To Understand an Era, Study Its Transport

Guest Post by G. M. Baker –

It is easy to take transport for granted in a story. If you need to move your characters to another scene, put them on a ship, or a horse, or a carriage, and send them off to their destination. But transport deserves a deeper look. Transport is key to understanding any place and time. There is no aspect of your characters’ lives that is not touched by transport.

Our lives today are shaped and dominated by transport. Food from all over the world is in our supermarkets year-round. We can easily visit friends and take exotic vacations. We regularly meet people from all over the world, because they too can travel. None of this was true for most people in most times. Transport was limited, expensive, and dangerous. And this affected everything in their lives.

Think about how many classic stories are travel tales. Today, we count travel time in hours, but for most of history, it took days, weeks, or months and was full of wonders and perils. Without television or photography to show the traveler where they would be going, every turn of the road and every port was new and exotic in a way we can hardly imagine today. But this was not something most people would ever experience, and thus, there was a huge demand for travel tales, both fictional and factual.
The difficulty and expense of travel, combined with a lack of movies and photographs, meant that most people lived with a very different picture of the world than we have today. Ask yourself how often your characters would see a stranger. In the average day of city life today, we meet dozens of strangers. We are often surprised to run into a friend if we had not made an appointment to meet, so accustomed are we to seeing strangers everywhere. In the average day in a village of the past, you would often not meet a single stranger from sunup to sundown. Every person you met would be intimately known to you. Consider the surprise, alarm, or delight with which a stranger might then be greeted. And imagine how strange and terrifying it would be for someone raised in that village to suddenly go to a city.

Today, our accents have softened and blended by contact with so many different people and by hearing received pronunciations on TV and in movies. Imagine the difficulty communicating with a stranger when accents were concentrated and deepened in isolated districts and villages. Imagine how difficult it might be to guess their intentions or understand their habits, and thus how nervous you might feel around them, not knowing what they might do or say, or how something you do or say might offend them.

Consider how your character’s close association with a small group of people intimately known to them, on whom they depended for their safety and livelihood, would affect how they viewed their role and social position. Today, we take an extremely individualistic view of our role in society. Our obligations are met by paying taxes. We work for institutions and shop at institutions, and we can change both our work and our shopping without notice or consequences. Our close relationships are with the people we choose for ourselves, and they tend to be people very like ourselves. And these friendships are entirely voluntary and can be dissolved without notice or consequence by either party at any time. None of this was true for most people historically. Their roles were largely the ones they were born to, and their relationships were with the people of their village, or perhaps of their ship or regiment. They did not choose them, and so they had to do more to accommodate to them. At the same time, their loyalty to them would have been far greater.

Our individualism changes our moral outlook as well. Today, we hold institutions to a high standard because we depend on institutions. We don’t hold our friends to a high standard because if we did so, they would stop being our friends. But in an isolated community, where people depended on each other for their sustenance and safety, they would have held each other to a high moral standard. Today, we regard as superstitious the idea that a whole community might pay for the sins of one of its members. But to most people in most ages, this was a daily reality. Imagine the harm to the village if the miller or the blacksmith was taken ill and suddenly there was no flour or horses could not be shod. If you believe that sin is punished by affliction, then the affliction of one becomes the affliction of all, and therefore the sin of one is the sin of all. And therefore the morals of all are the concern of all. Consider what would happen, and what people would think about it, if a crop failed or a plague swept through the village. Without transport, bringing in food or fleeing the plague would have been difficult or impossible. Where would people look to find an explanation for their misfortune?

Today, our access to transport and to goods obtained by transport is so great that the world is almost frictionless. People and things can move about as needed. In the past, the availability of transport varied widely, both between countries and within them, and the kind of transport available in particular times and places would have had a profound effect on the moral, social, and practical outlooks of the people of those times and places. The differences between a town, particularly a seaport, and a village a few miles away could be profound.

When you imagine your characters for your next novel, therefore, ask what transport was available to them and try to think through all the consequences that the availability or lack of transport would have had on their values, beliefs, and daily lives.