The Politics of Transportation: Mobility, Society, and Urban Development in Early Modern Paris
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Bertucci, Paola
Abstract
To date, scholars have written about the history of carriages to trace technological invention and innovation in the objects themselves. My dissertation offers a new approach to the study of carriages by exploring the relationship between transportation technology and society in an early modern context. Using a case study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, I follow the day-to-day travels of the city’s carriages by analyzing civil and criminal proceedings, expense registers, published guidebooks, and graphic representations of cityscapes from national archives in France. I demonstrate how carriages became contentious technologies as the ancien régime nobility and bourgeois embraced driving as an urban transportation practice. Vehicle use divided residents and visitors alike over a variety of issues, from the right to use particular spaces in the urban core for walking to the police’s use of carriages in the arrest and transportation of segments of the population to city prisons to await colonial deportation. I therefore show that in the early modern period, carriages were anything but periodically improved, passive vessels that moved around the city. Rather, they were technologies that, depending on their users and travel routes, contributed to the creation and destruction of human welfare in both the French capital and empire. I argue that the history of vehicle transportation is one of city and empire; of the exploitation of the urban environment in the creation of socially stratified access to mobility, and, consequently, urban life. The four chapters of this dissertation emphasize that the study of transportation technology is key to reshaping how we understand the following: the enforcement of bureaucratic rule, imperial expansion, socio-economic stratification, the creation of city infrastructure, and the liberties and restrictions placed on everyday human movement in the early modern world.
Recommended Citation
Strtak, Jennifer, "The Politics of Transportation: Mobility, Society, and Urban Development in Early Modern Paris" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1423.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1423
