During the nineteenth century, Abdulhamid II targeted the Iraqi provinces for extensive agrarian development projects -- a development informed by an environmental imaginary of undoing the region's supposed ecological decline over several centuries and promoting agrarian development. The Privy Purse Ministry oversaw many of these projects, since much of the land in the Iraqi provinces belonged to Abdulhamid II’s landed estate. The sultan put these lands under the care of the Privy Purse Ministry to prevent them from being taken over by foreign governments, particularly Britain. It is thus a curious fact that the Ottoman government began relying heavily on French hydraulic engineers to carry out these projects. Even more curious is the fact that it did so at a time when the Ottoman government began relying on its own technocrats for several modernization projects across the empire. This paper, thus, examines the hitherto unexplored role of French influence in Iraq during the late nineteenth century and examines what this development reveals about the late Hamidian period, French informal empire, Ottoman environmental imaginaries of Iraq, and the geopolitical factors shaping Hamidian policy in the Iraq region.