My paper seeks to understand how changes in the material living conditions of Baghdad’s citizens from the 1930’s to the 1950’s shaped the content of their political organizing against the monarchical government. Why is it that citizens focused their energies on the rising costs of food and electricity in the early 1930s, but on unjust treaties with Great Britain after the war and into the 1950’s? High grain exports, postwar inflationary pricing, and devastating floods would seem to suggest that citizens living under precarious circumstances continue boycotts and work stoppages aimed at achieving greater food and work security. Instead, during the demonstrations of 1948, 1952, and 1958, they resorted to mass gatherings in front of the nodes of government power, open-air speeches, and sometimes violent confrontations with the police. What transpired to make these Baghdadis take aim at the government itself? Using archival materials and the Arabic-language press, I argue that changes in urban infrastructure reconfigured laborers’ and professionals’ expectations for what protest could achieve. The state of transportation networks around Baghdad at the start of the monarchy encouraged acts of civil disobedience that targeted small, but portentous government incursions against the status quo. By the postwar period, the selective development of urban infrastructure had enabled the different types of protest that would eventually succeed in overthrowing the monarchy. Government officials and the purveyors of capital, however, continued to address the issue of shortages of food, work, and household amenities according to the old city paradigm, i.e. with targeted interventions in the ownership of utilities and relief efforts for flood victims. Thus it was not only the case that conditions were ripe for calling for an end to monarchy and British meddling, but also that the Iraqi government's own attempts at targeted interventions made more modest forms of protest suspect in the eyes of the city’s most beleaguered citizens and their allies.