From steamships to sovereignty: How Iraq's old arteries challenge modern myths

In the old Anglican cemetery in Baghdad’s Bab al-Sharqi district lie the bodies of foreigners buried for more than a century. Dry shrubs sprout between sun-baked stones, some engravings now worn and hard to read. 

Most visitors come seeking the grave of Gertrude Bell, the “Queen of the Desert”, immortalised by Hollywood and remembered - whether admired or condemned - for her role in shaping modern Iraq after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

Yet a short walk from Bell’s grave stands an older tombstone that draws the curious eye: that of Lieutenant Commander Charles Henry Cowley, a British naval reserve officer. Born in Baghdad in 1872, Cowley was killed near Kut in 1916 in a battle where he was awarded the Victoria Cross. 

Though far less known than Bell, Cowley’s life shows how Iraq once sat at the centre of a river-driven commercial network that propelled trade, but more consequentially, the political destiny of the region. His story also counters the Bell narrative that the Middle East was a blank slate awaiting European invention after World War I.

This history takes on contemporary relevance after the controversial (and factually incorrect) comments made this past September by US businessman and political operative-turned-ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack.

Barrack asserted: “There is no Middle East. There [are] tribes and villages”, arguing that modern nation-states were mere colonial inventions.

While some critics of the post-WWI settlements argue that the Sykes-Picot agreement imposed artificial state constructs that contributed to later instability, it is quite another matter to suggest that the societies upon which these constructs were imposed were somehow primitive or unsophisticated.

Long history

What this view ignores is that while Sykes-Picot borders were drawn to serve European imperial interests, they did not conjure civilisations from sandy deserts. Iraq’s long history - multilingual, mercantile, literate and forward-looking - was written long before European cartographers arrived, and offers a direct rebuttal to this attempt at revisionism. Barrack’s views were long ago debunked in the West by Edward Said and the entire academic field of Orientalism. 

Cowley’s name might not spark immediate recognition, like Lawrence of Arabia’s or Bell’s would, but a closer look at his life opens a window into an era when the Tigris and Euphrates were the Middle East’s superhighways, and control over their waters meant control of markets, diplomacy and power.

Iraq's past reminds us that the nations of the region are not artificial facades, but historical societies with only a relatively short period of colonial rule

The son of a senior captain with the Euphrates and Tigris Steamship Navigation Company and a woman of Armenian-Persian descent, Cowley grew up on the banks of the Tigris. Raised among steamship captains, river pilots, merchants and interpreters, he understood the rivers as Iraq’s economic lifeblood.  

Educated in Liverpool, he returned to Baghdad after his father’s death to work in the river trade, eventually becoming the company’s senior captain by World War I. Tasked with ferrying British troops and supplies up the Tigris, he became a persistent menace to Ottoman forces, who branded him “the pirate of Basra”.

Fluent in Arabic and several other languages, he moved easily between cultures, embodying an older Mesopotamian cosmopolitanism defined by trade rather than borders. During the desperate 1916 mission to break the siege of Kut, Britain’s worst military defeat, Cowley’s ship was ambushed. Captured, he was almost certainly executed.

His tombstone, erected by his mother, presents a key to a neglected chapter of Iraqi history. It evokes a time when identities were fluid, when faiths and ethnicities intertwined; when the daughter of Armenian refugees from Julfa could marry an Anglo-Irish river captain; and when steamships knit together commerce, travel, correspondence and even war.

Commercial heavyweight

Long before the age of Aramex, the internet and worldwide supply chains, the Euphrates and Tigris Steamship Navigation Company controlled the rivers and regional trade of Mesopotamia. It was the artery through which goods, people and influence flowed, connecting far-flung parts of then-imperial and colonial Great Britain. 

These arteries made Iraq a commercial heavyweight, a logistical entrepot whose waters linked India, Persia, the Gulf and eastern Anatolia. The same networks also indirectly tied Iraq to port cities such as Izmir, Alexandria, Bushehr and Jaffa - urban centres whose traders and guilds were drivers of cultural exchange.

