After the defeat of 1967 as well as the perceived failures of nationalism and developmentalism, many Arab thinkers began to revisit Arab history in an attempt to assess the roots of these failures. Historians have shown how Marxist, feminist, and liberal intellectuals increasingly turned toward culturalism and engaged in 'self-criticism’ in the 1970s and '80s: thinkers such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Yassin al-Hafiz, and Hisham Sharabi offered a variety of sociocultural explanations in order to account for Arab stagnation and defeat. In this paper, I suggest that some Arab theorists and social scientists sought to account for these failures in another way: by revisiting Arab socioeconomic history of the Ottoman era. A flurry of publications appeared in the 1970s and '80s that debated whether a transition to capitalism took place in the Levant and Egypt in the nineteenth century. The debates turned on what mode of production preceded capitalism, and whether the orthodox Marxist conception of a linear transition from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production applied to the Arab world. It is in this context that many thinkers from the Levant and Egypt seized upon Marx’s concept of an 'Asiatic Mode of Production,' a concept that was not the subject of much discussion in Arabic developmentalist thought of the early to mid-twentieth century. Syrian thinkers such as Tawfiq Sallum and George Tarabishi translated some of the key Soviet texts on the Asiatic Mode of Production into Arabic. Others held conferences and published their own texts that discussed whether socioeconomic relations in the late Ottoman Arab world should be characterized as ‘feudal’ or ‘Asiatic.' At stake was a new way of accounting for the Arab world’s ‘incomplete’ transition to capitalism, which in turn explained the failures of mid-twentieth century developmentalism. On the one hand, this dovetailed with the revival of interest in the Asiatic Mode of Production in Soviet historical thought in the 1960s. On the other hand, it provided a means for Arab Marxists in particular to reject the culturalist emphases of the new 'self-criticisms,' opting instead for explanations that emphasized the Arab world’s particular socioeconomic formation in the Ottoman era.