Based on recent archival work and the reading of laws and regulations, this presentation describes the regulatory framework of landownership in khedivial Egypt. I argue that the khedives created a new political economy in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet the legal making of their domestic sovereignty was a slow process between 1800s-1880s, which used and transformed the earlier regulatory system that the Ottoman administration developed for the province of Egypt. The presentation focuses on the curious career of the taqsit (pl. taqasit), which ultimately served as an elite land title deed by the mid-century.