One argument in my first book is that practices and infrastructures for controlling movements of goods and people in the Old Reich were not anchored at the outer borders of a territory for much of the early modern period. Customs and toll stations were situated along roads and rivers, and travelers could pass by several such posts within the same territory. In the second half of the eighteenth century the geography of governed mobility in the Holy Roman Empire began to change: the levy of duties was now increasingly relocated to the outer borders and the major commercial hubs within a territory.
