Recent works in Arab intellectual history have aimed to rethink the “long nineteenth century” and its relationship to “the modern”. Challenging both the presumptions and the conclusions of Albert Hourani’s 1962 classic Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, this scholarship has sought to complicate the notion of a single modernity by drawing attention to the variety of ways in which Arab intellectuals indigenized, and at times pushed back, against concepts and currents of thought they encountered in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Though this work is no doubt unfinished, it has unearthed a variegated and unexpected Nahda – the so-called Arab awakening –– contrary to its anachronistic reading as the incubation period of a latent nationalism. Curiously, yet another 1962 classic, Şerif Mardin’s The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, has not figured as catalyst of a similar uptake in Ottoman-Turkish intellectual history, having only been translated into Turkish nearly half of a century following its publication. Though the causes for this discrepancy in revisionist work are doubtless plenty, a central reason may well to do with the obstinacy of nationalism in informing historical study: that is, irrespective of how far we consciously intend to expand our understanding of the Nahda and Ottoman-Turkish modernisms, they nevertheless figure as “Arab” or “Turkish” phenomena. This paper ventures to rethink the Nahda and Turkish modernism together through the concept of freedom in the works of two figures: Namik Kemal (1840-1888) and Rizqallah Hassun (1825-1878). Starting with their personal relationship which began in the Istanbul of the 1850s and continued as exiles in London in the following decade, I first excavate both authors’ preoccupation with the notion of freedom as the fulcrum of their criticism of the Ottoman government and programmes for progress in their Hürriyet (1868-9) and Mir’at al-Ahwal (1876-7) respectively. Despite their different subjective positions and political objectives, both thinkers were compelled, I show, to work with a relatively new concept to articulate the type of socio-political malaise afflicting their society, and the legal and institutional reforms needed to improve it. Finally, against thinking about the resonance of freedom for Ottomans as enabled by their encounters with liberal or republican thought, I argue that a close-reading of Kemal and Hassun’s treatises on freedom yields partial insights into an Ottoman society that was being transformed by new practices associated with capitalist production and circulation.