Also, prior to the invention of the steam engine, you couldn't move goods overland with any sort of efficiency. You needed, at a minimum, canals. The author o

Also, prior to the invention of the steam engine, you couldn't move goods overland with any sort of efficiency. You needed, at a minimum, canals. The author of the blog has covered this in great detail in previous posts and it comes out to something like you can't have an overland supply chain longer than a week in pre-modern times because the draft animals will eat more than they carry in food in a week. A 5-day supply chain is already carrying more in food than it is other goods. And you can't just rely on pasturage because (a) it's often not available (and highly depends on season), (b) your draft animals would need to spend hours each day foraging to get enough food, which is hours they aren't spending moving, and thus (c) the trip takes longer and you need to bring more food for the humans accompanying it. So, yeah, you could probably have carried charcoal from one town to the next, but you aren't gonna see long supply chains of charcoal, same way you didn't see long supply chains of anything else. That's why the biggest cities in the period were so small by modern standards, and were all along rivers/oceans; you literally couldn't supply more than a medium-sized city by land because it was impossible to get enough food into the city.