“The Iraqi government, not the Shaikh of Kuwait, is our government; we are the owners of the soil and have been born and bred on it.” In the early 1930s, this was a common refrain among the farmers who had risen up against one of the largest landowners in southern Iraq, repelling private tax assessors and marketing the crops themselves. Although Shaykh Ahmad al-Jaber took it as an affront to his independent sovereign power, he and the ruling Sabah family of Kuwait were reluctant to resort to outright coercion to quash these “communistic” challenges to their proprietary rights. Instead, they would spend the next years enmeshed in Iraqi courts, invoking Iraqi laws, and insisting on the efficacy of Iraqi territorial sovereignty—only to gradually lose many of their properties around Basra. In studying the disputes over the Sabah properties around Basra, my paper explores themes of nationality and territoriality as they unfolded in struggles over the material wealth of agricultural land. It links these disputes in Ottoman and Mandate-era commitments by the British to fiscal privileges for the Sabah family, and in the social crises and economic confusion of the Great Depression. The latter had already helped spur a wider political project in interwar Iraq to capture greater shares of the value of regional commodity circuits like the Basrawi date trade within the country’s borders. The paper then recounts how the peasant uprisings on the Sabah estates incidentally reinforced such projects. Many of the tenants were originally Nejdi, but by the 1930s they were invoking Iraqi nationality in their challenges to the Sabah enforcers and lawyers; appeals to district and provincial authorities; and self-advocacy in national periodicals. The paper also considers the materiality of the Sabah properties themselves. These estates were primarily marshlands in which the surface area fluctuated annually due to ecological conditions in the northern Gulf littoral, and as such had complicated attempts by Ottoman, British, and Hashemite state authorities to assign them stable cash values. Cultivators on the Saba properties had acquired certain rights of tenure precisely because they had labored to reclaim the estates from the marshlands of the Shatt al-Arab estuary. The paper thus asks how, by fixing the land concretely in place for the purpose of commercial agriculture, cultivators provoked abstract claims to property and nationality—and in turn served to render these notions real and concrete in the new political geography of Iraq.