This paper will detail the legal and labour history of the oil fields in the provincial city of Kirkuk in Hashemite Iraq. It begins by describing how International and transnational law shaped the imperial spaces and semi-colonial enclaves of the oil frontier in Iraq, revealing its detrimental effects on the working classes. It then shows how the oil workers of the British-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company in Kirkuk and its surrounding areas, organized against the constraints of the legal structures of imperialism, which were embedded in the international legal instrument of the 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty and the transnational law of oil concessions. The paper details how the Gawurbaghi strike of 1946 was violently suppressed by the local police in complicity with the company and the British Embassy. The anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle of the oil workers and their union at specific points in space and time eventually forced the company to reassess their labour arrangements. However, as the company and British records show, although the company’s ultimate response shifted its approach to one of social development, it attempted to impose a specific ideology and alternative institution of trade unionism to co-op the labour movement. This paper relies on records from Kew, IPC at the BP Archive, and communist pamphlets. It demonstrates how law and its structures played a significant role in the social production of the spaces of the Iraqi oil frontier on the one hand; while on the other, shows how the oil workers used this unique spatiality in their strategy and tactics to assert their own vision of an alternative social and legal order as was evident from the legendary K3 pumping-station strike of 1948.