This paper examines the interplay between a legal and economic culture of household waqf and early centralizing efforts under Mehmed ‘Ali Pasha (r. 1804-48) in the Egyptian Delta at the turn of the nineteenth century. Land and urban property held by elite provincial families as waqf presented an immediate obstacle to Mehmed Ali’s efforts to increase revenues from taxation and trade of agricultural products. When the pasha imposed state monopolies on cash crop production in the northern Delta beginning in 1812, he brought the state into direct confrontation with the longstanding interests of household waqfs invested in irrigated land, wells, and waterwheels as well as urban mills, storerooms, and livestock facilities. Drawing from the Shari’a court records of the major urban centers of the northern Delta, Rosetta and Damietta, this paper explores the fate of agricultural waqf property during the economic and administrative restructuring of Mehmed ‘Ali Pasha’s early decades. Following the fortunes of waqf properties and property-holding households from the late-eighteenth century, I will highlight points of continuity and divergence in legal practice and economic activity during a transitional period most often discussed as a moment of rupture in Egypt’s Ottoman history. The pasha brought much of Egypt’s agricultural land under the control of the central state when he abolished the administrative category of landed tax farms in 1813. But waqf was not an administrative category, and the land and industrial property held as waqf fell under the jurisdiction of Shari’a law. Thus, the negotiations by which this property came into the possession of the central state in Cairo or, alternatively, remained in the hands of prominent families, transpired in the local courthouse. These negotiations, involving the ulema, rural shaykhs, and agricultural merchants, used the same legal mechanisms that local populations had been using to transact household waqf property as a form of quasi-private property for generations. This paper contends that local understandings of waqf property in the Egyptian Delta were crucial to shaping the implementation of Mehmed Ali’s agricultural monopolies on the ground. At the same time, considering the confrontation over household waqfs in the Delta allows us to situate Egypt squarely within larger processes of state centralization and capitalist reorientation that characterize the Ottoman nineteenth century.