the eighteenth century. Growing awareness of the commercialization of the early modern global economy has placed a spotlight on the impact of commerce and capitalization on Ottoman governance. This paper offers a ground-level view of capital at work in a domain of imperial affairs that also addresses Egypt’s position in an Ottoman framework during a period of crisis in the late-eighteenth century. The shari’a court records from the port city of Rashid provide a window into social organization, economic life, and politics in a major center of Egyptian rice cultivation and export in the second half of the eighteenth century. This study hones in on the economic and political activities of rice merchants and brokers as a powerful and influential cohort within Rashidi society. Drawing on commercial and advance payment (salam) contracts, probate inventories, and property transfers and complemented by Ottoman imperial orders and Ottoman and French travel literature, I explore how this propertied commercial class formed a critical link between Egypt’s tax-farming elite, local cultivators, and representatives of the Ottoman treasury invested in keeping the produce of the Egyptian soil within imperial reach.