Europe.

On the surface hunting might seem to have been a natural sport for almost everybody in preindustrial Europe, but such was not the case. City dwellers did not have much opportunity for hunting. In England the woods were progressively reserved for the nobility and the gentry. Ordinary people were prohibited from taking the birds, deer, and rabbits from these reserves, and while some poached, others never even tried their hands. Guns were also much less accurate and much more difficult and time-consuming to operate. The rifled bore, which gives the rifle its name, was used in the eighteenth century, but even by 1800 there were still smoothbore muskets sitting on people's mantles. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, loved bird hunting as a young man but eventually gave it up for a series of reasons which suggest why ordinary Englishmen were not hunters: it...