Iraq’s entry into the world economy as an oil producer was the culmination of a series of long and protracted struggles for the control of oil supplies between oil companies, European powers, and Ottoman and later Iraqi governments. While the history of this diplomatic wrangling and commercial negotiations has been well documented, the contentions that arose over the development of an effective infrastructure to transport and distribute Iraqi oil to European markets have often been overlooked. However, the control of oilfields in Iraq was intimately bound up with the question of the construction of a pipeline to transport Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean coast. This paper examines the negotiations over the route of the Iraq-Mediterranean pipeline carried out between the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), and the British, French and Iraqi governments between 1928 and 1931. Completed in 1935, the Iraq-Mediterranean pipeline consisted of two lines running from the oilfields in Kirkuk that split at Haditha, with one line taking a northern route through Syria to Tripoli, Lebanon and the other passing through Jordan and terminating in Haifa, Palestine. The decision to adopt a bifurcated route was not based on financial or engineering considerations alone, but rather was a result of attempts to reconcile French and British imperial ambitions, commercial and political disputes within the IPC, and Iraq’s status under Mandate rule. Using British archival sources, this paper focuses on British policymaking in relation to the pipeline’s route. It considers the ways in which British officials sought to navigate a triangular set of commitments to the IPC and the French and Iraqi governments, while also upholding its imperial and strategic goals. This paper argues that British officials continued to address issues of oil and infrastructural development in terms of the establishment of political and economic ‘spheres of influence’ and Anglo-French imperial rivalry. In doing so, this paper points to considerable continuities in British imperial policy in the region, despite the changed post-war international context.