Current historiography on nineteenth-century migration to the Ottoman Empire has focused on the mass migrations of various ethno-linguistic populations from the Balkans and Caucasus to Istanbul, Anatolia, and Greater Syria. This scholarship often concentrates on the permanent settlement of migrants and refugees in the construction of cities and villages in frontier borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. This paper expands our understanding of Ottoman migration by examining the temporary migration and contract labor of expert migrant agriculturalists who were charged with scientifically transforming “untamed” and “empty” lands into organized, fertile spaces for the creation of profit and civilization. Centering on North Africa, or more specifically, Ottoman Libya, this paper claims that expert migrant agriculturalists from Ottoman Crete were part and parcel of larger local and imperial ambitions of state-making. Contract labor was envisioned as a means to develop lands in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica for the purpose of agricultural development and to create a flourishing landscape where the monopolization of cash crops fostered economic growth and greater government control of local agricultural production. The key to realizing such transformations in these regions was the application of local expertise and agricultural science that at once functioned to discipline not only the land in terms of its productivity, but also the local inhabitants who resided in these territories. This paper argues that these interactions between transient Cretan migrant agriculturalists and locals of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica over the proper use of land constituted a civilizing mission. This mission was one that employed scientific methods at manipulating not only the fruits of the land but also the labor that harvested it. In sum, the combination of local and imperial ambitions to permanently transform these two enclaves of North Africa culminated into a potential project to introduce to North Africa an Ottoman commercial rich zone of agriculture and productivity in the late nineteenth century.