In 1902, Lord Cromer completed a series of successful experiments aimed at extending rural credit to poorer peasant landholders and then established (with the help of Sir Ernest Cassel) the quasi-official Agricultural Bank of Egypt. Cromer took great pride in this institution, and its promotion elsewhere (such as in the Philippines), but the bank’s rural operations were effectively shut down in 1912 by Sir Herbert Kitchener when he passed the so-called five feddan law. Described by one prominent historian as “the most radical intervention”* ever undertaken during the period of British rule, this law prohibited creditors from dispossessing small landholders of their last five feddans, their house, or necessary animals and agricultural implements. Within a brief ten year span, colonial discourses on peasant foreclosure had changed dramatically: whereas Cromer drew primarily on European economic theories to extol the greatness of credit (and of bankruptcy too), Kitchener emphasized its perils through reference to his India experience as well as to concurrent homestead policies in America and England. The financial crisis of 1907 clearly had a huge impact on official perspectives. Yet neither Cromer nor Kitchener -- despite their professed commitment to the welfare of the ‘fellah’ and for all their reference to theoretical and global perspectives -- ever seem to have known very much about the dynamic and complex relations, social and economic, between cotton and credit in the Egyptian countryside. By examining the official accounts of rural indebtedness, the published reports of some banks, and the secondary literature on comparative credit institutions in India, America and England, this paper seeks to better understand the contradictory colonial perspectives on the provision of agricultural credit in Egyptian villages. The focus will be on the multiple contexts in which first Cromer and then Kitchener received and interpreted what little information about Egyptian agriculture was presented to them at the time. * Gabriel Baer, History of Land Ownership in Modern Egypt, 1800-1950 (Oxford, 1962), 89.