The imposition of the League of Nations Mandate system in the former Ottoman Arab provinces brought about significant change in an era already enveloped in uncertainty. In the early 1920s, European colonial administrators replaced Ottoman bureaucrats, and the sovereignty of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul was eliminated, by new borders and hastily negotiated treaties. Despite this, there are significant continuities between late Ottoman and mandate Syria. Using Ottoman, French, British, and League of Nations archives, this paper reconstructs the persistence of Ottoman modes of citizenship practice in mandate-era Syria. It argues that various late-Ottoman reforms and laws aimed at defining who was and who was not an Ottoman were in fact attempts to codify an already developed form of citizenship practice for an international and domestic audience. I draw distinct connections between late Ottoman reforms and citizenship practice in the mandates through a detailed study of the style and purpose of petitions from both periods, and analyze laws and reforms aimed at defining the rights and responsibilities of Ottoman and mandate-era Syrians. I also examine mandate-era regulations that attempted to define, and redefine, Syrians’ rights under a neo-colonial regime to argue that part of the French civilizing mission in Syria after World War I required an aggressive campaign to subvert any existing notions of Ottoman modernity, especially regarding individual and collective engagement with the state. This involved a systematic attack on traditional Ottoman institutions, which by the early twentieth century already resembled modern notions of political and social modernity. Ottoman subjects engaged freely with Istanbul, despite social status and geographic location. French and Mandate officials, on the other hand, saw this practice as a nuisance and sought to stifle the voices of the former Ottoman population through a series of increasingly stringent procedural rules regarding the petitioning and the mandate’s citizenship regime. Thus, a system that was once available to anyone within the Ottoman realm was slowly transformed into an increasingly burdensome process that relied heavily on new political boundaries to prevent large-scale opposition. Syrian frustrations with the restrictions on their engagement with the state are reflected in countless petitions found in League of Nations, British, and French archival collections. The modernity that the French sought to cultivate in Syria following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire already existed, and eventually manifest itself as a counter to French claims that Syria was not yet ready to stand on its own.