In the 1940s, Karl Polanyi tried to make sense of the recent rise of fascism, communism, and welfare-state capitalism, arguing that they were different forms of a common “double movement”: efforts to protect society from the utopian project to create a self-regulating market. Central to this utopian project, he argued, was the organization of markets around three “fictitious commodities”—labor, land, and money—distinct from other commodities like cars or t-shirts. This paper explores the double movement in the colonial world that followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the commodification of land, a fictitious commodity because nature produces it. Part of a dissertation on the history of U.S. food aid to Egypt and India, it draws on extensive research at the National Archives in Egypt, India, and England, and the British Library. It also examines social scientific writings, papers of social scientists, and official government publications and statistics. The food crisis in Egypt extends far earlier than the 1970s, when food imports from the US skyrocketed. In the late nineteenth century, the growth of perennial irrigation and rural money-lending systems encouraged small landholders to produce cotton for the export market at the expense of grain production and at the cost of soil depletion. During the global Depression of the 1920 and 1930s, Egyptian and British government officials attempted to respond to some of the problems of this system: the debt of small cultivators, low crop prices, and insufficient food yields as a result of high cotton acreage. Their efforts included the establishment of an Agricultural Reserve and the Credit Agricole Bank, which offered cash advances as well as choice seeds and chemical fertilizers—required now as a result of soil depletion—in exchange for crops held as securities. This period also saw the rise of agricultural censuses, efforts to measure and manage national food production, and new social scientific interpretations of population growth. The paper describes parallel and inter-linked developments in the U.S. and India, in response to the economic crises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The double movement in this period—however insufficient in tackling the problems of the rural economy—allowed for the centralization of grain surpluses and the rise of new ideas and discursive practices. These developments would later enable and encourage a new mode of managing national and international food supply in which state officials played an unprecedented role.