This paper examines the ways in which flows of Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean shaped and structured nature-society relations in the interwar Levant. In particular, it focuses on the construction of the Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines and investigates the ways in which the pipelines shaped the social, political, and material landscapes and environment through which oil moved. Built between 1932 and 1935 by an international oil consortium, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the Iraq-Mediterranean oil pipelines consisted of two parallel lines that ran from Kirkuk to the Iraq-Syria border, where they split with one line running through Syria to Tripoli, Lebanon and the other taking a southern route to Haifa, Palestine. Drawing on the work of scholars in anthropology, geography, and history who have examined dispossession and conflict at sites of oil extraction (Appel, 2019; Watts, 2012; Bet-Shlimon, 2019; Fuccaro, 2015), I ask what kind of social processes, environmental relations, and forms of agency and resistance did oil transportation give rise to? In so doing, I also build on recent work (Barry, 2013; Ghosn, 2011) which has analyzed the politics of oil pipelines not in terms of geopolitics, but as agents of spatial and material transformation. In its public relations material, the company presented the lands through which the pipeline passed as empty desert, thereby erasing the impact of the pipeline’s construction on both people and nature. However, the pipelines traversed villages and areas of irrigable and cultivated land, especially as it reached Tripoli and Haifa, diverted water resources from the Euphrates and Tigris, and disrupted tribes across the Jazirah and the Syrian desert. Through an examination of materials from oil company and British and French national archives, I consider the oil company’s mobilization of resources and extension of control over land, water, and labour in the construction of the pipeline. I highlight how the company expropriated land, laid water pipes, and hired unskilled labour through an appeal to ‘public benefit’ and deployment of a corporate discourse that positioned the company as an agent of mandatory development, with far-reaching social and environmental consequences. Finally, I show how landowners and elites in Iraq and the transit countries criticized the gulf between the company’s discourse and practice through petitions and in the press and demanded greater material and economic benefits, while cultivators and laborers engaged in activities to disrupt the company’s pipe-laying activities.