This paper explores the struggles around the predominantly French-owned Sharikat Kahruba’ Bayrut (Société Électricité de Beyrouth – EDB). On the eve of independence, the EDB operated both electric current and tramlines in Beirut, as it owned the exclusive rights to develop and operate the city’s electricity and tramway systems. The pricing, quality of service, and ownership structure of public utilities—such as those the EDB provided—were a contentious issue in the period shortly after independence. This dynamic had important antecedents in the late Ottoman and French mandate period. However, the context of independence infused the issue with an entirely new set of stakes, norms, and institutions. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the ways in which public utilities constituted one of the central arenas of the struggles over the organization of the political economy of early independence Lebanon. It does so by tracing popular and elite mobilizations around the EDB, their intersections and divergences, as well as the institutional and normative contexts within which they played out. These struggles first resulted in direct state intervention to lower the prices of electric utility rates (1952), and subsequently the nationalization of the EDB (1954). The analysis is developed through a close of reading of press reports, ministerial documents, company memos, development treatises, and oral history interviews. It highlights the intersection between two movements that emerged in the early independence period: a bottom-up mobilization around the issue of public utilities and a top-down opposition to the presidency of Bishara al-Khoury. The ultimate outcome of this intersection was the nationalization of one of the largest foreign companies operating in Lebanon at the time. This outcome itself stands in contrast to what is the eventual consolidation of an open, laissez faire, service-based economy in Lebanon—otherwise referred to as “Merchant Republic.” The narrative of these mobilizations and their outcomes disrupts the assumed separation between “the political” and “the economic.” It also highlights particular norms and repertoires that were drawn from a broader array of circulating notions about statecraft, economic development, and the role of various social groups. Finally, the narrative identifies the expanding role of state institutions in the “economic affairs” of post-colonial Lebanon and the everyday lives of its citizens. In this sense, the story of the EDB can serve to complicate otherwise linear and tautological narratives of both state-led and private sector-led economic development.