Recent historiography of the 1919 revolution has suggested that the revolution was sparked not just by the material deprivation wrought by the First World War, but by the influx of new political ideas dreamt elsewhere that were transmitted from various metropoles to Egypt. According to these putatively ‘global’ accounts, ideas about emancipation were enthusiastically received from abroad by Egyptians rather than produced at home, in the years prior to and during the momentous uprisings of 1919. In the liberal version, Egyptian nationalists are inflamed by Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about self-determination; in the leftist version, Egypt is inspired by a global Leninism. Yet in charting these two paths, scholars suggest that anti-colonialism belongs to the intellectual genealogy of European enlightenment, granted as yet another gift from the metropole to the colonies. These global histories, I argue, reproduce the historicist thinking that was once central to imperial rule itself. Unwittingly, scholars have rehearsed a colonial logic of deferral, in which every new Egyptian mobilization represented the imitation of a distinctly European past, one that Egyptians were allegedly not yet ready to inhabit. My paper proposes that the question of why thousands of people become willing to die and to kill in defence of abstract ideas like the nation requires a new kind of intellectual history. This question cannot be answered through accounts that assume Western political theory had already identified, and even resolved, the main philosophical problems in politics—and that Egyptians might at best replicate them. I argue that we must move away from Wilson and Lenin and instead study the ephemeral and fragmentary texts of political practice used in the Egyptian revolution itself. Only by doing so can we transcend the racialized claims of the colonial archive that insisted Egyptians were incapable of thinking and behaving politically. Drawing upon revolutionary pamphlets, in my paper I propose a way to move beyond diffusionist models, where intellectuals imagine de-colonial futures and subalterns provide the manpower to realize them, and instead reconstruct the ideational and material conditions that made the choice to protest (or not) inevitable.