The coup d’état that brought a cadre of military officers to power in Egypt in July 1952 was the culmination of a long process of disillusionment with the liberal system that had emerged in the wake of the 1919 revolution. For decades, state officials and liberal landowning elites paid lip service to reform without ever seriously challenging the structural inequalities that warped social and political life in Egypt. Ostensibly to correct this imbalance, the first policy initiative announced by the new government in the summer of 1952 was a program of Land Reforms designed to confiscate all land held in plots over 200 feddans and to redistribute it to landless peasant families. But while this aim seemed simple enough, the devil is in the details. The question of how this land should be divided up and organized was still open to contentious debate, and the answers provided by the new government would come to change the relationship between the Egyptian state, the Cold War superpowers, and the millions of workers and peasants employed in Egyptian agriculture. This paper reconstructs the political economy of agricultural cooperatives in the twentieth century Egypt, tracking a shift in the basis of power from transnational networks of landowner/financiers to a set of nationally organized apparatuses constructed during the 1950s and 60s. I follow this shift from a number of perspectives. First, how did the agricultural cooperative movement participate in and reflect changes in geopolitics during the tumultuous twentieth century? Second, how did demographic shifts and considerations of national economy influence the formation of agricultural cooperatives? And finally, how did cooperatives function in rural society and the daily lives of peasant cultivators? Taking this three-pronged approach to studying agricultural cooperatives allows us to link macro-level institutions like the United Nations and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the forerunner to the World Bank) to the formation of the Egyptian state and the daily lives of rural Egyptians who remain a major demographic force in the region and throughout the world.