Kept as a state secret in the Spanish empire, merino sheep partook in global empire building in the mid-eighteenth century and onwards. Scholars working on the global biography of merino sheep studied South Africa, New England, Australasia, Western Europe, and the Western Mediterranean. In this paper, I put the efforts of the Ottoman empire to import and crossbreed merino sheep in the Balkans and the Western Anatolia in the early 1830s and 1840s into a dialogue with the literature on sheep and empire building. I note that the Ottoman interest in merino breeding intersected with the period of steep rise of wool prices (1827-1835) in international markets as well as the aftermath of the abolishment of Janissary corps. By focusing on granular details from the Ottoman imperial archives, first, I document and argue that the Ottoman chapter in the global merino history reveals underexplored regional connections among Russian, Spanish and Ottoman empires. My archival findings clarify that Ottoman bureaucrats, merchants, and consuls were driving forces in the functioning of capitalism in the Eastern Mediterranean. Second, I argue that the importation of merino sheep made ongoing bureaucratic correspondences on domestic and foreign breeds, veterinary care, sustainability of wool supply, and aesthetics of fez production visible. Third, by looking at the case of imperial landed estates (ciftlik) of Mihalic, an imperial institution established for sheep breeding specifically in the vicinity of Bursa in the 1840s, I demonstrate that Ottoman interest and investment in merino breeding were accompanied by meticulous and rich record keeping processes attentive to local and global events. Reading these account books with a critical gaze, I investigate the ways in which the lower and middle rank imperial functionaries run, monitored, imagined, and intervened what supposedly constituted an institution of the imperial “economy” and “ecology.”