The years after World War One were marked by a crisis in the organization of global capitalism. The breakdown of the international economic order raised questions in different corners of the world about the relationship between capitalism and empire, with several observers—from Lenin, to Wilson, to Schumpeter—contemplating what it would mean for empire to cease being the main political framework for the management of the global economy. At the same time, with anti-colonial rebellions sweeping across key sites of the British Empire, the fate of the colonial world was on the agenda. Nationalist planners, entrepreneurs, and experts began to consider alternative ways of managing economies that were slowly being disarticulated from the world of British political hegemony—in short, how to organize capitalism after empire. This paper explores the history of economic thought in Egypt in the years immediately before and after the 1919 revolution. It examines various strands of economic nationalism— articulated by thinkers like Isma’il Sidki, Tal’at Harb, and Ibrahim Rashad—that aimed to promote a variety of projects from peasant uplift and reform, to agricultural cooperation, to nationally-scaled forms of economic regulation, to ideas about balanced agricultural and industrial development. In following these intellectual currents that developed as the country was gradually securing its nominal independence from the British Empire, this paper pursues two lines of inquiry. First, it seeks to situate these Egyptian thinkers in a wider global intellectual landscape that took shape in the aftermath of World War One, and in which thinkers began to consider how the political management of capitalist economies might look in a post-imperial world. Second, it investigates the changing relationship between the “political” and the “economic” in nationalist discourse as a growing cohort of economic nationalists began to envision and develop institutions to refashion economic life, which they saw as inseparable from any political project of genuine national independence.