This paper examines the campaign to build thousands of kilometers of unpaved “agricultural roads” across the Egyptian countryside as a case study in the changing nature of the Egyptian state under British occupation. Drawing on materials from the Egyptian Council of Ministers and the Public Works Department housed in Dar al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya, I argue that new state projects of this kind represented instances of a contradictory process of “state rescaling”. On the one hand these projects, evaluated through the use of new and more abstract measures of public utility and general interest, employed new technologies and institutions to augment and accelerate flows of water, goods, law, credit, and knowledge more evenly throughout the Egyptian countryside. On the other, such efforts to project state power on a national scale depended crucially on the reconstitution of the village and of village authorities—‘umdas, shaykhs, tax collectors, and ghaffirs—as local agents of the central state. I will begin by charting the emergence of “public utility” (al-manafi‘ al-‘umumiyya) as a central organizing concept of the Egyptian state in the years following 1882. After commenting briefly on the wider imperial circulation of this term, I will turn to the deployment of the category of “public utility” in debates about state acquisition of land for the construction of roads and other public works. While the term quickly assumed the status of a mere formula in such land confiscation procedures, I suggest that the very extent of such everyday usage rendered the category available for alternative interpretations. From the minutes of ministerial meetings to petitions from individual villagers, the new roads sparked heated debates over how and for whom such “utility” should be construed. Finally, I will examine the varied forms of law and justice invoked at different levels of the state in the planning, building, and maintenance of the new roads. In particular, I seek to highlight a contrast between the protracted and cumbersome adherence to formal protocols in negotiations between the Council of Ministers and the various local and provincial assemblies and the concern with efficiency that motivated new institutions of “administrative justice” in the person of the village shaykh.