This paper explores the cultural consequences of an early manifestation of "technocapitalism," the establishment and operation of "transport and tourism" companies that provided the first bus services linking Damascus and Baghdad, and thereby "conquered" the Syrian Desert (badiyat al-Sham). Thus it investigates the nexus of venture capital, technology, journalism, and politics in the early to mid-twentieth century, the site at which a new spatial imaginary was being constructed and deployed. It also seeks to address a number of lacunae in the historiography of the modern Arab East by (1) shifting the discussion of Arab nationalism as a historical phenomenon from the sphere of politics to that at the intersections of culture and economy, and (2) testing the applicability of borderland studies' analytical framework to the entirely different set of geographical, historical, and cultural circumstances found in the twentieth-century Arab world. Through the examination of archival sources, memoirs, and the popular press of 1920s-1950s Syria, I will seek to recover the contemporary meaning of this spatially, temporally, and conceptually transformative process for Syria's political elites, its expanding literate masses, and its more "traditional" populations, i.e., the Bedouin tribes who inhabited the sprawling borderland shared by the new nation-states of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. This process generated a vast body of discourse surrounding the aforementioned companies, chief among them the Nairn Transport Company, Ltd. Founded by two brothers from New Zealand, it was the first and most prominent of such firms, and thus the model for all its successors. Starting as an express mail delivery firm in 1923, Nairn quickly evolved into a cross-desert charter service running convoys of specially adapted Cadillacs, and finally adopting the successful formula of attaching deluxe (eventually air-conditioned) "Pullman" coaches to large American tractor trailers for daily round trips between Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad. This success generated a considerable body of discourse and a seemingly permanent place in the Syrian national imagination. My project is guided by the following questions. What spatial imaginary appears to have been prevalent in the early twentieth-century Arab East, and what role does physical geography appear to have played in its formulationv What agency - a role heretofore attributed exclusively to imperialist power and nationalist ideology - did venture capital wield in the rhetorical reconfiguration of "natural" boundaries in the region