_History of the World_. By permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.)]
[Sidenote: Migrations in relation to zones and heat belts.]
In South America, Caribs and Arawaks showed a strictly tropical
distribution from Hayti to the southern watershed of the Amazon. The
Tupis, moving down the Parana-La Plata system, made a short excursion
beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, though not beyond the hot belt, then
turned equator-ward again along the coast.[195] In North America we find
some exceptions to the rule. For instance, though the main area of the
Athapascan stock is found in the frigid belt of Canada and Alaska, north
of the annual isotherm of 0°C. (32°F.) small residual fragments of
these people are scattered also along the Pacific coast of Oregon and
California, marking the old line of march of a large group which drifted
southward into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the northern part of
Mexico. The Shoshone stock, which originally occupied the Great Basin
and western intermontane plateau up to the borders of Canada, sent out
offshoots which developed into the ancient civilized tribes of tropical
Mexico and Central America. Both these emigrations to more southern
zones were part of the great southward trend characterizing all
movements on the Pacific side of the continent, probably from an
original ethnic port of entry near Bering Strait; and part also of the
general southward drift in search of more genial climate, which landed
the van of northern Siouan, Algonquin and Iroquoian stocks in the
present area of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and
Louisiana, while the base of their territory stretched out to its
greatest width in southern Canada and contiguous parts of the United
States. [See map page 54.][196]
[Illustration: ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF INDIA FROM THE INDIAN CENSUS OF
1901.]
[Illustration: ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF ASIA. Vertical Shading in the
North is Slav.]
[Sidenote: Range of movements in Asia.]
If we turn to the eastern hemisphere, we find the Malays and
Malayo-Polynesians, differentiated offshoots of the Mongolian stock,
restricted to the Tropics, except where Polynesians have spread to
outlying New Zealand. The Chinese draw their political boundary nearly
along the Tropic of Cancer, but they have freely lapped over this
frontier into Indo-China as far as Singapore.[197] Combined with this
expansion was the early infiltration of the Chinese into the
Philippines, Borneo, and the western Sunda Isles, all distinctly
tropical. The fact that the Chinese show a physical capacity for
acclimatization found in no other race explains in part their presence
into the Tropics. In contrast, the Aryan folk of India, whether in their
pure type as found in the Punjab and Rajputana Desert, or mingled with
the earlier Dravidian races belong to the hot belt but scarcely reach
the Tropic of Cancer,[198] though their language has far overshot this
line both in the Deccan and the Ganges Delta. One spore of Aryan stock,
in about 450 B.C., moved by sea from the Bay of Cambay to Ceylon;
mingling there with the Tamil natives, they became the progenitors of
the Singhalese, forming a hybrid tropical offshoot.
Europe, except for its small sub-arctic area, has received immigrants,
according to the testimony of history and ethnology, only from the
temperate parts of Asia and Africa, with the one exception of the
Saracens of Arabia, whose original home lay wholly within the hot
climate belt of 20°C. (68°F.). Saracen expansion, in covering Persia,
Syria, and Egypt, still kept to this hot belt; only in the Barbary Coast
of Africa and in Spain did it protrude into the temperate belt. Though
this last territory was extra-tropical, it was essentially semi-arid and
sub-tropical in temperature, like the dry trade-wind belt whence the
Saracens had sprung.
[Illustration: ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF AFRICA AND ARABIA.]
[Sidenote: Range of movements in Africa.]
The Semitic folk of Arabia and the desert Hamites of northern Africa,
bred by their hot, dry environment to a nomadic life, have been drawn
southward over the Sahara across the Tropic into the grasslands of the
Sudan, permeating a wide zone of negro folk with the political control,
religion, civilization and blood of the Mediterranean north. Here
similar though better conditions of life, a climate hotter though less
arid, attracted Hamitic invasion, while the relatively dense native
population in a lower stage of economic development presented to the
commercial Semites the attraction of lucrative trade. South of the
equator the native Bantu Kaffirs, essentially a tropical people, spread
beyond their zonal border to the south coast of Africa at 33° S.L.,
and displaced the yellow Hottentots[199] before the arrival of the Dutch
in 1602; while in the early nineteenth century we hear of the Makololo,
a division of this same Kaffir stock, leaving their native seats near
the southern sources of the Vaal River at 28° S.L. and moving some nine
hundred miles northward to the Barotse territory on the upper Zambesi at
15° S.L.[200] This again was a movement of a pastoral people across a
tropic to other grasslands, to climatic conditions scarcely different
from those which they had left.
