This article examines how the Muḥammad ʿAlī Dynasty (1805–1952) used visual culture to articulate, promote, and legitimize its vision of modernization in Egypt. Through an analysis of artworks, engravings, and photographs, it explores how infrastructural projects, including the revival of Alexandria’s port, the Maḥmūdiyya Canal, the Cairo–Suez Railway, and the Suez Canal, were framed as both engineering achievements and symbolic statements of power. These visual and material interventions positioned Egypt as a vital hub in Mediterranean and global trade networks, while simultaneously inscribing the dynasty’s political biography into the national landscape. The study reveals how history, imagery, and urban planning operated as interconnected registers of soft power, projecting urban modernity to foreign audiences, and anchoring dynastic legitimacy in historical and mythical lineages from ancient grandeur to Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. Spanning from Muḥammad ʿAlī’s reign to Nasser’s nationalist re-appropriations, the article engages with the tension between visionary planning and authoritarian implementation, and between the aestheticized idea of mobility and its contested social realities. In doing so, it situates Egypt’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century infrastructural transformations within the broader visual politics of Mediterranean modernity.