The cataclysmic events of World War I tend to overshadow the regional, and certainly less devastating, Italo-Turkish War pushing this conflict to the margins of our historical memory. Yet, this struggle over seemingly peripheral territories, such as the Dodecanese Islands and Libya, became a heated ideological battleground for the emerging nationalisms of the Mediterranean and deserves more scrutiny. Taking a comparative perspective, my paper delineates the contours of the geographical imaginaries of Italian, Ottoman, Greek, and Arab nationalisms and how participants and pundits of the conflict incorporated these Ottoman territories into their national spaces. Examining the writings and publications of influential nationalist leaders, military participants, and popular media coverage of the war, I trace the trajectories of nationalisms in response to shifting borders and material realities. The paper demonstrates how historically insular and independent territories became the target of a variety of nationalist projects that attempted to homogenize and nationalize these spaces. Further, it illustrates the way in which these territories and the conflict over them shaped and reshaped the national paradigms of the war’s belligerents. Episodes, such as Ottoman commander Enver Pasha’s insistence on establishing and maintaining schools to service the local population in the Ottoman Sancak of Benghazi despite the constant threat of Italian incursions, Ottoman Greeks’ reaction to the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese Islands, or nationalist, and later fascist, ideologue Enrico Corradini’s reconceptualization of the Italian diaspora in North Africa as the building blocks of an incipient national empire, demonstrate the significance of this war in the geographic imaginaries of Mediterranean nationalisms responding to European colonialism, the hardening of borders, and the emergence of a world system of nation-states.