Fictitious Capital is a book that looks to the history of the Arabic novel and reads an untold tale of finance that precedes the familiar narrative of the nation. Beginning in 1859, Khalīl al-Khūrī serializes a novel in his official newspaper Ḥadīqat al-Akhbār. Like many an Arabic novel to come, al-Khūrī’s readers find themselves dreaming of gardens set apart from the rush of the industrializing world, and at the same time, of a future of “material and literary progress.” Textiles are central to this alchemical dream, hinged to the fate of the silkworm, caught between the collapsing Ottoman Empire and the rise of the French in the affairs of Mt. Lebanon. Reading the silkmoth’s serial reapperances in the turn-of-the-century Arabic press and in theories of capital, Novel Material argues that finance capital and its fictions were reconfiguring time itself in an age of hope, fear and speculation.