Coins, notes, fats, oils, soda waters, teas and wines, dyes and medicines, diplomas, certificates, patents and titles… Fakes were everywhere in the late Ottoman world. Did anyone care?

As this book shows, calls to “discriminate the true from the fake,” a founding motto of philological practice from the 16th century onwards, prompted many encounters between forgers and bureaucrats in the late Ottoman world. Each tells a different story about how fakes occurred. Quoted and translated in full, reports of these forgery affairs shed new light on Ottoman state-society relations. They show that the taming of the fake has been crucial to the reforming of the state.