Prologue

The Prologue reaches back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to reveal the deep roots of modern communications networks in German-speaking Central Europe. It highlights the changing role of the state in the development of roads, waterways and postal networks, from the emergence of the post-Westphalian territorial state to the diffusion of cameralist ideas in the following centuries. It considers how communications networks influenced, and were in turn shaped by, changing understandings of the function of exchange in society and the economy. It describes the related, changing context of academic scientific research in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and how the broader circulation of ideas slowly merged with cameralist notions of ‘useful knowledge’ to stimulate technological development.