In 1912, a Greek cotton-dealer named Xenos Xenophon submitted a proposal to Viscount Kitchener, the Consul-General in Egypt, for the establishment of a ‘Commission of Verification.’ While previous government policies promoting capital-intensive agricultural development had led to an “agricultural crisis”, current policy, Xenophon argued, had done little to alleviate the impending “social crisis” caused by the resulting high levels of rural indebtedness and landlessness. Comprised of individuals intimately familiar with commercial practices in the countryside and housed under the Ministry of Interior, the commission would be tasked with the surveillance of cotton merchants, their rural agents and large landowners through the periodic audit of their account books and investigation into matters of expropriation. The work of the commission would, in turn, constitute a “bureau of information on the moral and financial situation of each, individual, indigenous and foreign” upon which could be constructed a “perfect order” balancing the spirit of enterprise with the demands of equity and justice between creditors and debtors. While the commission was never established, Xenophon’s proposal highlights how colonial governance became colonized by emergent forms of social scientific knowledge. The present paper traces the colonial genealogy of economy and security through the projects of colonial officials to surveil and regulate the relationship between small agriculturalists and village money lenders in the Egyptian countryside between 1898 and 1912. It examines how the problematic of agricultural debt instituted new regimes of knowledge production and how the site of this problematic within colonial governance shifted. While traditionally a concern of the Ministry of Finance in conjunction with the National Bank of Egypt, by 1912, the problematic of agricultural debt had devolved to the personnel of the Ministry of Interior now tasked with policing the boundary between new norms of market practice and usury: assuring the accuracy of scales, overseeing the operation of village cotton markets and facilitating the dissemination of cotton and cotton futures prices to rural agriculturalists. However, rather than the product of conflict between British and Egyptian officials, this paper argues that the devolution of economic surveillance and regulation to the Ministry of Interior was part of a more fundamental transformation in the nature of economic knowledge and its relation to collective life. This critical point is made by reassembling the professional and intellectual linkages between colonial administration and the Khedivial Society of Political Economy, Statistics and Legislation established in 1910.