tegwick
2d1282a61e
Restructure entity storage from per-chapter subdirectories to a flat
canonical set in output/entities/. Each entity exists as a single file;
duplicates across chapters are detected by slug collision and skipped
(first occurrence wins). Chapter views use {{ include }} transclusion
to reference shared entity files.
Add @{existing_entities} macro to extract-entities template so the LLM
knows which entities already exist and focuses on genuinely new ones.
Refactor _call_llm() from _execute_llm() for callers that handle their
own file I/O. 41 unique entities from 4 chapters (2 duplicates removed).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
1.6 KiB
Water-Carriage
Definition
The transportation of goods by navigable rivers, canals, and sea routes. Smith identifies water-carriage as vastly superior to land-carriage in cost-efficiency, demonstrating that a ship crewed by six to eight men can transport the same quantity of goods as fifty waggons requiring a hundred men and four hundred horses. This cost advantage means that water-carriage dramatically expands the effective market available to producers, enabling finer division of labour.
Source Chapter
Book 1, Chapter 3: "That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market"
Context
Water-carriage is the chapter's primary mechanism for explaining geographic variation in economic development. Smith argues that civilisation and industry naturally arise first on sea-coasts and navigable rivers because water transport opens "a more extensive market... to every sort of industry than what land-carriage alone can afford it."
Economic Domain
Exchange
Smith's Original Wording
"As by means of water-carriage, a more extensive market is opened to every sort of industry than what land-carriage alone can afford it, so it is upon the sea-coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers, that industry of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself."
Modern Interpretation
This is an early articulation of how transportation costs shape economic geography. Modern trade theory and economic geography (Krugman's New Economic Geography) formalise the same insight: reductions in transport costs expand effective market size, enabling agglomeration economies and deeper specialisation.