The historiography of oil in the Middle East has been framed in declensionist narratives, dismissing the human agency of local actors that operated within and against the mechanisms of oil production. By exploring human ecology – how humans shaped their environment, and how in turn this environmental reconfiguration (re)shaped human social reproduction – within the history of oil in Iraq it is possible to recover, indeed make legible, subaltern voices that were informed by and constitutive of the global politics of oil. An environmental history of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium provides an intimate understanding of how local populations engaged with and conceived of late-nineteenth-century petro-capitalism, that swelled with, split off from, and were occluded by sources of imperial intervention in the Middle East. Using Alan Mikhail’s work as a framework of historical analysis in late-nineteenth-century Mosul, we begin to see how socioeconomic transformations – land management, peasant dislocation, and resource commodification – “alienated the products of the land as much as the products of human labor.” (Cronon 2003, 170) The legacy of colonialism in Mosul, both in terms of foreign (European) and localized (Ottoman) intercession into communal forms of resource management, is twofold: it illustrates a form of ‘environmental orientalism’, whereby imperialists characterized the lands surrounding the city as marginal and backward, and it made the city and its surrounding environs a potential lynchpin of global trade. As Camille Cole argues in “Precarious Empire”, Iraq was simultaneously fraught with environmental precariousness and considered a commercial nexus through which a latter-day ‘Northwest passage’ to India, and from there the world, could be developed.