In early February 1904, the Egyptian local committee for the Gresham Life Insurance Company held their first meeting to hash out the details of a new business venture in the country. Acting on directives from the London Board of the company, they began to specify the terms on which a million British pounds of Gresham’s substantial float would be invested in Egypt’s booming mortgage market. In the years that followed, the members of the local committee sought to attract suitable borrowers from among the country’s powerful class of large landlords. Anxiously aware that the waves of mortgage credit then flooding the country threatened to drive interest rates downward, they raced to place the Board’s investments ahead of their numerous competitors. And yet just three years later, the mortgage market screeched to a halt in what Egypt’s new cadre of political economists described as the country’s first true economic crisis. Alarmed by the number of loans that suddenly started to go bad, the London Board demanded an explanation for how their agents in Egypt had acted so irresponsibly. Drawing heavily on a remarkable collection of archival sources detailing the Egyptian local committee’s activities, my paper will use this tale of boom and bust to explore the changing relationship between state, finance, and land during the British occupation of Egypt. I will begin by arguing that the conditions of possibility for Egypt’s wildly speculative land market lay, paradoxically, in an array of novel colonial policies that aimed to create a class of conservative peasant landowners firmly rooted to their own land. More specifically, the series of tax reforms and land surveys enacted in the mid-1890s generated masses of standardized data that, for the first time, provided the practical and technical means for treating rural land as an abstract commodity. The second half of the paper will attempt to offer the outlines of an “eco-social” history of this speculative boom and subsequent crisis. In particular, I will suggest that the expectations motivating the onslaught of finance capital at the close of the nineteenth century entailed an uneasy oscillation between the growth of monetary value and the growth of plants on the land. The sudden and rapid decline in both forms of growth during the first decade of the twentieth century helped to bring about a widespread shift towards more politically charged understandings of crisis in Egypt.