| In the decades surrounding World War II, there was a broad and coherent shift in the mapping sciences from a focus on the authoritative representation of terrain to the development of pragmatic, infrastructural tools which would be installed as part of the landscape. By looking at three major international projects -- one each in the three principal branches of the mapping sciences: cartography, geodesy, and navigation -- I argue that the transformation of geographic space into a new kind of engineering service both inaugurated a new politics of global spatial legibility and constructed a new, geographically embedded subject for whom nationally defined space would become increasingly irrelevant.;In cartography I analyze the International Map of the World (IMW), a hugely ambitious scheme to make a uniform atlas of the earth in unprecedented detail. It was first proposed in the 1890s and remained a going concern until the 1980s. In geodesy -- which typically refers to the study of the size and shape of the earth but also includes high-precision surveying more generally -- I trace the origins of the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) system, a grid-based alternative to latitude and longitude created by the US Army in the late 1940s. The mathematics of UTM gave every point on the earth a unique coordinate that facilitated easy calculation and coordination; it was a global expansion of earlier systems that had been invented during World War I. In navigation, I analyze the development of radionavigation systems, from the first efforts in the 1910s to the design of the Global Positioning System (GPS) by the US Department of Defense in the early 1970s.;All three projects -- the IMW, UTM, and GPS -- spanned several decades of development and debate, engaged scores of scientists from dozens of countries, received wide notice in non-specialist circles, and were ambitious even to the point of hubris. Conceptually, all three also constructed a specific vision of global space and global collaboration. They all directly addressed the relationship between a national and an international realm, the distinction between internationalism and globalism, and the relationship between sovereignty and geographic knowledge. |
