Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "Premodernist" channel.

  1. I remember the factoid that outside of 50 km of a navigable river or the coast, prior to the invention of railways, it wasn't economical for farmers to produce above a subsistence level, since the costs of fodder for their carts would kill their profits.
    782
  2. unfortunately that was on a hard drive of mine which crashed early in pandemic and I failed to think of taking it to my local white box guy in time as it caused me a surge of depressive and somewhat delusional symptoms
    35
  3.  @gfuentes8449  I can't cite the guy but it was a theory of why French agriculture developed where it did during the Enlightenment. The peasants who actually had carts were the better-off ones.
    34
  4.  @user-uy1rg8td1v  Canals can have other social impacts. Where I live, they did help larger farmers to move their goods to market, but the change in ethnic demographics caused by the mass importation of Roman Catholic canal diggers lead to social unrest and required first the introduction of a police force, and second that the people who lived here began to invent a set of minimum standards of second class citizenship, due to the limits of what Protestant guys with sticks could accomplish in keeping the peace, which slowly morphed into the local version of multiculturalism.
    13
  5. My brain just kept yelling "tse tse flies" through the first two minutes.
    5
  6. ah there it is six minutes afterward
    4
  7.  @Galactipod  I like that you scrolled through the replies to copy and paste one to give me a sense of deja vue.
    3
  8. We're talking prior to the Marian Reforms or for resupply over longer marches here?
    1
  9.  @johnreeves3688  That's the analogy that went through my head with bitcoin.
    1