The “Excuse of Phylloxera”: Place and Plant Disease in the Late Ottoman Aegean

By 1888, the dreaded vine pest phylloxera had reached the Ottoman Empire’s raisin growing heartland of Izmir. Having first emerged in the United States and gradually worked its way across Europe and the Mediterranean, it had left destruction in its wake. But phylloxera also created opportunities. Before phylloxera struck Izmir, the devastation of vineyards in France offered an opportunity on the world market for those willing to plant a vine. After phylloxera struck, large landholders swooped in to capitalize and acquire land and also tax benefits for those who replanted with American root stock, which was largely impervious to the phylloxera. By the 1890s yet another group of actors began to take advantage of the phylloxera: post-Ottoman states around the Aegean, which all justified protectionist policies toward Ottoman produce exports as in the interest of protecting their own vines from the dreaded insect. But Ottoman officials disagreed, suggesting that their counterparts in Greece or Bulgaria were using phylloxera as a pretext to nurse their own grapes to health without competition from the empire they were both once a part of. The Ottoman minister of agriculture, forests, and mines notably referred to this phenomenon as “the excuse of phylloxera.” Relying on sources in Arabic, French, and Ottoman Turkish, this paper thus conceptualizes phylloxera in terms of the various ways that different actors harnessed it for their own agendas. The paper concludes by considering the ways that the labor of tending the vines—largely done by Greek Orthodox workers—was remembered in the wake of the large-scale expulsion of these people in conjunction with the Turkish War of Independence and the Population Exchanges. Here, too, the “excuse of phylloxera” served a purpose: observers blamed the vine pest—and not the violent politics of population—for the demise of regional grape production.