From 1900 to 1940, southern Iraq transitioned from being an Ottoman province, to a British Mandate, and finally to the independent Kingdom of Iraq. During this period Ottoman, British, and Iraqi officials often documented smuggling operations along the porous boundaries of southern Iraq’s desert land borders, marshlands, and river networks. Incorporating primary sources from archives such as the British India Office Records (IOR) and the Ottoman-era Svoboda Diaries in conjunction with current scholarship, this paper entitled “Smuggling Under Sovereignties” argues that the three successive governments administering southern Iraq responded to both real and imagined smuggling operations to extend imperialist and nationalist policies over the “frontier”. To defend this claim, “Smuggling Under Sovereignties” details how smuggling adapted chronologically as Iraq changed administrative hands. Many publications focus on smuggling under each of the three regimes respectively, but there is no current scholarship on the change over time in governmental responses to smuggling in the first half of 20th century Iraq. Under the Ottoman and Mandate periods, recorded smuggling operations are more feared by the imperial authorities than an actual threat to their assets in the region. Despite many of the smuggling operations under these two governments existing primarily in the imagination of imperial administrators, officials allocated substantial resources to uncover and eradicate such illicit activities through policy and political agents. Smuggling later increased when Iraq became independent, which became a justification for the complete annexation of Kuwait. Within each of the three periods, this paper analyzes the extent to which smuggling occurred, the ways governments attempted to control their borderlands, and how officials conceptualized the problem of smuggling. Together with Ottoman and British archival sources on illegal trading, “Smuggling Under Sovereignties” incorporates analyses of the southern Iraqi “frontier” by Frederick Anscombe and Peter Sluglett as well as publications on smuggling under imperial administrations by Eric Tagliacozzo, Mehmet Kilic, and Kate Boehme. This research also engages with the debate between the authors Amar Farooqi and Claude Markovits over whether smuggling under imperial regimes is a form of active resistance or is simply a result of indigenous populations exploiting “leaks” in administrative oversight. In the case of southern Iraq, smugglers were engaged with both. “Smuggling under Sovereignties” explores the complex relationship between networks of smugglers undermining imposed regulations and consequential governmental efforts to strengthen control of their border territories.