Over the past three decades or so, historical treatments of Egypt’s 1919 Revolt have overwhelmingly taken up subalternist critiques of nationalism as a shared point of departure. From this perspective, urban and rural actors did not take part in the singular “national uprising.” Rather, the outbreak of protests in Cairo released a cascade of more localized struggles expressing the particular grievances and frustrations of distinct social groups. In the case of Egypt’s peasants, the particular targets of rural violence evince not an attachment to the abstract ideal of national independence but rather a sense of outrage about forms of privation experienced under the British regime of wartime labor conscription and requisition. The present paper explores a problem that such revisionist accounts of 1919 have largely ignored. In brief, the origins of an account that distances peasant insurgency from the politics of nationalism and attributes it instead to the mismanagement of wartime supply lie not in the theoretical innovations of subalternist historiography but in the colonial archive itself. To date, most existing Anglophone histories of the Revolt rely, albeit in varying degrees, on the voluminous reportage of the Milner Mission dispatched by the British government to investigate the causes of the uprising. Reading the Milner Mission’s findings in relation to a longer history of colonial discourse about the Egyptian countryside, the paper argues that the Milner Mission’s primary task was precisely to construct a narrative that would explain the magnitude of rural insurgency in 1919 while at the same time affirming the impossibility of genuine peasant politics. From the earliest moments of the British occupation in 1882, colonial rule had been premised on a fundamentally economistic understanding of Egyptian society that judged the country’s peasant majority as capable of no more and no less than a bare recognition of their own material interests. According to this logic, political discontent would vary in inverse proportion to the country’s economic prosperity, and peasants were unable to grasp political concepts that did not pertain directly to their immediate economic experience. From this vantage, the Mission’s emphasis on the bungling of wartime supply attributed the explosion of peasant animus to a set of exceptional circumstances. It thereby helped to ensure that the political order that followed Britain’s unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922 would reproduce the structural denial of rural politics that had been a defining feature of colonial rule for four decades.