This introduction recounts the extraordinary story of John Joseph Nouri, the nineteenth-century Chaldean Patriarch of Babylon whose transcontinental journey from Baghdad to the United States culminated in his wrongful imprisonment in a Californian asylum. His experience, framed through the lens of cultural capital and imperial politics, highlights key tensions in the late Ottoman and early modern Western imperial contexts: the performance of legitimacy, the symbolic role of material heritage, and the contested nature of identity. Through Nouri’s case, the book introduces cultural governance as a theoretical framework for understanding how heritage—both tangible and intangible—was leveraged for the consolidation of identity and power across a century of political transformation in Iraq. This framework enables a critical interrogation of how states and individuals have historically governed culture as a means of articulating power, identity, and legitimacy. Situating the politics of heritage at the intersection of empire, statehood, and international governance, the introduction lays the foundation for an examination of Iraq’s cultural landscape from 1892 to 1992.