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This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was an effort to plant American rootstocks, which were relatively resistant. The Ottoman response to phylloxera offers another example of the ways in which the alleged 'sick man of Europe' was actually much more dynamic than its detractors insisted. The invocation of phylloxera moreover became a way for post-Ottoman states like Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia to protect their national grape economies. The article's broader analysis explains how the shared environment of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean incubated both the spread of phylloxera and—in the protectionist legal regimes formed in response—the architecture of the region's peculiarly integrated disconnection. The article closes by considering the agriculture of displacement amidst the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, and how it further entrenched these dynamics as migrants took vines with them and planted them in the remarkably similar environments of their new national homes.

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