EVEN IN THIS AGE OF AIR TRAVEL, WHEN WE THINK OF TRANSPORTATION, we think first of wheeled vehicles trucks, trains, or cars and then of ships that sail across open water. This vision of how goods and people travel is accurate enough when applied to most of the European past, and Europeans were able to impose their style of transportation, and much else, on the rest of the world in the course of the past century and a half. But a broader historical perspective makes the familiar European definition of transport misleading because it omits animal portage-the caravan-and overlooks the sporadic importance of canals. This essay will attempt to redress the balance by putting the peculiarities of European transport systems into their appropriate world historical framework. Edward Fox, in his History in Geographic Perspective: Other France, emphasized the difference between movement by water and movement by land. ' He pointed out that, before the railroad changed traditional patterns, water transport was both much cheaper and much more capacious than overland haulage. As a result, according to Fox, two diverse societies arose within France: one outward-looking, comnmercial, and maritime; the other rural, politically subject, and intensely local in economic matters. Links between the two were mainly political and quite slender: hence his subtitle, The Other France. Fox may have exaggerated the separateness of rural from urban France, but his emphasis on the defects of European overland transport in the pre-industrial age is surely well taken. Before the second half of the eighteenth century, when the French pioneered systematic road building, European roads were little more than a succession of mud holes. During much of the year, the moist climate made roads all but impassable for wheeled vehicles, especially wagons carrying heavy goods. In contrast, abundant precipitation combined with the almost flat topography of the north European plain to provide Europeans with a natural substitute for roads-the river system, which, with remarkably little artifical improvement, allowed easy movement far inland, thanks to comparatively placid currents and a fairly even flow of water throughout the year. Indeed, Europeans could put up with backward and inefficient overland transport before the eighteenth century only because the natural system of internal waterways was so good. Why bother