In 1934, after years of drought and a worldwide economic depression that caused a slump in crop prices, matters had reached crisis proportions in Syria’s agricultural sector. Farmers, unable to pay their debts due to low yields and prices, found their crops, animals and lands seized by mandate authorities and put up for public auction. Pleas for a moratorium on debt went unheeded. To protest these policies, in September 1934, a group of farmers met in Damascus to demand the agricultural bank under the French mandate change its mode of operation. Mandate authorities remained intransigent. What was at stake in this stand-off and why had the situation become so intractable? Using bank records and accounts as well as correspondence from the Ottoman and French archives and Arabic periodicals from the period, this paper will explore the transformation of the agricultural bank from an Ottoman institution established in the late 1880s ostensibly to help farmers acquire the funds necessary to purchase certain agricultural necessities or invest in improvements and new technologies to an establishment at the heart of a financial crisis in 1930s French mandate Syria. It considers what this historical trajectory reveals about different imperial approaches to agrarian finance. Following the installation of the French mandate in 1920, French banks were eager to get involved in the mortgage business, but were unwilling to do so until certain aspects of Ottoman-era banking regulations, namely the status of property held as collateral and the bank’s ability to dispose of it, were redefined. Mandate officials were intent to oblige. Thus the region’s agricultural banks, having had most of their capital and records carted off to Anatolia when the Ottoman army withdrew at the end of World War I, underwent a period of reorganization in the 1920s before being reopened with a modified scope. By examining the agricultural bank’s various sources of capital during the Ottoman and mandate periods as well as its changing processes for loan-making this paper will present a comparison of Ottoman and French approaches to managing agrarian credit in the region. It argues that these two empires had distinctly different priorities when it came to lending practices and the ways in which collateral was held, leading to divergent loan collection policies and consequences which culminated in the crisis of the 1930s.