ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the spatial characteristics of the distribution stage. It focuses on the trade in cereals, and in particular wheat, as the most important agricultural commodity and the one on which we have most information. The statistics available on agricultural production, although they gradually improved throughout the last century, are particularly unreliable. In some areas access to relatively assured water-borne food supplies encouraged agricultural specialization, although the remained hazardous, as the problems of vine-growing areas of Saone-et-Loire, normally dependent on wheat from Haute-Saone, showed following the poor harvest of 1846. Poor communications resulted in the geographical fragmentation of agricultural markets and in the restriction of the bulk of trading activity to local or regional levels. The areal limits served by a particular market might change over time as transport conditions changed, but the basic characteristics of the pre-industrial rural marketing system were not transformed prior to the railway era.
