By the 1860s, the Ottoman-Turkish press, previously the mouthpiece of the Ottoman regime, was quickly evolving into an organ of political dissent. The Ottoman literature on decline (tedenni) and the need for reorganization/renewal (tanzim/tecdid), a hallmark of the late 18th century, had now taken on a new conceptual vocabulary. I propose that one such newly-coined concept, political freedom (hürriyet), was the prism through which the individual, with its natural rights for political representation, to own property and to labor, became articulated as part of a larger social totality in the Ottoman 19th century. But freedom’s flipside was just as defining of the period: a set of necessities that for Ottoman intellectuals dictated modern life, and imposed a set of responsibilities between individuals as interdependent members of the social. How might this new notion of freedom and changing necessities of social interdependence shed a new light onto the experience of capitalism in the late Ottoman world? In this two-part paper, I begin with a close-reading of the 1868 newspaper Hürriyet, established in London by exiles Namık Kemal and Ziya Paşa, along with two other dailies: İnkılâb (1870) and İbret (1870). In such media as well as works of translation and original monographs, I chart the evolution of an emergent art of political economy, the categories of which helped critics propose legal, economic and institutional reforms that would ensure political freedom in the Ottoman Empire. In the second part of the paper, I think through the conditions of possibility enabling this new understanding of freedom leading up to the first Ottoman Constitution of 1875. To do so, I read the social criticism throughout these publications against the backdrop of state-sponsored techniques of revenue extraction whereby land, labor and time were increasingly commodified following the Gülhane rescript of 1839, the Reform Edict of 1856, and the Land Code of 1858. Freedom’s socio-political background, associated concepts and utilization in political projections of the future, I propose, constitute a novel way to study conceptual change in the Ottoman age of capitalization.