@taamvan:
They certainly did consider themselves the “center of the new world”. Since the international date line is arbitrary, as is the Grenwich line, I’ve heard some interesting points made that maps made in England tend to place the UK in a visually prominent and focused position, same with the USA. Maybe its a kind of subtle chauvinism to keep the focus themselves.
One interesting point I heard once is what would you do on a planet with no giant ocean on one side; the International Date Line is very conveniently placed here, where very few people live; since any landmass or nation divided by this line would have to deal with the not inconsiderable inconvenience of it being two different business days in a limited geographical area.
There’s an interesting book titled “A Strategic Atlas: Comparative Geopolitics of the World’s Powers” which, among other things, contains several maps of the world that show how it looks when you use different countries or regions as the centre of the map, thus illustrating how the world (and its power dynamics) might be perceived from the point of view of the people who live there. As I recall, it also has a map showing the staggering geographic imbalance (in terms of surface area) that existed between the Axis and Allied powers in WWII.
Arthur C. Clarke once wrote a funny short story (I can’t remember the title) about a future Mars colonized with vast cities covered by pressure domes, one of them being called Meridian City because it sits on the Martian equivalent of the International Date Line. (One of Clarke’s characters makes the point that on Earth we were able to dump the problem into the Pacific Ocean, but that this solution isn’t available on Mars because Mars has no oceans. On the other hand, Clarke doesn’t explain why his colonists chose to build a city right smack on the IDL, since presumably Mars isn’t crowded enough to force people to locate a city there.) Anyway, the plot revolves around a thief from Earth who plans to steal a priceless artifact from a museum in Meridian City, and whose complicated methodology to keep the theft undetected involves a whole day’s in the museum on the one day of the week when the museum is closed. Unfortunately for the hapless thief, his hotel and the museum are on opposite sides of the city – and on opposite sides of the IDL – and he misinterprets by 24 hours what the actual closing day is, so he ends up being caught when the staff opens the museum for business in the morning while he’s still inside with only half of his work done.