Beirut evolved from a minor Ottoman maritime town of about 10,000 inhabitants (early nineteenth century) into a thriving Levantine city that accommodated a population of over 100,000 individuals (early twentieth century) and specialized in transit trade due to its newly constructed port (1890–1893) that was sponsored by French money. Engaging a comparative analysis of various histories of the making of the Levantine city, this study demonstrates how most scholarly works have in fact divided Beirut’s history into divergent narratives that are tied to one of the two governing regimes: Ottoman and French. Fin-de-siècle Beirut acquired two distinctive political statuses; first it was capital of an Ottoman province (1888–1918) and later, with the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the inception of the French Mandate, it became capital of the newly founded Grand Liban (1920–1943). Histories of pre-WWI Beirut, despite their rich and comprehensive nuances, emphasized one of two theoretical positions. Highlighting the economic relapse of the late Ottoman Empire, some scholars represented the modern project as a colonial one that is preoccupied with the employment of Western forms and norms. Others, attempting to avoid Orientalist and essentialist views that point to the weakness of the Ottoman Empire in its latter days before its demise, emphasized the role of the Ottoman reformation system (tanzimat) in the modernization of Beirut. I argue that the two opposing intellectual trends, with their respective modernist and postcolonial leanings, have been influenced by the tradition of splitting the two areas of study—Ottoman and French—as though the two histories never overlapped. Local Beiruti elites in fact developed a commercial system that reflected, as well as resisted at times, projects of imperial scale. The local system emerged as a result of a larger politico-economic alliance between the Ottoman Empire and France in the wake of the uprisings in Mount Lebanon and the establishment of the Mutasarrifiyya in 1861. It thrived in the interstices between the centralized Ottoman tanzimat and the European concessionary business, which developed from an earlier form of regulated trade between the Ottoman state and French merchant-consuls. The history of Beirut is best expressed through a statement by Philip Mansel: “Beirut, the last [Levantine] city where neither Christianity nor Islam dominates, [was] born from one of the most successful alliances between France and the Ottoman Empire.”