From town to town: how commercial travel connected manufacturers and markets during the industrial revolution

Telegraph communication networks used by the Japanese pharmaceutical industry in 1901

“…Some previous research, however, does not clarify howand through whom-these two processes were accomplished; in this context, the role of human agencies, which linked production with markets and distribution in practice, is critical, because the prosperity of industrial regions was based on sales to mass markets. Focusing on the role of merchants and wholesalers, other recent studies examine how commercial communications created real spatial interactions across the industrializing economy of England in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries (Stobart 2004;Popp 2009). These features apply not only to England, the world's first industrializing nation, but also to a late-industrializing country such as Japan.…”