ABSTRACT
As we have already seen, many of the first developments in travel technology, including the wheel and the domesticated horse, originated in Asia, as did the earliest farming cultures and, later, the first urban civilizations of the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia. For the earliest farming cultures of Asia, travel was a domestic business involving access to local market centres or (more rarely) international travel by a few merchants or explorers in search of rare natural commodities. The rise of great empires in the Near East necessitated volumes of military and political travel (on foot or by water, only much later using horse-drawn vehicles), but the focus of the ancient world remained firmly in Asia until the rise of the classical civilizations of Greece (and later Rome) from the sixth century BC turned it towards the Mediterranean, where it remained for a thousand years. 1 After the dis-integration of the Roman Empire, the early medieval period was marked by disruption in trade and travel both on land and by sea, with the network of Roman roads disintegrating and easy road-based travel on a Roman scale not achieved until the eighteenth century. We have already seen that this was to change with the emergence of new ports and intra-European trade routes in the fifteenth century, with the dominance of Italian cities such as Venice and Genoa not only over trade in the Mediterranean but also, via routes across the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, over sea routes linking Europe with Asia. The resumption of the Silk Road following the Mongol Empire restored the greatest highway in the world, but there has not been a unified transport system since the fifth century. The sixteenth century voyages of discovery opened up entire new continents to travellers, just as the transport improvements of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution drove a movement towards the establishment of colonial empires by European powers. Continuous improvements and innovations in travel technology and infrastructure have permitted the development of the cheap, rapid international travel that we have today. A glance at Map 5.1 shows that the heartlands of travel in western Europe are, as they have always been, France and Spain, but internal travel within Europe has become considerably easier since the formation of the European Union (EU). The origins of European integration date back to the end of the Second World War, which left Europe in ruins and prompted the search for a lasting peace and, in particular, the need to bring about lasting reconciliation between France and Germany. One of the first initiatives was the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), established by the Treaty of Paris in 1951. On 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, proposed that French and German coal and steel production should be ‘pooled’. Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands joined France and Germany in setting up the ECSC and merging national interests in these industries. In 1957, the six members of the ECSC formed the European Economic Community (EEC) and began the process of developing a common market for goods and services. The Treaties of Rome, signed in March 1957, created the EEC and the European Atomic Energy Community. The Common Agricultural Policy to support farmers was also established. Since 1957 the EEC has seen five stages of enlargement, and now brings together twenty-five countries in what is known as the European Union (EU). 2 Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom joined in 1973; Greece in 1981; Portugal and Spain in 1986; Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995; and Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia on 1 May 2004. The first direct elections to the European Parliament were held in 1979; before that, its members were drawn from national parliaments.
