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1450 to 1750 xxvii Urban zones in Spanish Galicia, England, and elsewhere saw similar densities By 1800, Europe boasted an estimated half a million watermills China and the Muslim world also employed watermills from at least the ninth century Peoples in sub-Saharan African and the Americas relied exclusively on human labor, the latter at least until the growth of sugar and slavery in Brazil and the Caribbean from the 16th century, when animaldriven sugar grinding mills were introduced From the 15th century, the Dutch introduced major innovations in windmill technology, permitting extensive reclamations of land from the North Atlantic Sails comprised the other major way to harness mechanical energy, used mainly in oceanic transport, discussed below The steam-engine did not begin to replace these and related engine technologies in a significant way until the Industrial Revolution Production of Thermal Energy Wood and its derivatives provided the overwhelming preponderance of thermal energy during this period—it was used for heating homes, cooking food, refining ores, and stoking furnaces to manufacture objects of iron, steel, glass, and ceramics, among other materials For centuries coal had been used in China, Europe, and elsewhere, and began to be used on a large scale in the Liège basin and Newcastle basin from the early 1500s By the 1650s, Newcastle, in England, was producing an estimated half a million pounds per year, used in saltworks, glassworks, ironworks, breweries, lime-kilns, and many other industries Techniques to produce coke from coal were developed in England by the 1620s, though smelting iron with coke did not become commonplace until the 1780s Throughout this period, wood remained the only available fuel for the vast majority of the world’s people Deforestation became a major problem in some areas, prompting diverse responses, ranging from rising coal use in England to the invention of wok cooking techniques in China, an adaptation to perennial firewood shortages In thermal energy production, if the 20th century was the Age of Oil, and the 19th the Age of Coal, the early modern period, like all previous epochs in human history, was the Age of Wood Food and Agriculture The major transformations in agricultural technologies consisted principally of incremental improvements to iron-tipped wooden ploughs, an implement dating to around 1000 b.c.e Overall, the pace of agricultural change in the early modern period was slow, despite the biospheric revolution brought about by the Columbian Exchange The “agricultural revolution” had only begun by the end of the period under discussion here Most agriculturalists around the world continued to employ technologies handed down from generation to generation: fire and digging sticks in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas; draft-animal drawn plows in Europe and Asia; animal, waterwheel, and human-powered irrigation systems, using technologies dating back centuries or millennia On the whole, and despite some important innovations, agricultural and food technologies did not undergo dramatic changes until the final decades of the early modern period, and even then on a tiny fraction of the globe’s tilled surface Transportation Until the 18th century, sea transport was slow and expensive, land transport slower and more expensive still The principal overland conveyances were beasts of burden, wheeled carts, and carriages Horses and mules were common across Europe, the Asian steppes, and the post-conquest Americas; camels from North China, India, and Persia to North Africa; pack-oxen and elephants in India Sub-Saharan Africa had no such wheeled conveyances or beasts of burden (limited by the tsetse fly), in common with most of the pre-conquest Americas, save the Peruvian Andes, where llamas were used as pack animals—though by the mid-1700s herds of wild horses, introduced into Mexico by the Spanish, had migrated into North America and were adopted by the indigenous peoples of the Southwest and Great Plains Roads, unpaved and seasonal, were generally poor and unreliable, with some exceptions, like the imperial Inca road system built from the 1450s Throughout the early modern period, the maximum distance coverable by land in one day was around 60 miles (100 km); as one historian has observed, “Napoleon moved no faster than Julius Caesar.” River transport was generally faster and cheaper, in canoes (North America), poled barges, and other floating or rowed conveyances, and seasonal in northern latitudes Oceanic transport, dating back millennia, saw major advances during this period, based mainly on improved shipbuilding designs and technologies in northern Europe dating to the 1100s and
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