Based on the strength of some book reviews on web sites I normally visit, I headed down to a Borders Books near where I live and purchased The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 - 1815, by Tim Blanning, a Professor of History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of the British Academy. Blanning's book is a tour de force of a wonderfully rich subject - what happened in Europe during the 170 years between the conclusion of the Treaty of Westphalia and Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. I am now about 100 pages into this book.
Of interest here is that Dr. Blanning starts off his book with a most curious topic - the amazing improvement in transportation and communications which occurred, particularly in Britain and France, during this period. Blanning also notes that in Eastern Europe, little changed in terms of infrastructure during this time. Blanning of course gives due to what happened when railroads were invented, but in his first 40 pages Blanning compares the difference of what transportation was like in the middle of the 17th century and what it was like 150 years later.
As a student of history, I knew that for most of mankind's history, transportation was slow and expensive for most and that not many people traveled more than 10 or so miles away from the homes they were born in during their own lifetimes unless something compelled them to. Nonetheless, Blanning's book drives home exactly how expensive it really was for our ancestors to travel and that travel was rarely faster than walking pace.
Some exerpts:
1) (If one desired to travel outside of one's own town - Wizard)
"Four or six draught animals were needed to pull a coach and they had to be changed every 6 to 12 miles, depending on the condition of the roads. In England it was calculated that one horse was needed for every mile of a journey on a well-maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles from Manchester to London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the seventeen changes required by the stagecoaches which traveled the route. Those horses in turn required an army of coachmen, postillions, guards, grooms, ostlers and
stable-boys to keep them running. As a coach could carry no more than ten passengers, fares were correspondingly high and out of reach of the mass of the population. A journey from Augsburg to Innsbruck by stagecoach, although little more than 60 miles as the crow flies, would have cost an unskilled laborer more than a month's wages just for the fare."
2) "Almost everyhere the 'roads" were tracks, with no foundations or drainage and consequently deeply pitted by wheel-ruts."
'more like a retreat of wild beasts and reptiles, than the footsteps of man', in the view of an English observer writing in the early eighteenth century.... The roads of Europe were essentially those of the Roman Empire - after fourteen hundred years of neglect.
3) Blanning includes a table of travel times from London 1700-1800 in hours:
1700 1750 1800
Bath: 50 40 16
Edinburgh 256 150 60
Exeter 240 120 32
Manchester 90 65 33
4) Blanning talks about how forced labor from the farming peasantry was not an efficient method of infrastructure improvement. Instead...
"By that time, however, another method had been found. This was the 'turnpike', a word which originally designated just a barrier across a road to keep marauders out."
Blanning goes on to say that one of the beneficiaries of turnpikes were members of Parliament, who could now travel to London much more comfortably from their country homes - and proceed to pass more Acts of Parliament which created more turnpike roads!
5) Improvements in roads and road surfaces greatly dropped freight costs. To quote Blannning:
...but freight too could benefit. Much larger and more heavily laden wagons could pass along the improved roads: in the 1740's three-ton loads were permitted, by 1765 that had been doubled. The improved surfaces meant that fewer draught animals per ton were required. Writing in 1767, Henry Homer claimed that 'the carriage of grain, coal, merchandise, etc. is in general conducted with little more than half the number of horses a with which it formerly was.'
6) Writing in the middle of the 19th century, the German social historian Karl Biedermann estimated that travelling had been fourteen times more expensive two generations earlier!
7) Blanning wrote that the expansion of Europe's infrastructure also created a new class of society - the highwaymen - who would prey on hapless coach riders since cash was demanded up front in exchange for being permitted to use the turnpikes. Some wondered whether all this newly found mobility was worth the crime and congestion. London had streets choked full of coaches and wagons.
8) And perhaps my favorite excerpt:
"The turnpikes brought speed and mobility into a society previously characterized by their opposites. This was a culture-shock which many found upsetting - especially when the lower orders started to move out of their villages, on to the roads and into the towns, picking up insubordinate habits on the way. John Byng complained bitterly in 1781:
'I wish with all my heart that half the turnpike roads of the kingdom were plough'd up, which have imported London manners and depopulated the the country - I meet milkmaids on the roads, with the dress and looks of Strand mistresses, and must think that every line of Goldsmith's Deserted Village contains melancholy truths.'
The reference to Goldsmith's poem is revealing, for it is an elegy for a lost world of rural innocence and harmony, from which the forces of modernization have banished the inhabitants to urban anomie and vice."
300 years later, some people are still complaining that mankind's vastly increased mobility has resulted in the same urban ills. It seems that for some people, the more things change the more things stay the same. At the same time, one really does need to remember that one of the primary reasons why we build the cities we do today is because we can - due to the staggering drops of transportation costs in real terms. Otherwise we would still be living in huddled and cramped conditions.
Wizard.
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at August 30, 2007 01:44 PM