Carting in the Hispanic World: An Example of Divergent Development

Abstract

HERE IS AN OBVIOUS ASSOCIATION between economic growth and the appearance of increasingly specialized transport, and much of the research into the economic history of medieval and early modern Europe has dealt with this parallel development. The medievalists have studied both water and land transport, showing that the latter was often highly specialized and able to compete successfully with water-borne carriers.' Historians of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, however, have tended to accept Fernand Braudel's dictum that by 1600 land transport was overshadowed by improving shipbuilding and navigational techniques.2 As a result, they have concentrated their energies on the latter and given little attention tp land transport, except as associated with the beginnings of the industrial revolution in England. This tendency has obscured the fact that until the introduction of railroads, Europe went through repeated episodes of regional economic growth which depended almost entirely on overland transport consisting of professionalized carters and muleteers. Spain and her American empire witnessed at least three such episodes: in Mexico, 1540-1600, in Castile, 1750-1800, and in Argentina, from about 1770 to the middle of the nineteenth century. The interior of the Iberian peninsula, the Mexican plateau, and the pampas of the Argentine were all large inland areas restricted to the use of land transportation. The transport of these regions developed from the technology of late medieval Spain and supported significant economic growth for considerable periods. Obviously one must avoid implicit comparisons with the headlong growth of industrialization.