This article began with a chance encounter while I was scanning through undigitized Ottoman central-administration folders of Imperial Council (Divān-ı Hümâyûn) for my doctoral research. I frequently came upon records about publicexpense issues. Even at first glance, the content of these records promised to shed a great deal of light on local dynamics in Ottoman provinces. Public-expense registers in these records were generally referred to as tevzî‘ defteri 2 , but they also go by several other interchangeable names, including sâlyâne defteri, müfredât defteri, masârıfât-ı mahalliyye, and masârıf-ı vilâyet. 3 The registers detailed the expenditures of particular districts; the salaries and fees collected by district governors, the expenditures of officials passing through the district, some specific taxes for either provincial governors or the state, and how they were distributed as taxes imposed on people of the district. They were used to document and verify the money to be collected for public expenses from the people of a district, whose particular contributions varied according to their affordability.4 In theory, the process of producing such registers was to be a collective act of all related agents. Producing them required the approval of and solid collaboration between all notable persons and officials over expense items. When preparing the list, everyone who had spent money for expenses had to show receipts for their payments so that they could have them added to the list. All registers were to be prepared at the district level and the money to cover the expenses listed in them was to be collected from the liable households (hâne) of a given district.5 Such district-level expenses paid by the public were not registered in central budgets, but collected and spent on-site and listed only in the district court records (sicill). Although these are called “public expenditures”, the content of them mostly consisted of governmental spending—including officials’ travel expenses, the fees of state officials, and military expenses in a district—rather than local expenses for the districts themselves, which figured much less prominently. Therefore, these expenditures in the tevzî‘ defterleri represent the outgoing money of the central government spent in the provinces, which in a way amounted to unseen expenditure items in the state’s central budget.