This paper connects late Ottoman debates over economic policy to developmentalist initiatives in the Arab provinces in the 1890s and 1900s. Older literature describes a “paradox” between Ottoman Arab elites’ aspirations towards a progress they associated with Europe and a desire to maintain Ottoman sovereignty in the face of European expansion. This paper explores a more complex set of debates that reflected global discussions about economic sovereignty that were also relevant in spaces like Germany and the United States during the financial crises of the late nineteenth century. In particular, the paper focuses on discussions among Arab elites in Istanbul and Damascus lawmaking circles over imperial development, Zionist investment in Palestine and the Hijaz railway. These elites had deep ties and investments in agrarian and commercial contexts across Syria and beyond. The paper draws on the 1890s diaries of Sultan Abdulhamid II’s Damascene palace associate Izzet Pasha al-Abid who came from a landowning family with deep ties to the provincial administration in Syria especially through the career of Izzet Pasha’s father, Holo Pasha al-Abid, in the 1850s and 1860s. In his diaries, Izzet Pasha expressed a vision of Syria and Hijaz as bulwarks of Ottoman sovereignty in comparison to the tumult he perceived in Anatolia. He also sharply criticized foreign borrowing and saw his efforts to reform tax collection practices and promote Ottoman infrastructure and agrarian production as clear alternatives to imperial indebtedness and the financial “fate of Egypt”, which he saw as distinct from the Ottoman experience. The paper connects Izzet Pasha’s views to those of administrative officials in Damascus as they debated the desirability of the Hijaz railway and Zionist colonization, showing that many favored a national economy vision that promoted preserving the regional status quo especially in terms of labor, production, land ownership and sovereignty. The paper argues that these debates over property policy and commerce, which followed broader regional and global tensions between free trade-ist liberal thought and aspirations of national economy, shaped the long-term legacies of Ottoman administration in the colonial and postcolonial Arab world.