In this paper I concentrate on Palestinian uses of the Allied World War II rhetoric of “democracy and the free world” to explore how elites linked national freedom to economic prosperity. I focus on economic elites to complicate the flattened topography of Palestinian social history by moving beyond the ubiquitous binary of the decadent, infighting notables and the honorable but ignorant peasantry. This paper will focus on the period just after the declaration of the White Paper of 1939, which committed to a unified Palestinian state within ten years that would consist of an Arab majority and a Jewish minority. Although the official Palestinian line was to reject the White Paper, businessmen were invested in the promise of a unitary state, at the same time that they drew on and shaped ideas about national freedom and economic prosperity. Businessmen built on earlier turn of the century notions of “an economic nahda” to actively link self-determination to the great expectation of free trade in the 1940s. It was in this period that Palestinian economic elites exchanged visits, literature, and expertise with their counterparts in Lebanon, Syrian, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. Together these men envisioned the contours of postwar trade. For Palestinian elites, like many others, the promise of “democracy and the free world” was embodied in the notion of free trade and the potential economic prosperity it assured. In Palestine and beyond, colonial officials, businessmen, political figures, and reformers were shaping and managing a new national and political object called the economy. The colonial administration’s introduction of income tax in Palestine in the 1940s was one of many technologies to make and manage this newly conceived object. Palestinian elite advocacy for free trade was in part a response to these new technologies. In this paper I explicate these businessmen’s postwar vision, in which they constituted the vanguard of “a brave new world.” I show how Palestinians crafted the character of the postwar capitalist, whose innovation, courage, energy, and professionalism would ensure the seemingly co-dependant dyad of profit and progress. This paper will explore how even in the face of limitations and challenges to Palestinian self-determination, free trade nevertheless held the promise and potential of national independence for economic elites.