ABSTRACT
How do ideas and practices of cardinality, global spatiality, and global space relate in making global governance possible? This is a problem at the core of ideas such as the international and the global that characterize the modern period from the sixteenth century onwards. This chapter explores, through a historical epistemological analysis of Juan de Escalante de Mendoza’s Itinerario de Navegacion, how this was a problem of relationality. It involved shifting conceptions of ocean space, European spatial identity, as well as the standardization of wayfinding practices. The resulting cardinalization of space was as much the answer to a pressing logistical problem (the training of pilots) as it was one to the problem of governing novel global spaces.
