This paper will provide the political-economic setting to Baghdad of the 1950s, allowing a more contextual and layered account of the aesthetic, cultural and ideological aspects of the place and time. It begins with a survey of Iraq’s nascent political institutions, installed by the British after the First World War. Next, economic structures and conditions are assessed. These reveal that substantial change occurred in Iraq’s political economy in the two decades preceding the 1950s, including the increasing importance of oil income (along with correspondingly lighter taxation of agriculture) and the growth of a substantial middle class. It is also shown that (even by the late 1950s) Iraq’s economy was a highly unbalanced one: the modern and highly developed oil sector (employing few workers) existed alongside an under-developed agricultural sector (which employed most of the population). Consequently, large numbers of people (especially in rural areas) lived in grinding poverty; their continued migration to the cities would carry crucial implications for urban politics in the decade and beyond. The discussion raises a number of pertinent questions. These include, on a macro-level, why, despite objectively favorable resource endowments, the monarchy that ruled Iraq was unable to adequately consolidate power: even relatively weak actors (e.g. in the army) were able to capture the state (before the 1950s and since). On a micro-level, the paper raises questions over the investment allocations of the ‘development board’: namely could oil revenues have been used better to strengthen public institutions and build human capabilities—or did the monarchy’s reliance on powerful landowners preclude this?