Recent scholarship on class formation in South Asia has drawn attention to consequential processes of capital accumulation taking place in provincial towns and in the countryside. This “provincial capital” finds its genesis in the commercialisation of agriculture, is often smaller in scale than big capital, is rooted in the locality, depends more on informal than formal institutions, and holds diverse assets across the rural–urban divide. While the significance of this segment of capital is well established in the literature on India, it has hardly been investigated in Pakistan. In response to this dearth of studies, this article charts the “making of a provincial capitalist class” in two areas of the Pakistani Punjab. It traces the origins of this class in how the distinct landownership structures and caste composition of the two areas interacted with the commercialisation of agriculture in the colonial period. Yet their paths were by no means pre-determined as the exit of Hindu mercantile castes created a vacuum that was filled by peasant castes diversifying off-farm in one of these areas and large landlords and non-landed artisanal castes in the other. This highlights the widening of the social circle from which capital has emerged.