Between 1885 and 1908, tens of thousands of Armenians migrated from communities in the eastern provinces of Anatolia to North America. Throughout this period, the Ottoman state endeavored to prohibit this migration on the grounds that Armenian migration to North America posed a political threat to the empire. This paper explores the emergence and evolution of smuggling networks that developed in response to this prohibition on Armenian migration. Over time, these dense networks, which together comprised a veritable industry, grew to involve a surprisingly wide and diverse array of actors including local bankers cum migration agents, muleteers, boatmen, boardinghouse patrons, employees of foreign consulates, state officials and debt collectors operating from Harput to Worcester and everywhere in between. In addition to focusing on the various actors that comprised this migration industry, this paper will also focus special attention on its rapidly shifting geography. Networks dedicated to smuggling North America-bound Armenian migrants out of the empire initially emerged in the late 1880s and early 1890s out of preexisting socioeconomic linkages that connected communities in eastern Anatolia to port cities such as Istanbul, Samsun and Mersin. As the Ottoman state intensified its efforts to interdict this migration, however, these surprisingly adaptable networks responded by growing in density and geographic scale. By the early 1900s, they connected communities such as Harput and Palu deep in the Anatolian interior to port cities on the Levantine coast such as Latakia and Beirut, regions that historically possessed few social and economic ties. It is a central contention of this paper that the social and spatial adaptability of these migrant smuggling networks were key to the continuation of Armenian migration to North America in the face of state prohibitions. Furthermore, it argues that even at the height of the Ottoman state’s modernization and centralization efforts, these migrant smuggling networks, by linking subjects from a variety of geographic, economic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds across vast swaths of the empire’s territory, produced a distinctly “Ottoman” space that challenged rather than reinforced the power of the state.