💾 Archived View for bjornwestergard.com › notes › hobsbawm-age-revolution-ch1.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:23:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
First chapter of...
Hobsbawm - The Age of Revolution (1789-1848)
The world was both smaller and larger than today [Hobsbawm was writing in the 1960s].
Smaller because the geographic knowledge was very limited, the population was about one third as large, and humans were on average of shorter stature.
Even the most geographically knowledgable and well-traveled (e.g. Humboldt) knew little. For the most part, detailed knowledge was limited to coastal areas and the contours of the seas (ignorance of ocean depths was total). The more usual case was that of the "Burmese cultivator" or "Sicilian peasant", who would know essentially nothing about the world, being illiterate and seldom if ever traveling any appreciable distance.
Page 10:
As late as 1861 more than nine out of ten in more than seventy of the ninety French departments lived in the department of their birth.
Tne population was 1/3rd Asian, 1/5th European, 1/10th African, 1/33rd American/Oceanian. The Artic was less settled because the world was a bit cooler (though less cold than in the most recent Ice Age). Malarial regions (e.g. Southern Italy) remain unsettled.
The world was larger because communication and transport were slow and unreliable.
The London to Glasgow mail coach took about twelve days in the 1760s to less than three days around 1800. Generally, land transport went as fast as someone could walk beside a beast of burden.
Water transport was hugely faster. Goethe went from Naples to Sicily in four days by boat.
Page 9:
To be within reach of a port was to be within reach of the world: in a real sense London was closer to Plymouth or Leith than to villages in the Breckland of Norfolk; Seville was more accessible from Veracruz than from Valladolid, Hamburg from Bahia than from the Pomeranian hinterland.
Page 10:
...it was easier to link distant capitals than country and city. The news of the fall of the Bastille reached the populace of Madrid within thirteen days; but in Peronne, a bare 133 kilometers from the capital 'the news from Paris' did not arrive until the 28th.
Europe was overwhelmingly rural in the 1780s.
Russia, Scandanavia, and the Balkans were between 90% and 97% rural, and few countries were less than 80% rural. The only cities large by our standards were London (1mn) and Paris (500k).
Provincial towns served primarily to market agricultural goods from the surrounding country side, were seldom engaged in long distance trade or manufacture for distant markets. The free cities of the middle ages had gone into decline.
Towns clung to their trade monopolies with the regions surrounding them
Page 13:
The agrarian problem was therefore the fundamental one in the world of 1789, and it is easy to see why the first systematic school of continental economists, the French Physiocrats, assumed as a matter of course that the land, and the land rent, was the sole source of net income. And the crux of the agrarian problem was the relation between those who cultivated the land and those who owned it, those who produced its wealth and those who accumulated it.