In the spring of 1896, the British Consul-General and de facto colonial overlord of Egypt, Lord Cromer, submitted his annual report to Parliament on the "Progress of Reforms" in the preceding year. Among the proudest accomplishments he sought to advertise was a wholesale reorganization of the Ministry of the Interior under the supervision of a newly-attached British adviser. A streamlined administrative hierarchy extending from the Minister in Cairo down to the 'umdas and shaykhs of individual villages would thereafter ensure swift and consistent enforcement of the law and implementation of government policies across the Egyptian countryside. In claiming success for these changes, Cromer boasted that "village life is no longer to so great an extent troubled by political dissensions, the result, generally, of some Cairo complication which has been misunderstood and misinterpreted." Histories of the British occupation under Cromer have long focused on the Ministry of Public Works as the central institution of British rule in Egypt. According to such accounts, colonial officials, concerned primarily with revenue extraction for the repayment of Egypt’s public debt, selectively appropriated aspects of the Egyptian state as instruments of foreign capital interests. The present paper argues that while an ambitious program of agrarian reform was indeed central to the operations of colonial rule, that program depended upon and, in turn, reinforced a much more extensive reworking of the institutional organization, everyday practices, and ideological representations of the Egyptian state. And the British takeover of the Ministry of the Interior in 1894 played a central, if previously underappreciated, role in those transformations. Drawing on a range of new archival sources including peasant petitions and the reports of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II’s rural informants, the paper explores how British-led reforms to the Interior’s administrative apparatus aimed to reinvent the figure of the village headman as a faithful and reliable agent of agrarian development. Contrary to Cromer’s official pronouncements, the village shaykh’s new paper existence, freighted with an expanding array of bureaucratic responsibilities, failed to replace older modes of local authority. These changes did, however, help to redefine these figures as mere representatives of the central government in the village rather than leaders of discrete local communities. The ensuing reconceptualization of all sub-national institutions of rule as “administration” would serve to organize the political geography of anti-colonial struggle in Egypt for decades to come.