[Sidenote: Colonization and latitude.]
The modern colonial movements which have been genuine race expansions
have shown a tendency not only to adhere to their zone, but to follow
parallels of latitude or isotherms. The stratification of European
peoples in the Americas, excepting Spanish and Portuguese, coincides
with heat zones. Internal colonization in the United States reveals the
same principle.[201] Russian settlements in Asia stretch across Siberia
chiefly between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth parallels; these same lines
include the ancient Slav territory in Germany between the Vistula and
Weser. The great efflux of home-seekers, as opposed to the smaller
contingent of mere conquerors and exploiters, which has poured forth
from Europe since the fifteenth century, has found its destinations
largely in the temperate parts of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand,
and South Africa. Even the Spanish overlords in Mexico and Peru
domiciled themselves chiefly in the highlands, where altitude in part
counteracts tropical latitude. European immigration into South America
to-day greatly predominates in the temperate portions,--in Argentine,
Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil and southern Chile. While Argentine's
population includes over one million white foreigners, who comprise
twenty per cent. of the total,[202] Venezuela has no genuine white
immigration. Its population, which comprises only one per cent. of pure
whites, consists chiefly of negroes, mulattoes, and Sambos, hybrids of
negro and Indian race. In British Guiana, negroes and East Indian
coolies, both importations from other tropical lands, comprise
eighty-one per cent. of the population.[203]
The movement of Europeans into the tropical regions of Asia,
Australasia, Africa and America, like the American advance into the
Philippines, represents commercial and political, not genuine ethnic
expansion. Except where it resorts to hybridization, it seeks not new
homesteads, but the profits of tropical trade and the markets for
European manufactures found in retarded populations. These it secures
either by a small but permanently domiciled ruling class, as formerly in
Spanish and Portuguese America, or by a body of European officials,
clerks, agents and soldiers, sent out for a term of years. Such are the
seventy-six thousand Britishers who manage the affairs of commerce and
state in British India, and the smaller number of Dutch who perform the
same functions in the Dutch East India islands. The basis of this system
is exploitation. It represents neither a high economic, ethical, nor
social ideal, and therefore lacks the stamp of geographic finality.
[Sidenote: Movement to like geographic conditions.]
A migrating or expanding people, when free to choose, is prone to seek a
new home with like geographic conditions to the old. Hence the stamp
once given by an environment tends to perpetuate itself. All people,
especially those in the lower stages of culture, are conservative in
their fundamental activities. Agriculture is intolerable to pastoral
nomads, hunting has little attraction for a genuine fisher folk.
Therefore such peoples in expansion seek an environment in which the
national aptitudes, slowly evolved in their native seats, find a ready
field. Thus arise natural provinces of distribution, whose location,
climate, physical features, and size reflect the social and economic
adaptation of the inhabitants to a certain type of environment. A
shepherd folk, when breaking off from its parent stock like Abraham's
family from their Mesopotamian kinsmen, seeks a land rich in open
pastures and large enough to support its wasteful nomadic economy. A
seafaring people absorb an ever longer strip of seaboard, like the
Eskimo of Arctic America, or throw out their settlements from inlet to
inlet or island to island, as did Malays and Polynesians in the Pacific,
ancient Greeks and Phoenicians in the subtropical Mediterranean, and the
Norse in the northern seas. The Dutch, bred to the national profession
of diking and draining, appear in their element in the water-logged
coast of Sumatra and Guiana,[204] where they cultivate lands reclaimed
from the sea; or as colonists in the Vistula lowlands, whither Prussia
imported them to do their ancestral task, just as the English employed
their Dutch prisoners after the wars with Holland in the seventeenth
century to dike and drain the fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire.
Moreover, the commercial talent of the Dutch, trained by their
advantageous situation on the North Sea about the Rhine mouths, guided
their early traders to similar locations elsewhere, like the Hudson and
Delaware Rivers, or planted them on islands either furnishing or
commanding extensive trade, such as Ceylon, Mauritius, the East Indies,
or the Dutch holdings in the Antilles.
