The Cost of Transportation in Pre-Industrial Europe

In pre-industrial Europe, rising productivity both in agriculture and in industry depended on the expansion of trade, and the expansion of trade depended in turn on the reduction of trading costs. An important component of trading costs--for some goods the most important--was the cost of transportation. This had two elements: the cost of predation and the cost of carriage. This paper examines these two elements and how they changed over time. It also discusses the relative importance in lowering the cost of transportation of organizational change and technological progress