Iraq in the aftermath of Britain’s invasion during World War I was the site of a transformative shift in the meaning of colonial development. As Priya Satia has argued, British cultural ideas during the Great War presented Iraq “as a fallen cradle of civilization where development would hail a new age of miracles.” (Satia, 2013). Expanding on recent scholarship, this paper argues that Iraq during the Mandatory period continued to be framed as an object of colonial development. Unlike war-time rhetoric—which emphasized the military transportation infrastructure’s potential to usher in this change—British, and increasingly Iraqi, observers now also pointed to the tourism industry as a possible tool for developing the country. To achieve development through tourism, as this paper shows, British and Iraqi advocates pointed to Iraq’s past as the key to its future. Using British government archives, corporate records, and travel accounts alongside Iraqi press sources, memoirs, and government printed site-specific promotional literature, this paper reveals how proponents of tourism understood Iraq’s heritage as a resource for actualizing its tourism potential. As a rhetorical device, they pointed to its long history as a crossroads for overland trade as evidence of Iraq’s potential to become a lynchpin of global mobility once more. More tangibly, they believed that the material remains of past civilizations—including monumental ruins, active excavation sites, and antiquities housed in Baghdad’s museum—could serve as powerful incentives for leisure travelers. Though this paper traces similarities in British and Iraqi perspectives on tourism, it also reveals key differences in how they understood its role in securing the country’s future. British defenders of the Mandate of Iraq believed in tourism promotion as one way for the Empire to nominally fulfill its commitments made to the League of Nations while also providing a moral justification to colonial rule, regardless of tourism’s actual success in the country. Over time, Iraqi politicians, scholars, and journalists embraced tourism as a genuine pathway to development, strengthening the economy and instilling national pride.