Reconstructing Western Europe's Transport System 1500-1950

Abstract

The purpose of this contribution is to present practical and conceptual parts as well as first results of a larger research project which aims to reconstruct Western Europe’s transport system for the period 1500 until 1950, derive corresponding travel times, and finally use the latter one to explain the evolvement of states via spatial models. The very beginning of the project was presented at the T2M conference in Kouvala/St.Petersburg in 2013; in the last couple of months, research on the one hand consisted of work in archives and libraries to detect suitable map, statistical and other travel-related material and on the other hand to establish sound concepts to link transport characteristics (travel time, costs), trade and economy with the ‘degree of presence of state’. The evolvement of states, in the end national states, in Europe has been a field of research since decades. Be it an analysis of the expansion by the Romans, city-networks during Renaissance or empires and confederations later on and finally national sovereign states in recent times. These manifold processes have been examined mainly by the humanities and social sciences. Fernand Braudel for example, in his famous book “La Mediterranee et la Monde Mediterraneen a l’Epoque de Philipp II”, gives intriguing insights into a Europe undergoing major changes and points out the fundamental importance of space and transport. According to Braudel, “space was the enemy number one” of everyone at those times. Other researches, such as Charles Tilly, recognised the importance of networks, Tim Blanning focused on the concurrence of transport and communication. However, the benefits and costs of a growing and accelerating transport network are usually treated as an implicit variable in a section – household organisation, productivity in agriculture, availability of knowledge and so forth – of Western Europe’s path of development. The research presented in this paper starts one step before these traditional concepts and addresses the, as we think, main driver behind the observed developments: the benefits and costs of transport supply. This happens in a quantitative and spatially explicit way by literally reconstructing the historical network shape of the available mode of transports and their corresponding characteristics (costs and travel time) in several time intervals. Consequently, a lot of historical material is digitised and geocoded. The paper will include: i) An overview on the collected materials (maps and also various information on costs, distances, travel times); ii) present our developed digitalisation algorithm for maps; iii) detail on concepts to explain state evolvement by transport supply.