How agreements were maintained and enforced beyond state-backed systems is among the least understood aspects of Ottoman legal history. This article reveals how merchants’ engagement with Ottoman state finance intertwined private and state-backed legal practices through a letter-book written entirely in Ottoman Turkish belonging to a seventeenth-century English merchant, Peter Whitcomb, who provided financial services to Ottoman officials across the empire. As a rare example of surviving early modern mercantile correspondence in Ottoman Turkish, Whitcomb’s letters to distant officials expose Ottoman financial epistolary culture and a wide range of alternative methods of dispute resolution. By combining these letters with court records, this article shows how Ottoman finance’s layers of devolved authority themselves relied on a range of legal practices that encompassed a language of reciprocity and reputation, established Ottoman documentary forms, intercessions on an individual’s behalf, appeals to elites, petitions to the grand vizier, and appearances in Ottoman sharīʿa courts. The capacity of Ottoman state finance to incorporate a foreigner like Whitcomb into its fiscal apparatus through this breadth of legal practices further suggests that we should revisit domestic narratives of competitive early modern state formation to include inter-imperial actors.

如何在国家支持的体系之外维持和执行协议是奥斯曼法律史上最不为人所知的方面之一。本文通过一本完全用奥斯曼土耳其语写成的信书，揭示了商人与奥斯曼国家金融的接触如何将私人和国家支持的法律实践交织在一起，该书属于十七世纪英国商人彼得·惠特科姆（Peter Whitcomb），他为奥斯曼帝国各地的官员提供金融服务。帝国。作为奥斯曼土耳其语中幸存的早期现代商业信件的罕见例子，惠特科姆给远方官员的信件暴露了奥斯曼金融书信文化和广泛的替代争端解决方法。通过将这些信件与法庭记录结合起来，本文展示了奥斯曼金融层的权力下放本身如何依赖于一系列法律实践，这些法律实践包括互惠和声誉的语言、建立的奥斯曼文件形式、代表个人调解、向精英呼吁、向大维齐尔请愿，并在奥斯曼伊斯兰教法法庭出庭。奥斯曼国家财政通过广泛的法律实践将像惠特科姆这样的外国人纳入其财政机构的能力进一步表明，我们应该重新审视早期现代国家竞争性形成的国内叙述，以将帝国间的参与者包括在内。