Since the outbreak of popular protests against the Syrian government in March 2011, and more particularly after their transformation into civil war during 2012, the ambivalent stance of the urban business elite has posed several interpretative questions. The bourgeoisie’s reluctance to choose sides is no doubt conditioned by uncertainty about the future, regime resilience, and the generalized violence, especially in Aleppo. Clearly the bourgeoisie’s position is also shaped by the particulars of its development over a half-century of Ba‘thist rule: the eradication of the old industrial bourgeoisie in the mid-1960s, the reconstitution of a dependent and subordinate business class, and the more recent elaboration of crony-capitalist networks binding individuals from the regime and the private sector. But any analysis that takes the Ba‘th coup of 1963 as “year zero” runs the risk of ignoring other relevant factors. While not discounting the value of social-science approaches focused on the contemporary period, this paper argues that a moyen durée historical approach has explanatory value. Specifically, the Syrian urban bourgeoisie has, because it is a bourgeoisie, accommodated itself in particular ways to the state irrespective of the particular regime in power. Although the roots of this accommodation lie in the late Ottoman period, the critical turning points took place during the French Mandate, when the maturing industrial bourgeoisie struck a “corporatist bargain” with the Syrian state that set the basic parameters of state-private sector relations for independent Syria. Understanding the terms and implications of this bargain not only gives historical depth to analyses of post-1963 Syria but also, it is suggested, indications of the potential trajectories of state-private sector relationships in the post-“Arab spring” Middle East as a whole.