Between 1930 and 1950, the Great Depression and Second World War provoked a transformative period of industrialization, urban migration and increasing wealth and income inequality in Egypt. As Nazi Germany prepared for war, British diplomats sought to salvage imperial hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean with a 1936 bilateral treaty that granted the Egypt state autonomy in domestic administration — including control of its Ministry of Interior. This paper argues that the problems of this era and the administrative choices made to address them helped establish the ministry at the center of the postcolonial Egyptian state and led it to develop methods not merely mimetic of colonial administration. The decolonization of the Ministry of Interior occurred at the same time as the British military reoccupied the country in 1939 with hundreds of thousands of troops. The Egyptian government employed a constitutional state of emergency that granted it sole legal jurisdiction over Egyptian civilians in security matters to limit the power and presence of the British in Egyptian space. Because the British still dominated the Egyptian military, the Ministry of Interior controlled the flow of cases and appeals in a military court system ostensibly run by the military and Justice Ministry. The creation of the Ministries of Public Health (1936), Social Affairs (1939) and Supply (1940) also helped in providing new sources of social intelligence, in putting a humanitarian service spin on these services and in breaking British influence over these areas. In reaction to the rise of urban industrial labor and urban protest, expert knowledge on policing in Egypt shifted from rural criminal psychology towards militarized crowd control tactics. However, as the staff of the ministry based in urban areas shifted from one to two thirds of the total, and wartime inflation ravaged the standard of living of wage employees, the police force experienced the same social unrest it had been tasked with suppressing. In April 1948, Cairo and Alexandria mid-grade police officers led their subordinates on strike that the resurgent Egyptian military intervened to stop. By 1950, the leadership of the Ministry of Interior had some confidence that it had established a liberal, neocolonial security state. At the same time, the same social and political changes that helped establish its power had also led to threats: bureaucratic malaise and military populist nationalism.