The ups and downs of silk, cotton, and stocks syncopated with serialized novels in the late nineteenth-century Arabic press: Time itself was changing. Khalīl al-Khūrī, Salīm al-Bustānī, Yūsuf al-Shalfūn, Jurjī Zaydān and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf wrote novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk-increasingly legible at a moment when French and British empires were unseating the Ottoman legacy in Beirut, Cairo and beyond. As silk dominated Beirut's...