This book is the first English-language collection of scholarly essays to investigate the ambiguous and supporting role that colonialism in the Aegean Region played in Mussolini's imperial ambitions, bringing to light a history rarely scrutinized until recently.

Valerie McGuire is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Italy's Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895-945, and other articles on modern Italian history and culture.

Aron Rodrigue is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is the author of numerous publications on Sephardi Jews in the modern era, with a special focus on the Ottoman Empire.

Introduction 1. A Hole in the Maps of International Humanitarian Institutions in the Near East: The Absence of the Dodecanese (1915-1924) 2. Tourism and Fascism: The Cultural Capital of Rhodes 3. Ottoman-Italian Imperial Continuities in Rhodes: State and Society in the Early Twentieth-Century Mediterranean 4. Fascist Modernity and Ottoman Afterlives in the Eastern Mediterranean 5. The Assimilating Sea: Italian Rule and Mediterranean Mobilizations in the Aegean 6. Detached yet Connected: Life and Tension Between the Dodecanese Islands and the Turkish Mainland in the Interwar Period 7. The Rabbinical Seminary in Italian Rhodes, 1928-1938: A Fascist Project 8. Reflections on the Juderia: Remembering, Memory-Making and History in the "Lost World" of Jewish Rhodes 9. Italokratia and the "Privileged" Islands: Factions and Social Protest on Kastellorizo