The Map That Changed the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

example, led indirectly to a set of completely unanticipated consequences. Although the nation’s farmers certainly produced a lot—being armed with such weapons as the crop-sowing inventions of Jethro Tull, and the revolutionary land management methods of Thomas Coke, all the benefits of enclosure—and although what they produced, like the bread and the meat, was a delight to eat, it became an unfortunate reality that from that moment on until today, they could not produce enough. England became during this period and for the first time a net importer of wheat and corn.
    This was due to the simplest of Malthusian reasons—the fact that the country’s population had begun to rise significantly since midcentury. But figures had begun to inch up not because of an increase in birthrate going hand in hand with the rising prosperity, but mainly because of a small but important fall in the nation’s death rate. And that was due, in no small part, to the better diet of white bread and roast beef. An unexpected interplay of factors, indeed—all part of the making of Britain as a modern, complicated society, a society readying itself for modern, complicated ideas.
    There were other factors in play as well. Health was improving, for example. A child like young William Smith could be more assured than ever before of survival: There was better midwifery, a relative abundance of doctors, the construction of lying-in hospitals for women in labor, the introduction after 1760 of smallpox inoculations, the widespread opening of dispensaries, and a general agreement that fresh air was good for one and that hygiene and ventilation should be regulated—allsuch developments, all occurring in the latter half of the eighteenth century, helped to ensure that childbirth was far less risky an adventure than before.
    Moreover, people simply knew much more than before. Their lives were more efficient and comfortable than they had ever been. There was ample reason for a new degree of physical contentment—an atmosphere that, for those who were so predisposed, was highly conducive to study, to pondering and wondering. There had been steady improvements in education and literacy (Samuel Johnson’s great Dictionary had been published in 1755). There was now a mature newspaper industry. The postal system was becoming reliable and even efficient—a letter mailed in London could reach Chipping Norton, which was close to Churchill, the afternoon of the following day, “on every day except Monday”—meaning that people, even in so remote a part of the country as Oxfordshire, could now keep abreast of national developments, could tap into an ever-running wellspring of advice and information.
    They could learn, and by comparison with what had gone before, they could learn in double-quick time, something of the trivia of trends—as when eighteenth-century gentlemen farmers were beginning to buy pianos for their newly carpeted living rooms. They could know how a Mr. Chippendale began to turn out enchanting new styles of furniture from a new wood, mahogany, which had been discovered in South America. They could read how ladies in Liverpool, Manchester, and Edinburgh were starting to supplement their inelegant skirt pockets by carrying with them what they would call “indispensables,” which would be later called handbags. People in Churchill knew that young ladies of fashion, reading the new colored style journals, were now preferring to sport interestingly pale faces instead of the sunburned cheeks of the peasantry. The women of Churchill could learn all too rapidly how—in part to achieve this look—the recently invented parasols and umbrellas were becoming “quite the thing.”
    And they could learn of foreign developments—the rising agitation in the Americas being the most vexing—or of the minutiae of their own national government (George III, the capricious and unstable farmer-king who had assumed the throne in 1760, oversaw no fewer than