Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ships.
40
Thus before the advent of the railway wood could only be transported by
water over longer distances. A city like Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire,
rapidly growing in population since the siege by the Turks in 1683 (1680: 70,000,
1783: 209,121 inhabitants), received 80 % of its
re wood via the Danube, only
20 % were transported from the regional Wienerwald. But even for that area, fairly
close to Vienna, water transport was preferred: the
rewood was
—
cut in pieces of
about 90 cm
washed down little creeks and rivers towards the Danube where it
was caught in special rakes and transported on
—
oats or ships towards Vienna. In
many instances also special slides, tunnels or channels to facilitate wood transport
were constructed. Also construction wood was transported this way: originating
from upper Austria, Tyrol and Bavaria, the logs were tied together to larger
oats of
700 m
3
wood which were driven down the Danube and eventually stored in
suburbs of Vienna.
41
In international comparison Vienna was in a fairly advantageous situation having
rich forest resources in distances of only some 100 km. The Flemish and Dutch
cities, as a contrast, had only very little, sometimes no forests in their vicinity, due
partly to the particular ecology of these lowlands. Here we can observe a long-
distance trade in construction timber already developing in the late middle ages.
Cities like Bruges, Gent and Antwerp, major players in the European trade net-
works of that period, were provided with wood from the Black Forest, from
Scandinavia and the Baltic, particularly from the Vistula. Gdansk became the
gateway-city for the opening up of the resources of the Vistula basin for the bene
400
-
t
of the Flemish cities with their large need for construction wood and grain.
42
Thus
we can already observe an international division of labor developing in staple
commodities such as wood and grain between the highly urbanized North
West of
Europe and the more agrarian and less densely populated Baltic and Eastern
European regions. But this network depended on water-borne transport; as soon as
carts had to be used, market integration of bulky goods tended to be local rather
than regional.
Whereas Vienna had solved its wood problems by investing in transport sys-
tems, London, another rapidly expanding capital in the early modern period, took a
different route: Already in the late Middle Ages coal was used as an alternative to
-
re-wood since it was cheaper as regional forests started to be depleted. After the
Black Death which brought a massive population drop, coal disappeared from the
London market only to reappear after 1500. Firewood saw a price rise which was
double the general average in the period 1500
1700, a clear indicator for growing
scarcity.
43
Coal was still competitive although it had to be transported from
Newcastle upon Tyne in the north-east of England, some 400 km distance from
London. There the coal could be mined on the steep hillsides of the river Tyne and
-
40
Sieferle, Transportgeschichte.
41
Johann (
2005
).
42
Galloway et al. (
1996
); Unger, Feeding.
43
Allen (
2010
).
