In the 1870s, the Euphrates deserted its channel for one to the west, devastating the rich agricultural countryside around Hillah and causing turmoil for regional finances. In November 1913, the inauguration of the Hindiyah Barrage divided the flow of the Euphrates between the river’s two channels. The inauguration of the barrage represented the culmination of many years of struggle by Ottoman bureaucrats, British financiers, Indian engineers, and local workers to manage the current and silt of the Euphrates. The barrage could not have been built without the cooperation (and often contestation) of all these actors. Indeed, the contingent circumstances which gave rise to those interactions were fundamental determinants of the work’s final form. This paper will explore the intellectual currents which informed the construction of the Barrage as they were situated within social, economic, and political frameworks. Such an exploration will help illuminate the internal dynamics of the early twentieth-century British imperial project in Iraq. Focusing on the character of William Willcocks, and drawing both on his publications and the archival record surrounding the barrage, the paper will examine the ways in which British romantic thought interacted with conventions of scientific irrigation emerging from British India to produce specific ways of thinking about and eventually molding the landscape of the Euphrates. For Willcocks, irrigation in the Tigris-Euphrates basin was as much about “restoring” the Garden of Eden as it was about rational scientific water management, and he brought both to bear on his advocacy and eventual plans for the irrigation of Mesopotamia. This powerful combination of religious and scientific fervor has generally been overlooked by historians of Iraq. Though Willcocks’s master plan was never fully implemented, his ideas continued to serve both practical and inspirational purposes throughout the British period and through much of the twentieth century, heavily influencing dominant conceptions of both existing and ideal Iraqi landscapes. Returning to look more closely at the sources of his ideas and the ways they were positioned within early twentieth-century power dynamics can enable us to better understand why the land of Iraq has been understood and manipulated the way it has.