On January 21, 1954, Iraqi engineers began the demolition of public brothel houses located in the Maydan area of Baghdad, forcibly relocating those in the city’s sex trade to the surrounding streets and neighborhoods. The Hashemite monarchy had long been concerned about the unregulated movement of Baghdad’s sex workers, yet the targeted depopulation of this space led these evacuees to adopt new forms of mobility for survival. This demolition project and the consequential changes in urban mobility present notable case studies for a better understanding of the relationship between local and transnational networks, modernization efforts, gender, and sexuality in the history of mid-twentieth-century Iraq. This paper considers the intersection of these themes by mapping the social history of prostitution in Baghdad between 1950 and 1958. It first addresses how the Iraqi state and the public associated sex workers with perceived threatening, vulnerable, and redeemable characteristics. Not only were these perceptions informed by concerns on the national level, but they were also situated in contemporaneous debates about abolishing prostitution on the international level. According to these attitudes, the government translated anxieties about the spread of prostitution into various preventive measures issued in the capital city, such as the demolition of public brothels. These projects were inextricably connected with the Iraqi state’s discourse on modernity as modernization efforts in mid-twentieth-century Baghdad were often intentionally employed to exclude segments of the population from the urban landscape. As this paper will argue, many of those involved in Baghdad’s sex trade, specifically female sex workers, actively responded to these threats against their survival by adapting to new networks of mobility. In the scholarship on Iraq’s social history, the subject of prostitution in 1950s Baghdad has been largely neglected. Some scholars have drawn noteworthy conclusions about Baghdad’s nightlife in general, and prostitution in particular, by considering literary accounts and the work of female performers in the 1950s. Building upon this literature, this project conducts a social history of prostitution in mid-twentieth-century Baghdad through discourse and digital geospatial analyses of local newspapers, government census data, memoirs, international convention materials, and maps. By incorporating these sources, this paper seeks to shed further light on the social history of Iraq and present an introductory approach to mapping modernization efforts and mobile networks of prostitution in 1950s Baghdad.