Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria all saw significant changes to their political systems in the years following the end of World War II. In the years 1952-1963, nationalist coups d’etat in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria put an end to (semi-)competitive elected parliaments and initiated authoritarian populist regimes. Turkey, by contrast, began to allow sustained political competition for the first time beginning in the years 1946-1950. This paper seeks to explain this variation in outcomes through a look at the importance of land reform, an issue that played a key role in all four cases. This paper argues that parliaments dominated by landowners led nationalists in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria to see democratic governance as an obstacle to national emancipation, identify feudalism with colonialism, and pursue revolutionary land reform as the key to lifting the subjugation of both the peasant and the nation. In Turkey, by contrast, different patterns of agrarian land use transformed land reform into an issue that was used to promote democratization by anti-land reform dissidents within the ruling single party. Whereas the parliaments in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria were “captured” by landholding interests fiercely opposed to land reform, rendering land reform through the existing democratic institutions inconceivable, in Turkey democratic politics were actually championed by those promoting the security of rural land tenure to prevent radical land reform from being carried out. Why did land reform play such a different role in these four cases? I investigate three factors leading nationalist military and state elites to view land reform and democracy in different ways. The first is the pattern of landholding, with roots in the Ottoman Empire and local social and ecological factors, often subjected to radical transformations under the periods of British or French rule. The second is the structure of the parliamentary institutions that were created in all four cases, and the ways that patronage and imperial influence led the Egyptian, Iraqi, and Syrian parliaments to offer little prospect for land reform. The third is the spread of ideas and economic theories concerning the nature of land use, agrarian economies, imperialism, feudalism, and the efficacy of state power in restructuring markets. Drawing on primary and secondary source materials in Turkish, Arabic, English, and French, this project seeks to provide new insights into role of political economy and rural poverty in the origins of the contemporary regimes in the Middle East.