Chapter 3 Part One Development Chapter One The World in the 1780s 1

The 18th century should be sent to the Pantheon. ——Saint Just 1 The world of the 1780s was both a much smaller and much larger world than ours today.This is our first look at that world.Geographically, the world was smaller then, because even the best-educated and most-informed people of the time—say, the scientist and traveler Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)— people—and only know this part of the human inhabited earth. (Compared to Western Europe, the "known world" of the less technologically advanced and less expansive communities is obviously smaller than that of Western Europe, so small that it is only a tiny part of the earth. Sicily without writing Farmers or cultivators living in the hills of Burma spend their lives in such a small world, and they are forever ignorant of the outside world.) Thanks to people as gifted as James Cook The exploration activities of navigators in the 18th century allowed most (though by no means all) of the surface of the ocean to be mapped on the map, although human knowledge of the seabed was still negligible until the middle of the 20th century.The outlines of the continents and most of the islands were already known, though not exactly by modern standards.The knowledge of the extent and height of the mountain ranges in Europe is more precise than that of Latin America is very rough.Little is known about Asia.As for Africa (except for the Atlas), nothing is known about its practical use.Except for China and India, the flow of the great rivers in the world is full of mystery to the world. Only a few hunters, businessmen who rely on trapping animals, or fur traders who go deep into the Canadian Indian region know the direction of the river in their area, or Said to have understood.With the exception of a few regions—and on several continents, which protruded no more than a few miles inland from the coast—the world map consisted of empty spaces crossed by the obvious tracks of traders or explorers.These blank areas would be even wider than they actually appear to be, were it not for some rough but useful second or even third-hand data gathered by travelers or officials serving in distant outposts.

Not only is the "known world" smaller, but so is the actual world, at least in the world of human activity.All available population estimates are purely speculative due to the unavailability of actual demographic data.What is clear, though, is that the Earth at that time could support only a tiny fraction of the present-day population, perhaps no more than a third of today's population.Asia and Africa supported a larger proportion of the population then than they do today, if the speculative figures we most often cite are not too large. The population of Europe in 1800 was about 187 million (the current population is about 600 million), a smaller proportion than today, and the proportion of the American population is obviously even smaller.In general, in 1800, two out of every three people were Asian, one in five was European, one in ten was African, and one in 33 was American or Oceanian.Obviously, with such a small population distributed on the surface of the earth, the population density is naturally much thinner than it is now.Perhaps, except for a small number of areas, such as certain parts of China and India, or some parts of Western and Central Europe, there may be population densities similar to modern times due to high agricultural production or high concentration of cities.Since the population size is smaller than it is today, the area where humans can effectively colonize will naturally be smaller.Climatic conditions (although the climate will no longer be as cold or wet as in the worst era of the "Little Ice Age" from the early 14th century to the early 18th century, it may be colder and wetter than today.) Containing human beings in the Arctic Circle The limit of domestic settlement; epidemic diseases, such as malaria, still restrict the growth of population in many areas, such as the coastal plain in southern Italy, which was actually uninhabited for a long time. It was not until the 19th century that people gradually settled.Primitive economic ways of life, especially hunting and (in Europe) nomadism, wasted land and made it impossible for people to settle entire areas, such as the plains of Apulia in the southeastern tip of Italy. Travelers in the early 19th century left their pictures depicting the area around Rome. It was an empty malaria-endemic area full of ruins, a small number of cattle and sheep accompanied by strange and strange bandits in twos and threes. This was the place people were familiar with at that time. landscape.Of course, many lands are still barren and overgrown with weeds after reclamation, and there are vast swamps, extensive pastures or forests everywhere, even in Europe.

The third phenomenon of relatively small size is manifested in the size of human beings: in general, Europeans at that time were significantly shorter than Europeans today. This statement is based on a large number of physical statistics of conscript soldiers, from which we can draw An example to illustrate.In one county on the coast of Liguria in northwestern Italy, men under 1.5 meters (59 inches) tall accounted for 72 percent of the recruits recruited between 1792 and 1799.But that doesn't mean that people in the late 18th century were thinner than we are.The scrawny, stunted, untrained soldiers of the French Revolution possessed a level of physical stamina matched only by the dainty guerrillas who roam the colonial forests of today.Marching at a speed of 30 miles a day, fully armed, for a week, is commonplace.However, judging by our standards today, it is an indisputable fact that people's physique was poor at that time.The fact that the kings and generals who are worth a lot of money hang their lives on the "tall men" who make up the lean and strong bodyguards, the armored cavalry guards, and the like security guards, all illustrate the above .

