Rural social relations have been absent from the scholarship on Lebanon and Syria for decades. That neglect has been particularly severe in the U.S. academy. This paper will consider why the agrarian question faded from scholarly agendas based on a reassessment of the history of World War I. The war saw a massive transfer of capital and land away from Mount Lebanon's laboring classes as a direct result of the wartime famine. Rather than an anomalous tragedy, the war featured an intensification of an ongoing process of capitalist dispossession in the countryside. Why have historians, including Marxists, not perceived this social dimension of the pivotal years that preceded Lebanon's creation in its contemporary borders? Instead of relying on the memoir accounts overwhelmingly produced by elites that have predominantly informed studies of the period, this study reconstructs the war based on contemporary manuscript sources from private archives in Lebanon. The paper will highlight social relations in the kaza of Kisrawan, in particular, based on the relevant land registers housed in the archive of the University of the Holy Spirit in Kaslik, Lebanon. These diaries, letters, and title deeds reveal that the main conflict, as it was experienced at the time, was a class struggle internal to Beiruti and Lebanese society. That conclusion speaks to one key question of Middle East studies: why has class analysis been so neglected relative to the literature on Latin America and South Asia? In Lebanon, the particular neglect of rural social relations owed much to restrictions on access to archives that revealed the painful conditions, like the famine, under which land and capital changed hands. The national land register remains closed. The same ownership class of the late Ottoman period retained its power throughout Lebanon's history and was able to keep archives closed for over a century. The current period of archival openness and renewed willingness among academics to use class as a lens could signal the return of the agrarian question.