New archaeological discoveries in Iraq uncover questions of community ownership

Read More »

Hardly static or insular, these communities were remarkably fluid, fluent in multiple languages and embedded in global markets. They formed a commercial class that governed Eastern Mediterranean trade long before European powers imposed administrative templates.

Nor was Iraq’s cultural life awaiting European enlightenment. A millennium before King Faisal I donned a western-style hat he called “al-Sidara”, declaring it a symbol of progress, Al-Mutanabbi wrote poems about the rise and fall of rulers and the nature of authority. 

More recently, Mulla Abbud al-Karkhi wrote a sharp verse capturing the anxieties of a society caught between a crumbling Ottoman order and an ascendant British Empire. His poetry offered early musings on identity, sovereignty and modernity. 

Indeed, Iraqis were not passive recipients of history, but active interpreters of their political moment.

Socioeconomic shift

The Euphrates and Tigris Steamship Navigation Company was part of a profound socioeconomic shift that affected those who made their living from the rivers. North of Baghdad, Tikrit and its residents manufactured the kalak, a small ancient boat. With the introduction of steamboats, this livelihood disappeared, prompting significant migration to Baghdad, mirroring the fate of other dislocated rural populations across Iraq. 

Their shift from river-based trades to urban professions demonstrates how Iraqis were forced to modernise rather than remaining bound to static “tribal” identities.

During this period, an officer from a remaining Tikriti family, Mawlud Mukhlis, encouraged his townsmen to join the military and its academies, cultivating networks within the armed forces. One such recruit was Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, who would lead the 1968 military coup, and whose cousin, Saddam Hussein, eventually seized the presidency for himself in 1979. 

Their trajectories show how economic displacement redirected human capital into state institutions, influencing the political order decades later - an evolution more complex than the caricature of a region defined solely by “tribes and villages”.

Today, however, those once-mighty rivers no longer overflow with the same vigour, reduced by the internal combustion engine, climate change, upstream diversions and drought. Their diminished flows and depths matter little to global commerce, which long ago shifted to overland channels. 

What is not diminished is Iraq’s long historical record, going back millennia to the era of cuneiform, mathematics and legal canon, belying the notion that the Middle East lacked coherent societies, economies or political identities before European intervention. 

Iraq’s past reminds us that the nations of the region are not artificial facades, but historical societies with only a relatively short period of colonial rule. Now largely forgotten, replaced by modern logistics and digital commerce, the legacy of the Euphrates and Tigris Steamship Navigation Company remains etched on gravestones in an incurious corner of Baghdad, alongside the grave of Bell, perhaps the most misread and misunderstood of the class known as “Arabists”.

But Cowley’s grave, and the lost world it represents, foreshadows a truth resurfacing today: Iraq’s cohesiveness, and that of the broader region, has always developed organically - not by oil, war or empire, but by their collateral effects of connecting peoples, ideas and economies.

Regional evolution

The Middle East of 2025 bears little resemblance to its early-20th-century past. A resurgent Turkey, once the “sick man of Europe”, and Iran are the two post-WWI states whose borders remain untouched, precisely because their nationalism and internal legitimacy evolved organically, rather than through Franco-British design.

This evolution mirrors broader regional trajectories: the rise of influential oil economies, temporary post-colonial pan-Arab mergers of the 1950s-60s, and today’s emerging trend towards federalism in places like Iraq, the UAE and, potentially, Syria. 

The story of Iraq's rivers is a reminder that the Middle East's capacity for adaptation has always been its defining current

The endurance of the borders of Turkey and Iran, and their assertive roles today, illustrates how political identities organically forged over centuries can prove more stable than borders drawn in European capitals.

For the first time in recent memory, Middle Eastern states themselves are reshaping their political geographies. Yemen may return towards dissolution, with limited regional repercussions, while Iraq continues to negotiate and refine its federated order.

As these states redefine federal structures, negotiate autonomy and shift centres of power, they do so within a region that is neither accidental nor newly imagined, but one whose political and social vitality has been evolving continuously for centuries. 

The story of Iraq’s rivers is a reminder that the Middle East’s capacity for adaptation has always been its defining current.

The views expressed in this article belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.