Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

TOWARDS AN INDUSTRIAL WORLDDanube. (There were in 1840 about 370,000 tons of steam shippingcompared to nine million of sail, though in fact this may have alreadyrepresented about one sixth of carrying capacity.) Here again theAmericans outdid the rest of the world, racing even the British for thepossession of the largest merchant fleet.*Nor would we underestimate the sheer improvement in speed andcarrying capacity thus achieved. No doubt the coach-service whichdrove the Tsar of all the Russias from St Petersburg to Berlin in fourdays (1834) was not available to lesser humans; but the new rapid mail(copied from the French and English), which after 1824 drove fromBerlin to Magdeburg in fifteen hours instead of two and half days, was.The railway and Rowland Hill's brilliant invention of the standardizedcharge for postal matter in 1839 (supplemented by the invention of theadhesive stamp in 1841) multiplied the mails; but even before both, andin countries less advanced than Britain, it increased rapidly: between1830 and 1840 the number of letters annually sent in France rose from64 to 94 millions. Sailing ships were not merely faster and morereliable: they were on average also bigger. 7Technically, no doubt, these improvements were not as deeplyinspiring as the railways, though the ravishing bridges, curving freshlyacross the rivers, the great artificial waterways and docks, the splendidclipper-ships gliding like swans in full sail, and the elegant new mailcoacheswere and remain some of the most beautiful products ofindustrial design. But as means of facilitating travel and transport, oflinking town and country, poor and rich regions, they were admirablyeffective. The growth of population owed much to them; for what inpre-industrial times holds it back is not so much the high normalmortality of men, but the periodic catastrophes of—often very localized—famine and food shortage. If famine became less menacing in thewestern world in this period (except in years of almost universalharvest failure such as 1816-7 and 1846-8), it was primarily because ofsuch improvements in transport, as well as, of course, the general improvementin the efficiency of government and administration (cfchapter 10).The third major change was, naturally enough, in the sheer bulk ofcommerce and migration. No doubt not everywhere. There is, forinstance, no sign that Calabrian or Apulian peasants were yet preparedto migrate, nor that the amount of goods annually brought to the greatfair of Nijniy Novgorod increased to any startling extent. 8 But takingthe world of the dual revolution as a whole, the movement of men and* They almost achieved their object by i860, before the iron ship once again gave theBritish supremacy.171