This paper extends the analysis of credit and the emergence of capitalism in Palestine, and the tensions and contradictions that accompanied them, to the British Mandate period. As several pathbreaking studies of the Ottoman era have demonstrated, early capitalism – and particularly credit in the form of moneylending (including via devices such as forward-purchase contracts) – played a central role in shaping modern Palestinian society, increasing class stratification and altering the social bonds between agrarian producers and the rising stratum of merchant-creditors that utilized usury as a means of capital formation and accumulation. The study of capitalism and the role of credit within Arab society have received less attention during the period of the British Mandate. British rule was built on paradoxical foundations. Colonial administrators sought to modernize and improve what they perceived to be deficient Arab agricultural practice while conserving the rural social hierarchy and the restraining influence of elites. Instead of bolstering stability and building prosperity, however, the British regime’s zeal for rural tax collection, among other deleterious policies, destabilized and impoverished much of Arab society. Credit became a kind of Gordian knot. Without affordable credit any improvement of the peasant majority’s condition was unlikely and any move from extensive to intensive agriculture (i.e. “modernization”) was impossible. Yet here the liberal agenda of agrarian “improvement” foundered, as the interwar empire was both loath to assume financial obligations related to providing non-usurious credit and chary of undermining the conservative social power of the merchant elite. With Jewish colonization and Arab landlessness both advancing apace under the Mandatory regime, credit became a live wire within Palestinian society. The Palestinian national movement occasionally demanded access to affordable credit while at the same time its wealthy members seemed to alter their own moneylending practices little. Peasants pled for affordable credit in meetings with state officials and by the 1930s their simmering class discontents sometimes spilled across the pages of the press. When the Palestinians rose in revolt in 1936, the class tensions underlying Arab society broke forth and peasants turned the tables on elites, first compelling them to bankroll the movement and eventually raising the flag of social revolution and banning debt collection in 1938. This paper tracks these developments and limns the socio-political importance of credit relations, and their multiple institutional and political contexts, in Palestinian society and history between 1919 and 1939.