The price of distance: freight transport in France (late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries)
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The aim of this article is not to identify cyclical changes and geographical disparities in transport prices, but rather to understand the extent to which distance and its various measures played a role in determining transport prices and the spatial organization of the freight transport economy between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This study is based on transport prices listed in various sources: tariffs, bills of lading and the data collected for the 1811 survey on road and waterway transport. These documents shed light on the different expressions of distance in the pricing of freight, which was not necessarily proportional to journey length. Despite a downward trend between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the constraints related to transport distances contributed to unequal integration across different geographical trading areas.
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