In the early 1900s, Egypt enjoyed the global reputation of a latter-day El Dorado. But in the spring of 1907, the financial bubble that had bolstered this moment of vaunted prosperity finally burst. Proclaiming the crisis that ensued to be a temporary corrective to the perilous excess of unscrupulous stock speculators, British officials promised that the sudden constriction of foreign capital flows would not harm the country’s peasant majority. Contrary to their confident pronouncements, however, the slump was not so quick to pass. And by February 1910, the Agricultural Bank that the British had established in 1902 to promote lending to peasant smallholders announced that a startling 40,000 of its roughly 250,000 clients were in default. Drawing together research from state archives in Britain and Egypt and several British bank archives, the opening section of this paper shows that the class character of the crisis was nearly the reverse of what British officials had predicted. By the end of 1907, several European banks had spotted opportunity in Egypt’s misfortune; profiting from the overall shortage of money, they began extending new loans to the wealthiest landowners at inflated interest rates. The country’s smallholders, meanwhile, were forced to employ a variety of desperate and risky strategies to retain their land. For a quarter century, the British had argued that improved access to mortgage credit would transform peasants into prosperous agrarian capitalists. Now, attributing the differential effects of the crisis not to class striations of the credit market but rather to innate and immutable characteristics of discrete social types, they determined that the only solution to the peasant’s woes was to sever his access to credit altogether. Building on this analysis of the crisis, the latter half of the paper reconsiders the form of economic nationalism that emerged prior to WWI. Critics of the British occupation could and did now argue that it was providing cover and support for foreign profiteering at the Egyptian public’s expense. But the protracted hardships of the crisis had also demonstrated that Egyptian landowners both great and small now depended on flows of foreign capital as much as water to sustain their livelihoods. Far more than a developmentalist concern with industrialization, it was the effort to resolve these contradictory entanglements of imperial finance that explains the wide appeal of calls for agricultural cooperation and national capital formation in these years.