Early modern Europe saw what may be called a 'stagecoach revolution'. For much of the Middle Ages, the options for cross-country travel had largely been limited to riding on horse or travelling by foot. From the seventeenth century onward, the rise of horse-drawn coaches and carriages fundamentally changed both the modalities and the experience of long-distance overland travel. The article focuses on one particular innovation inherent to this new form of travel, namely, the issue of social mixing across gender and class lines. This aspect has received relatively little attention from historians, even though it is key to understanding why stagecoach travel remained a contentious phenomenon throughout this period. Sharing a most narrow space with strangers over a prolonged period of time was a fundamentally new and, in many ways, a fundamentally challenging experience for contemporary travellers. Seen from this perspective, it is no exaggeration to regard the stagecoach as an unprecedented social experiment in the history of mobility and tourism that required travellers to develop new forms of interpersonal conduct and social conventions.
Daniel Jütte (Tue,) studied this question.