This chapter deals with the physical and tangible aspects of the worldwide circulation of royal officials and exposes how the Spanish Empire developed an unheard of system of global mobility. After evaluating the dramatic changes in how people thought of distance, it sketches some of the major patterns of Spanish mobility and the new technologies that enabled such movement. This allows for discussing some novel material representations of the globe and the original worldly imaginings.

Building upon the previous themes, the book’s last chapter highlights the development of Spanish imperial cosmopolitanism, which enabled officials and subjects to make sense of and subsume the heterogeneous societies and regions they encountered and think of the world as one coherent unity. This cosmopolitanism was demarcated by imperial rivalries and officials’ self-perception as Catholic soldiers. Their actions and interactions with other people were read through the lenses of their Catholic identity, which also fostered a sense of Spanish exceptionalism. Moreover, most global interactions and imaginings occurred in areas usually deemed "peripheral," expressing the unity and coherence of the polity despite its dispersion and diversity.