In the sixteenth century, European capital began to penetrate Ottoman territory through the establishment of joint-stock companies and trading houses in several ports and cities around the Mediterranean Sea. Throughout the mercantilist period, the scope and form of this penetration was regulated by a series of bilateral treaties (capitulations) signed between the Sultan and the sovereigns of various European states, who granted charters according corporations the privilege of trading in Ottoman cities where the treaties applied (échelles). Under this system of capitulations, the access of European merchants to Ottoman markets was thus limited by the authority of their own state as well as its diplomatic relations with the Porte. This paper explores how the decline of this regulated system of trade, and its replacement by free trade practices from the late eighteenth century, transformed the social role, institutional structure, and geography of capitalization in Eastern Mediterranean port-cities in the age of the Industrial Revolution. It adopts a comparative approach to examine the role of European companies in shaping social relations in the échelles du Levant, which were subject to the capitulations, and Beirut, which was not. As historians of capitalism in the Ottoman Empire have observed, Beirut’s freedom from the political and legal regulations that constrained capital accumulation in the échelles is critical to explaining the city’s transformation from an insignificant coastal town of 6,000 inhabitants in the 1780s to the most important trading hub of Greater Syria by the 1840s. However, a historical understanding of how the former engendered the latter remains to be developed. This paper seeks to contribute to such an understanding by examining how the regulatory climate of Beirut differed from the échelles, and how this difference mattered for the ways in which capital organised social life in these port-cities. By analysing how the role of capital changed as it transcended the geographic and social limits of the capitulations system, this paper aims to shed light on the relations between the liberalisation of trade, the historical forms of capital accumulation, and the transformation of social relations in commercial cities of the nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean.