European colonial administrations often implemented land settlement programs that privileged property rights over indigenous communal tenure systems. Given the large body of literature that supports private property rights as welfare-enhancing, I examine how British property rights reforms affected inter-generational economic opportunity in the case of Jordan, a British colony from 1921 to 1946. I argue that the conversion of communal tenure into private holdings introduced short-term economic benefits that did not result in inter-generational gains in economic well-being. To test this argument, I leverage variation in the pre-reform proportion of villages' communal tenure to examine individual-level economic well-being after the colonial-era reform. Using a contemporaneous case study and survey data from the 2016 wave of the Jordan Labor Market Panel Survey (JLMPS), I examine how exposure to the land settlement reform affected individuals' wealth, asset ownership, and educational attainment. In the short term, children from peasant families were increasingly able to attend school due to the capital infusion from land titling. In the decades that followed, however, I find that individuals born in villages with higher levels of historic communal tenure have lower levels of wealth and educational attainment. This paper contributes to our understanding of how colonial legacies may perpetuate inequalities in post-colonial autocracies, and challenges the characterization of private property rights as a prerequisite for development and democratization.