The second agricultural revolution, the global transformation of agriculture during the nineteenth century through the application of knowledge and skills associated with disciplines such as chemistry and botany, entrenched science as the primary way to know the soil, understand the lives of plants, and organize production in the field. While Egyptian agriculture was, and is, a focus of intensive scientific investigation since the mid-nineteenth century, we still know relatively little about the history of agricultural science in modern Egypt. My paper confronts this problem by examining the comparatively unknown work of Ahmed Nada (d. 1877), an Egyptian translator, educator, and author who contemporaries like poet Ahmed Shawqi and agricultural reformer Muhammad Safwat remembered as one of Egypt’s foremost science popularizers. I show how Nada’s attempt to synthesize European agricultural science and older Arab agronomic traditions in Husn al-sina`a fi `ilm al-zira`a (Good Industry in Agricultural Science, 1874) not only represented a contribution to the global popularization of agricultural science during the nineteenth century, but also participated in the colonization of Egyptian agriculture by naturalizing the social and environmental orders of capitalist agriculture emerging in the post-cotton boom era. In his work, large landownership became a way to scientifically organize the processes of production, rather than a product of Khedivial power. Soil exhaustion, a problem dealt with by the medieval Andalusian agronomists and recently rediscovered by Europeans, became the result of lost practices instead of a consequence of Egypt’s transformation into a vast cotton plantation. Nada also used agricultural science to define new agrarian ideals, urging cultivators to abandon tradition and become more like scientists and businessmen to take advantage of European demand for agricultural commodities. Nada’s scientific reinterpretation of Egyptian agriculture’s capitalist transformation underscores how many non-Western efforts to popularize science participated in an ancillary colonizing process. In effect, much of the world was colonized by attempts to indigenize Western knowledge well before the arrival of European armies in the era of New Imperialism. These ancillary processes laid the foundation for the technocratic regimes which, under the sign of science, have dominated the development of Arab societies into the modern era.