(^246) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
Equally costly were the delays for inspection and sometimes transship-
ment—a form of job creation and a pretext for further exactions.
The maximizing strategy of these brigands-in-guise-of-offlcials may
be inferred from their policy of deliberate uncertainty. Even where tar-
iffs were set, the toll-takers would make it a point not to publish them,
the better to levy as opportunity offered.^20 (That kind of transaction
put a premium on shrewdness and separated the "slick traders" and fast
talkers from the easy marks—a selection process, in effect.) The whole
system was designed to encourage bribes, including rounds of food and
drinks for the boys, which did not help the next boat to get through.
Needless to say, the local barons and municipal authorities who en-
joyed these gains had no desire to give them up by way of easing trade
and encouraging business; on the contrary, growing trade was an in-
centive to increase the tariffs. Such increases invariably drew howls of
protest and pain, but no one was ready to crack down even on small
gougers; too many glass houses to start throwing stones. The initial re-
sult of industrial development, then, was to raise the barriers.
From the seventeenth century on, the centralizing tendency of Eu-
ropean monarchies worked against this racket. One of the primary
goals of the new bureaucracies was to erase these levies and interfer-
ences, seen not only as restraints of trade, hence tax-eaters, but also as
poaching, as lèse-majesté. The British had litde to do along these lines:
their local tolls had largely disappeared by the fifteenth century; as a re-
sult they had the largest national market in Europe. The French needed
much more, and the great minister Colbert issued order upon order
banning and abolishing this legacy of disorder; to litde avail. Once
again, it was the revolution that did the job, one hundred years later,
clearing the debris of an outworn regime.
Germany, whose proliferation of tolls was a byword for madness—
furiosa Teutonicorum insania—was much slower to clear the way,
pardy because of the very size of the task, pardy because of the extra-
ordinary territorial fragmentation: thirty-eight separate tariff systems in
1815, plus thousands of local autonomies, down to small towns and
landed estates. Only power politics—Prussian screws—and chauvinist
ideology could do the job, and then painfully. Die-hards had to be
shown that it cost more to stay out than to come in. Treaties and ne-
gotiations following the Napoleonic wars freed up transport along the
Rhine, and a series of ever bigger customs unions culminating in the
Zollverein of 1834 opened most of the country to relatively untram-
meled trade. I say "relatively," because even then much remained to be
done. Some states were not brought in, heels dragging, until the 1860s
nora
(Nora)
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