The coal heavers of Port Sa'id hold a distinctive place in Middle Eastern labor historiography as the first indigenous group of Egyptian workers to go on strike for higher wages (in 1882 and later). Existing accounts understand these protests in a somewhat objectivist and materialist way as the more or less inevitable outcome of the penetration of an otherwise rather passive Middle East by capitalist relations of production. This article revisits the protests of the coal heavers of Port Sa'id in the light of a rare glimpse of two documents authored by the coal heavers themselves. These documents show that coal heavers' protests were arguably linked to state-making, and were not simply the automatic product of capitalist development. The arrival of “guild” elections, intervention on taxation, regulative change, and reforming discourse operated in part to constitute worker grievance in Port Sa'id by providing a language in which to appeal, a “progressive” code against which to measure unjust contractors and employers, and a newly interventionist referee before which to make claims. Grievance formation was defined and constituted not just within economically defined “relations of production,” but also within a broader context of state-making and reform in late nineteenth-century Egypt.