In the mid-nineteenth century, a modest private Arabic press was beginning to be established in the Levant. By the 1880s, the center of Arabic publishing moved to Egypt and expanded considerably. A number of new periodicals were being published that covered a wide range of subjects. During the same period, the two hubs of Arabic publishing, Egypt and the Levant, underwent immense economic transformations. In the 1880s, the Arabic scientific periodical Al-Muqtataf published a number of articles on ‘the new science of political economy,’ introducing their audience to ideas from the canon of classical political economy. These early articles considered ‘political economy’ to be a science of self-betterment that counseled frugality and discipline in order to obtain profit. Soon after, other periodicals such as Al-Hilal, Al-Jam'ia, and Al-Manar also began to publish articles on economic theories and local economic developments. This paper focuses on the history of economic concepts and ideas in Arabic periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through tracing the debates in these periodicals around labor, luxury, property, trade, taxes, and development, I argue that at the beginning of the twentieth century the meaning of the economic shifted away from being a ‘science’ of self-betterment. Writers like Niqula Haddad began to mobilize the concept of ‘the economic’ in these same publications in order to push for a more collectivist politics. Furthermore, I assert that these debates were not unique in the region—rather they were a part of wider debates about economic ideas happening among the community of Ottoman reformists during the turn of the century.