One of the most longstanding claims of historians of the Eastern Mediterranean is that in the late nineteenth century, peasants registered land in the names of urban and rural “notables” because they did not understand the implications of registration or feared they would be conscripted or taxed if they entered their own names into imperial registers. This claim echoes through specialized treatments of Ottoman property law and the textbooks we use to introduce students to the history of the modern Middle East. This paper continues an existing project to deconstruct this claim with empirical evidence and poses questions about its implications and stakes for our understandings of the nature of agrarian capitalism in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean at the turn of the twentieth century. The paper presents evidence from one of the most widely-cited milieus of purported peasant ignorance, the central Syrian grain-producing region of Homs, where large landowners emerged as a major political force in the post-Ottoman period. I present a number of previously unstudied legal cases from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which people defined as peasants protested the phenomenon of absentee landownership at its inception, claiming in official Ottoman legal venues that they in fact deserved alienable title to the land that had sustained their families for generations. In presenting these cases, I reveal the close alignment of particular imperial agencies with aspirational absentee landowners and explore the role of courts in class relations in the late Ottoman agrarian context. I also show the ways in which particular peasant cultivators, especially those claiming to represent village communities, employed the transformed court system and law codes designed to produce land as a commodified object of investment to preclude dispossession. In doing so, I argue that the articulated class politics of the interwar and postcolonial periods have their roots in Ottoman experiences of global capitalist expansion and sovereign imperial attempts to set and control the terms of accumulation. The paper presents legal history as a route to countering European colonial claims of postwar encounter with a feudal society that exclude the late Ottoman experience from histories of global capitalism.