Jacobus Cornelis Overvoorde, J.C., 1902. Geschiedenis van het postwezen in Nederland vóór 1795. Met het voornaamste verbindingen met het buitenland. Publisher: Sijthoff

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"This atlas combines some forty maps on the statistical dimension of communications and transport in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. Not the infrastructures themselves are the object of our inquiry, but rather the economic potential they represented once they had been built, as well as the economic performance they then achieved in the different countries of Europe since 1820. At the core of the mapping, therefore, lies a statistical comparison by country. Aside of the maps, all data underlying their construction have been given in tabular format as PDF-documents. In addition, short texts have been includeded to introduce the series and the maps and add some background to both." (Source: Website's Intoduction).

This project grew out of a cooperation between Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, and the Institute of European History Mainz, Germany.

Website

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In Issue 16 of " The Map Collector" published in September 1981, Werner Elias discussed the roads maps for Europe's post routes during the period 1620-1780. This is the sequel to that article and covers the later period of 1780-1850 when road mapping began to experience a ""sudden upsurge". (Source: Introduction to the article at Kunstpedia, September 1882.)

The Article

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"This essay explores the origins and the development of a ‘communications revolution’, which would give rise to a new concept within historiography. It proposes that the Communications Revolution can be explained as a macrohistorical process, comparable to the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, which have both had permanent and irreversible consequences in the modern era. The communications revolution, like the other two, began in the early modern era, and is still ongoing. The concept of a Communications Revolution encompasses smaller ‘media revolutions’, more easily ascribed to a specific historical period, and to a large extent mutually interrelated and dependent. The development of postal services gave rise to a new understanding of space and time, and it is this development that the essay identifies as the mainspring of change in the communications revolution. Postal services enabled faster movements of people, goods, and information. The new medium of the printed book, newspaper or sheet magnified the effects of this faster dissemination of information and news. So the Communications Revolution can be argued to have been the motor that enabled the construction of the infrastructure of the modern world, newspapers, cartography, and the ‘public sphere’ of politics, of warfare and diplomacy. Indeed, there is scope for discussion as to whether it was in fact the Communications Revolution which may have opened the way for both the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution". (Source: website: German History (2006) 24(3): 333-37). 

Abstract: Website German History.
Review:   Sehepunkte.

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