However, if the world was in many ways smaller than it is today, the extreme difficulty and instability of transportation made the world actually much larger than ours today.I do not wish to exaggerate these difficulties; by medieval or sixteenth-century standards, the late eighteenth century was an era of numerous and rapid means of transport, with roads, horse-drawn carriages, and postal services improving even before the railroad revolution.From the 1760s to the end of the century, the time required to travel from London to Glasgow has been shortened from 10-12 days to 62 hours. The mail or stage coach system established in the second half of the 18th century, greatly expanded between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the laying of the railway, it not only accelerated - in 1833, from Paris to Strassburg (Strassburg) mail delivery in just 36 hours - and has become a recurring service.However, passenger traffic by land remains small.Moving goods overland is not only slow, but also expensive and daunting.For those engaged in official business or business, mutual communication is absolutely inseparable. According to statistics, at the beginning of the war with Napoleon, 20 million letters passed through the hands of British postmen (by the end of the period discussed in this book). , the number of letters increased by another 10 times).But letters were of little use to most people at the time, since they could not read and write, and travel—except, perhaps, to and from the market—was entirely out of the ordinary. .If they or their goods were to go by land, they mostly walked or relied on the slow carts, which even in the early nineteenth century transported five-sixths of French goods at a speed Not even 20 miles a day.The dispatchers traveled long distances in a hurry; the coachman drove the postal carriage and took a dozen passers-by on the bumpy road, and every passenger was knocked to pieces; the private carriage of the nobleman sped along the road, But for most of that world, the coachman, who leads horses and mules on foot, still dominates overland transportation.

So, in this case, not only is water transport easier and cheaper, but it is often faster (if you exclude the vagaries of weather).During Goethe's travels in Italy, it took four days and three days by boat from Naples to Sicily and back.The wit was amazed at the shortness of the journey, which he spent comfortably over a few days on the same journey as the land journey.The distances of the docks are the distances of the world: in a practical sense, it is a longer journey from London to Plymouth or Leith than to the village of Breckland of Norfolk. The distance is closer.It's easier to get from Veracruz, Mexico, to Seville in southern Spain than Valladolid, in north-central Spain.It is easier to go to Hamburg from Bahia in Brazil than to go inland from Pomeranian in East Prussia.The main disadvantage of water transport is that the interval is too long. Even in 1820, mail was sent from London to Hamburg and Holland only twice a week, and to Sweden and Portugal only once a week.As for mail sent to North America, it is once a month.But Boston, New York, and Paris are certainly much more closely connected than the Carpathian county of Maramaros is with Budapest.Just because it is easier to transport great quantities of goods and persons by ocean transport, it is more convenient to communicate between two distant cities than between a city and a country.For example, it took five years (1769-1774) to transport 44,000 people from the northern ports of Ireland to America more easily than it took three generations to transport 5,000 people to Dundee in Scotland.The news of the fall of the Bastille was known in Madrid within 13 days, while in Peronne, only 133 kilometers from the capital, the news from Paris was not heard until the 28th day after the fall of the Bastille .

Thus, the world in 1789 seemed vast to most inhabitants of the time.Unless caught by some terrible accident, such as a draft into the army, most people are born, bred, and generally spend their lives in the parish of their birth.There were 90 provinces in France at that time, and as late as 1861, in 70 of them, more than 9 out of 10 people lived only in their birthplace.The rest of the world is the stuff of government proxies and rumors, no newspapers, even in 1814 the normal circulation of French magazines was only 5,000 copies, barely recognizable to anyone except a small upper middle class Word hyphenation.Floating population, including merchants, peddlers, day laborers, artisans, itinerant craftsmen, seasonal employees, as well as dervish monks or pilgrims begging around, as well as smugglers, robbers and fellow villagers in the market, such a wide range of erratic movements Huge crowd, these people are responsible for spreading the gossip to everyone.Of course, the local soldiers scattered among the people during the war or garrisoned among the people in peacetime are also responsible for spreading the news.Naturally, the news also came through official channels such as the government or the church.However, even the local personnel of such government organizations or Christian organizations spread all over the country, many of them are also local people, or they settle in one place and provide services to their kind for life.Outside the colonies, bureaucrats appointed by the central government and sent to succeed local posts were just emerging.Among all the low-level officials in the country, perhaps only the officers of the army can expect to move frequently and live a life of their own.These people find solace only in the various wines, women, and war horses in the region under his jurisdiction.