How did political economy come into being? What exclusions, elisions, reorganisations had to take place to make it viable in the way we understand it today? How did political economy increasingly come to denote political economy, the politics of an economic sphere—as opposed to the management (oeconomia) of politics? In short, how did the emergence of an ‘economic’ sphere become thinkable? Although such questions have been addressed in the scholarship, far less attention has been paid to the emergence of religion as a sphere distinct from the economic. This paper will explore the mutual constitution of the realm of the ‘economic’ and the ‘religious’ over the course of the long-nineteenth century as constitutive of the field of political economy. How does political economy emerge only as it removes itself from ‘religion’—that is, as it disassociated itself from practices that it ascribes to religion? How does the distinction between the spiritual and the material—increasingly posited as two separate domains—produce the conditions its emergence? The paper will explore this question by elaborating on some of the limitations of our conventional, naturalised understandings of political economy, by reading these against the archive of a messianic movement whose conceptual vocabulary exceeded these. In 1884 the Mahdist uprising (Mahdiyya) overthrew Ottoman-Egyptian rule in Sudan. In doing so, it articulated a critique of the way in which Ottoman-Egyptian rule had transformed land and debt. Having been rendered sources of individual wealth, it called for their reconstitution as sites of ethical practice, sites through which believers could operate as a single body (jasad wahid). The historiography has often defined the Mahidyya as either a ‘religious’ movement or an ‘economic’ backlash. By contrast, this paper takes seriously the movement’s own conceptual vocabulary—one which did not divide the world into the realms of religion and economy. In doing so, it argues that we can begin to think about how these distinctions, far from natural, were themselves the product of important reorganisations and reorderings of the world that took place in nineteenth century Ottoman Sudan. One of the key sites of transformation was in the realm of shari’a. Having been a decentralised practice, dominant in urban and commercial settings, the nineteenth century saw the beginnings its imbrication with an increasingly centralising government. This concentration of decision-making power within imperial centres had major implications for the way land and debt were dealt with, rupturing the ethical relations which had defined them.