In the 1870s, Egypt’s most influential engineer, Ali Basha Mubarak, offered a pioneering critique of what we would call today the cash crop economy. He examined how the expansion of cotton in the Delta and sugar cane in upper Egypt disrupted older economies of flax production and ecologies of pastoralism. Overseeing the expansion of perirenal irrigation as the minister of public works, Mubarak was himself instrumental to the expansion of cotton and sugar cane. His critique is thus all the more remarkable and reveals a tension endemic to the engineering profession that scholars have noted across temporal and geographic divides, from the interwar United States to Soviet Russia. Industrial profit or state revenues on the one hand and efficiency and accurate assessment of costs on the other constitute the conflicting prerogatives of engineering. In their attempts to reconcile these competing objectives, engineers of Mubarak’s generation and their successors critiqued the interrelationships between scientific knowledge, natural processes, and political formations. By the revolution of 1919, engineers articulated an understanding of the links between political formations and environmental interventions, locating the origins of the Egyptian state in the perennial struggle with the Nile. These critical interventions were an important and overlooked moment in Egyptian intellectual and political history as well as transnational debates and knowledge production on development. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Egyptian engineers sought to transform their strictly technical profession into an explicitly political discipline. Rather than simply the builders of the material undergirding of state and society, the engineering profession actively participated in imagining Egypt’s future and sought to direct the course of a country at the crossroads between empire and nation. In the process of their political participation individuals like Mubarak, Ibrahim Zaki al-Muhandis, and Hafiz Ramadan developed an understanding of science that was imbedded in politics, human relations, and ecological processes. By analyzing a number of government reports, manuals, and biographies from 1870 to 1920, this paper reveals the overlooked intellectual and political work of Egyptian engineers, who linked nature and culture and transgressed the enlightenment’s strict divide between objective science and politics.