This paper examines the interwoven relationship between the coastlines and the provincial inlands of the Ottoman Maghreb at the turn of the nineteenth century. While the Napoleonic Wars and the French Campaign in Egypt and Syria had brought with a surge in maritime activity, the subsequent 1815 Congress of Vienna and the shifting policies of the Ottoman Porte brought with them a sharp decline in Mediterranean corsairing, and a substantial loss in revenues for the North African eyalets. This paper will analyze how the governors of Tunis and Tripoli both turned their attentions inland to recoup lost revenues and to reassert their political agency in a time of transforming imperial landscapes. The objective of this paper to tease out how Maghrebi officials saw the sea and sand as two sides of the same coin. North African officials would routinely turn their attentions towards one during times of financial, political or even environmental crises in the other, and saw the spaces as working in tandem. This important historiographical corrective does the work of highlighting the ‘interwoven geographies’ North African world and argues against the contemporary paradigm which has long since isolated the Saharan inlands from the maritime connections with which they were so intrinsically connected. The central case-study for this paper and ‘interwoven geographies’ is an analysis of Tripoli’s empire building efforts in Bornu. It will analyze the proactive attempt on the part of Tripolitan governor—Yusuf Pasha Karamanli— to mimic the empire building strategies and directives of his neighbor-- Egypt’s Mehmed Ali by similarly expanding his reach beyond Fezzan and into Bornu. In doing so, this paper also examines the horizontal ties that bound provinces to one another in a changing imperial landscape as well as the vertical ties that bound the seas and sands of North Africa together.