Egypt’s nineteenth century petty traders and moneylenders, embedded in rural circuits of commerce and debt, were the worker bees of capitalism’s imperial expansion. They represented one terminus of the long, largely invisible chain of capital stretching from Egypt’s provinces to the metropoles of Europe and America. During the second half of the nineteenth century, they bolstered their economic position by adopting a new idiom: international law. Unlike capital, the chain of law that they used to connect themselves to the metropole was visible. In fact, visibility was its principal virtue, because it generated socio-legal power for the lenders and traders. The legal records of two lenders—the Maltese Filippo Calleja and the Jewish British subject Marco Levi Carusso—are at the core of the paper. They were emblematic of the new cast of characters which replaced the stereotypical village moneylender in the closing years of the nineteenth century. These new actors were deeply embedded in big city and international capital networks, now involving insurance and speculative real estate development. Critically, these actors deployed their reputation as subjects with access to international law in order to manage their local relationships. The extraterritorial privileges embodied in the Ottoman capitulations had been exposed and curtailed during the nineteenth century panic over foreign “parasites,” but their legal basis had not been overturned. In fact, a new suite of legal institutions (with the 1876 Mixed Tribunals at its head) governed commercial practices that had become formalized, legalized, normalized, and internationalized at all levels of the Egyptian economy. This paper is component in a larger project that seeks to globalize the history of international law by describing a specifically Egyptian genealogy for its subaltern practice. It argues that the nature of law is best understood through widespread practice, rather than origins.