This paper examines the financial crisis of 1907 as a watershed in nationalist thought about Egypt’s place in the uneven geographies of global capitalism. More specifically, it aims to explain the paradoxical emergence of Theodore Roosevelt, “Teddy the Meddler,” as a critical foil to the British Consul General Sir Eldon Gorst in Egyptian accounts of the social dislocation that ensued from the market crash of that spring. The first half of the paper offers an account of the 1907 crisis that resituates Egypt as one among a number of major frontiers for the expansion of metropolitan financial networks characteristic of global capitalism in the belle époque. As countless observers at the time were aware, the financial turmoil of 1907 was worldwide in scale. The convulsions that rocked money markets as distant as New York and Alexandria were brought about by economic processes that were not just structurally similar but closely interlinked. Tracking coverage of the crisis in its early months through the pages of Egypt’s leading Arabic dailies—al-Liwa’, al-Jaridah, al-Ahram, al-Mu’ayyad, al-Muqattam, and al-Zahir—the paper’s second part identifies a series of gradual but significant shifts in nationalist conceptions of the independence they demanded from British rule. On the one hand, the manifest hardship that the crisis unleashed gave the lie to the occupation’s economistic discourse of material improvement and public benefit. As a potent new keyword for the nationalist movement, “crisis” now provided a comparative diagnostic for the peculiar character of Egypt’s pseudo-colonial state, a state that had demurred in the face of widespread social upheaval and left the public unnecessarily vulnerable to the fluctuations of modern finance. On the other hand, the crisis revealed the extent to which even the lowliest of Egyptian farmers had come to depend on flows of foreign capital, as much as water, to sustain their very existence. As the repercussions of the crisis continued to spread, it became ever more difficult to identify the particular agents responsible for such diffuse misfortunes. While furnishing a new normative basis upon which to claim independence, the crisis laid bare the deepening entanglements between forms of political and economic domination in a capitalist world and thus reframed the question of what it might mean to live differently after British rule.