The social scientific literature on historical institutions links historical property rights and their protection to a range of redistributive outcomes. Few studies, however, have directly assessed the redistributive effects of property privatization reforms pursued by European administrations in late-colonized states. This paper brings qualitative and quantitative data from the colonized MENA region and the case of Jordan to bear on an understudied but wide-spread phenomenon: the widespread conversion of collective lands into private holdings under colonial land settlement programs. Building on historical work by Fischbach (2000), I argue that the colonial-era settlement of private property rights were economically regressive; despite titling a large proportion of the rural lower and middle classes, the private property regime accelerated the fragmentation and devaluation of the small landholdings that resulted from the process of private titling. At the same time, the process of dismantling collective land tenure was bureaucratically intensive and increased a locality’s legibility to the state (Scott 1998). I observe that in communities where collective (musha’a) tenure was dismantled earlier, state provision of public schools and government employment occurred earlier. This analysis draws on over two years of fieldwork in rural Jordan. I quantitatively test the redistributive effects of colonial land reform using an original dataset of property rights settlement in Jordan villages from 1933 to 1956 (N = 489). The data includes the area under each tenure regime (private, collective, state, or waqf), as well as the start and end dates for property title settlement in most localities. I test the relationship between land tenure and redistributive outcomes in three ways. First, I use household surveys to show that in areas where collective land tenure institutions were historically prevalent, household and individual wealth and landholding is systematically lower, ceteris paribus. Second, I compare inequalities of wealth, educational attainment, and access to government employment between cohorts by exploiting the variation in land settlement implementation across localities. Third and finally, I document the extension of infrastructural power into these communities following property settlement reform by tracing the expansion of public schooling from 1921 until the decade after reforms. I also present interview evidence and historical process tracing based on private and government documents from the Jordan National Archives. By economically disempowering the peasantry (fellahin) and extending the state’s infrastructural power in those localities, Jordanian colonial property reforms set in motion patterns of dependency and economic inequality that persist to the present.