In May 1910, the brilliant and peripatetic journalist, educator and political strategist ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish published a column about “Workers’ Rights and May Day Demonstrations” on the cover of al-‘Alam, the nationalist organ for which he served as editor. Jawish had devoted the better part of the previous two years to a multifaceted project of expanding the Egyptian National Party’s popular constituencies. But when he described organized labor as “the most important ideological, political, and economic movement the world has seen since the beginning of human history,” he was not only signaling the National Party’s continued support for Egypt’s fledgling unions and syndicates. Rather, as Jawish went on to explain, he sought to emphasize, “our obligation as a nation oppressed and mistreated in our own country to sympathize with the oppressed and mistreated across the globe in their pain and suffering and to struggle to lighten the burdens of humanity . . . for the weak, if they unite, may overpower the strong.” Jawish’s creative transposition—from the localized struggles of working groups to a generalized array of “peaceful wars” between the weak and the strong—was just one instance of a vernacular politics of comparison that saturated anti-colonial thought and practice in the eventful first decade of the twentieth century. Jawish and his contemporaries recognized that the logics of foreign rule were premised upon a particular framework of racialized comparisons that arbitrarily likened colonized peoples to each other and exaggerated their differences from Europe. Far from accepting such colonial representations in a “derivative discourse,” a diverse array of authors and activists argued back by invoking an alternative comparative geography of emerging solidarities both within and beyond the colonial world. Drawing on articles from the Egyptian press as well as political intelligence reports from the Egyptian Ministry of Interior, this paper focuses in particular on the multiple, overlapping valences of the category “union” in a moment of global upheaval. When Egyptians invoked union, they sought to establish that their own experiences of privation and disenfranchisement were meaningfully commensurable with those of constitutionalists in Istanbul and Tehran, anti-colonial nationalists in India and Ireland, and striking workers everywhere. Rejecting a mode of historicism that understood colonial development as a deferred repetition of Europe’s past, the proponents of union laid claim to a different notion of historical temporality, one grounded in the lived possibilities of contemporaneous transformations across putatively incommensurable domains.