For long, studies on social or collective memory in the Middle East have tended to focus on national memory. With regards to the Ottoman period in particular, the overall consensus was that post-Ottoman state ruling elites either intentionally forgot, or actively rejected, the Ottoman legacy on their societies. However, an increasing number of studies have emphasized the multifaceted and malleable nature of memory production on the Ottomans. With the imperial collapse, many were deprived of their businesses, professional networks, or sources of income. As a result, a multiplicity of counterhegemonic memory cultures about the Empire centered around the idea of crisis, has developed parallel to official representations. Since the mid-19th century, Iraqi provinces were particularly affected by the complex processes of re-Ottomanisation of the structures of power. In the print industry and education sectors in particular, the Tanzimat and the 1908 Young Turk revolution created new opportunities in a flourishing print market and administration, thus affecting the many professionals active in these sectors. In this contribution, I am interested in the historical profession as it developed in Iraq in the first decades after the end of the Ottoman Empire, with a focus on the historians’ representations of the Empire. I examine the writings and career paths taken by professional historians trained in Iraq or abroad, and active in Iraq after graduation: ‘Abbas al-‘Azzawi and ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani, who graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Baghdad in the 1920s, as well as ‘Abd al-Wahhab ‘Abbas al-Qaysi and Yasin ‘Abd al-Karim ‘Abbas, who obtained their Ph.D. at the Universities of Minnesota and Michigan in the 1950s. Using historical writings they produced about the empire, institutional archives (The American University of Beirut and Rockefeller Foundation archives) and interviews, I discuss the links between the Ottoman legacy in modern education and press, and their various modes of representation of the Ottoman past in general. By looking at these historians as memory makers who, like any other social group, inherit, participate in, shape and transform collective memories about the past of their own milieu, I contend that historians in Iraq have consolidated their own genres and modes of historical memory about the Ottomans, often in stark contrast to the official or national memory.