In Beirut, Cairo and Istanbul just as in Paris and Berlin, the economic and social transformations of the long nineteenth century had been accompanied by a different, but not-unconnected, upheaval in conceptions of language. Arabic, indeed, was in crisis: urgent linguistic reforms had been instigated to render a language now considered “ornate” and “archaic”, “simpler” and “modern” – closer to the style of the French and English texts flooding the global literary market. However, an examination of how language and translation were theorized in debates held in Arabic in the early twentieth century finds nothing so simple as adapted European “thought” or style. In these debates, the notion of meaning in language is discussed in Arabic in terms of financial value and efficiency; translation is conceived as an exchange predicated on equivalence between languages and governed by abstract economic "law." Arabic theories of language and translation in the early twentieth century articulate the material and economic concerns of a British-ruled Egypt being gradually incorporated into a global capitalist economy. Arabic literary scholars have argued that colonial cultural violence structured the subsequent course of Arab literary production and its place within world and comparative literary studies; I ask how that place might be reconceived if early twentieth-century theories of literature and language – in particular, notions of equivalency and exchange between languages – are seen to be embedded not simply in colonial ideological paradigms, but in (imperial) capitalist logics of market efficiency and infinite exchangeability, and deep anxieties about surplus and debt. The vision of translation that appears in the texts I read here responds less to Orientalist scholarship than it does to the uneven process by which Egypt, at the hands of British rulers and European creditors, was incorporated into global markets as a primary commercial producer of cotton.