Navigation can evoke imaginaries of adventure and exploration where frontiers are transcended, spaces are created, and fortune is tempted. Historically, it is associated with images and narratives of heroism and duress, with the encounter of places, peoples, and unknown conditions of life, as well as with the creation of novel spaces of governance. Its everyday use can also evoke mundane repetitive practices of pathfinding within established routes and is intrinsically related to cartographic representations of space and mapping practices.

Navigation, however, is not simply a practical problem of directed and coordinated movement through an environment with the intention to reach a known or expected location. It is tightly related to how people understand themselves to be in their world.

This book seeks to make the first collective contribution to reflect about the relationships between navigation, connectivity, and the opening of global spaces by focusing on the knowledge formations that have made specific practices of navigation possible in time. As such, the book is presented as a problem-based reflection that, although making a contribution to the understanding of the problem in different disciplinary fields, is] not discipline-specific, but rather deploys the multiple and complementary frames of analysis and scholarly sensibilities needed to capture the richness of the object in time, space, and culture.

As the last volume of the trilogy on Connectivity, Space, and Knowledge, this book builds on the tradition started by Imaginaries of Connectivity: The Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance (2019) and continued in Mapping Connectivity: The Making of European Empires (2021), to reflect, collectively, on the epistemological and historical conditions through which navigation constitutes a practice of connectivity that opens up global spaces in time.