This paper examines the fraught process by which Egypt's far-western provinces - key parts of the Western (or Libyan) Desert as well as the far reaches of the Mediterranean coastline - eventually came under the firm sovereignty of the Egyptian state--a process that culminated in an official border treaty with Italian-occupied Libya in 1925. Bringing together a variety of different sources - official documents from the Ottoman, Italian, Egyptian, and British archives as well as travel narratives, maps, and memoirs - this paper suggests that the Egyptian West, previously ignored in the historiography of modern Egypt, is a crucial site for challenging a series of long-standing assumptions underlying conventional narratives of Egyptian nationalism and statecraft. By taking a close look at the political, economic, and social history of the Egyptian west over a roughly thirty-year period, this paper seeks to address a series of issues of broader historical and theoretical interest. First, it investigates the meaning and impact of competing conceptions of space (local-Bedouin, European-colonial, Egyptian-nationalist) in a context of weak or limited state authority. Second, it seeks to understand alternate ways that spaces difficult to rationalize - the desert being a prime example - could be "mapped" spatially in the absence (until very late) of reliable cartographic representations. Finally, it questions the acceptance of a firmly national identity among Bedouin populations accustomed to local authority and frequent border crossings. At the same time, this research seeks to tackle some longstanding assumptions in Egyptian historiography. Foremost among these is the notion that Egypt, unlike almost all other nations to emerge from colonial rule, boasted natural and well-known boundaries that could be seamlessly traced back to antiquity. This paper also seeks to question the common historiographical view that the Ottoman state ceased to play any meaningful political role in Egyptian affairs after the British occupation in 1882. The research presented here challenges both these assumptions by suggesting that the "Egyptian" West was a space that the Egyptians actively needed to win over from both Ottoman and (later) Italian influence and consequently rationalize and "tame," reaching out to the predominantly Bedouin population that inhabited this territory through a variety of administrative means.