What was Khūrī thinking of, when he announced the birth of a new era in Beirut, in Ottoman-ruled Syria, in 1858? He might have been thinking of the astonishing growth of the port city of Beirut itself over the past three decades. From being a small backwater on the coast below Mount Lebanon, the city had become the main port of Syria, a major regional entrepot with regular steamship sailings to Europe and Egypt. He might have thought particularly of the rise to prosperity of Beirut’s local merchants – Syrian Christians, Muslims and Jews, selling, notably, Lebanese silk in exchange for European manufactured goods. Indeed, one such merchant, the wealthy and cultured Mīkhāʾīl Mudawwar, was financing his paper. Or he might have had in mind recent political changes. In 1856 the Ottoman government had issued the Hatt-ı Hümayun reform decree, promising equality to all the religions of the Empire – and also heralding the Tanzimat programme of reforms. These would bring a greatly expanded bureaucracy, which Khūrī and other Syrians like him would join, new laws favourable to commercial development and an extension of state power into areas of life it had previously hardly touched. Ottoman Syria would have seemed – from the perspective of a comfortable man of letters in Beirut – well on its way to economic prosperity and political order, a context in which Khūrī, other intellectuals like him and their wealthy merchant patrons could flourish. The universe was ordering itself around them, by a benevolent design.