Much farther down in the cultural scale we find the fisher tribes of
Central Africa extending their villages from point to point along the
equatorial streams, and the river Indians of South America gradually
spreading from headwaters to estuary, and thence to the related
environment of the coast. The Tupis, essentially a water race, have left
traces of their occupation only where river or coast enabled them to
live by their inherited aptitudes.[205] The distribution of the ancient
mounds in North America shows their builders to have sought with few
exceptions protected sites near alluvial lowlands, commanding rich soil
for cultivation and the fish supply from the nearby river. Mountaineer
folk often move from one upland district to another, as did the Lombards
of Alpine Pannonia in their conquest of Lombardy and Apennine Italy,
where all their four duchies were restricted to the highlands of the
peninsula.[206] The conquests of the ancient Incas and the spread of
their race covered one Andean valley after another for a stretch of one
thousand five hundred miles, wherever climatic and physical conditions
were favorable to their irrigated tillage and highland herds of llamas.
They found it easier to climb pass after pass and mount to ever higher
altitudes, rather than descend to the suffocating coasts where neither
man nor beast could long survive, though they pushed the political
boundary finally to the seaboard. [Map page 101.]
[Sidenote: Movement to better geographic conditions.]
The search for better land, milder climate, and easier conditions of
living starts many a movement of peoples which, in view of their
purpose, necessarily leads them into an environment sharply contrasted
to their original habitat. Such has been the radial outflow of the
Mongoloid tribes down from the rugged highlands of central Asia to the
fertile river lowlands of the peripheral lands; the descent of the Iran
pastors upon the agricultural folk of the Indus, Ganges and Mesopotamian
valleys, and the swoop of desert-born conquerors upon the unresisting
tillers of well-watered fields in all times, from the ancient Hyksos of
the Nile to the modern Fulbe of the Niger Valley.
[Sidenote: Southward and westward drifts in the northern hemisphere.]
The attraction of a milder climate has caused in the northern hemisphere
a constantly recurring migration from north to south. In primitive North
America, along the whole broad Atlantic slope, the predominant direction
of Indian migrations was from north to south, accompanied by a drift
from west to east.[207] On the Pacific side of the continent also the
trend was southward. This is generally conceded regardless of theory as
to whether the Indians first found entrance to the continent at its
northeast or northwest corner. It was a movement toward milder
climates.[208] Study of the _Völkerwanderungen_ in Europe reveals two
currents or drifts in varied combination, one from north to south and
the other from east to west, but both of them aimed at regions of better
climate; for the milder temperature and more abundant rainfall of
western Europe made a country as alluring to the Goths, Huns, Alans,
Slavs, Bulgars and Tartars of Asiatic deserts and Russian steppes, as
were the sunny Mediterranean peninsulas to the dwellers of the bleak
Baltic coasts. This is one geographic fact back of the conspicuous
westward movement formulated into an historical principle: "Westward the
star of empire takes its course." The establishment of European colonies
on the western side of the Atlantic, their extension thence to the
Pacific and ever westward, till European culture was transplanted to the
Philippines by Spain and more recently by the United States, constitute
the most remarkable sustained movement made by any one race.
[Sidenote: Eastward movements.]
But westward movements are not the only ones. On the Pacific slope of
Asia the star has moved eastward. From highland Mongolia issued the
throng which originally populated the lowlands of China; and ever
since, one nomad conqueror after the other has descended thence to rule
the fruitful plains of Chili and the teeming populations of the Yangtze
Valley.[209] Russia, blocked in its hoped for expansion to the west by
the strong powers of central Europe, stretched its dominion eastward to
the Pacific and for a short time over to Alaska. The chief expansion of
the German people and the German Empire in historical times has also
been from west to east; but this eastward advance is probably only
retracing the steps taken by many primitive Teutonic tribes as they
drifted Rhineward from an earlier habitat along the Vistula.
[Sidenote: Return movements.]
Since the world is small, it frequently happens that a people after an
interval of generations, armed with a higher civilization, will reënter
a region which it once left when too crude and untutored to develop the
possibilities of the land, but which its better equipment later enables
it to exploit. Thus we find a backward expansion of the Chinese westward
to the foot of the Pamir, and an internal colonization of the empire to
the Ili feeder of Lake Balkash. The expansion of the Japanese into Korea
and Saghalin is undoubtedly such a return current, after an interval
long enough to work a complete transformation in the primitive
Mongolians who found their way to that island home. Sometimes the return
represents the ebbing of the tide, rather than the back water of a
stream in flood. Such was the retreat of the Moors from Spain to the
Berber districts of North Africa, whither they carried echoes of the
brilliant Saracen civilization in the Iberian Peninsula. Such has been
the gradual withdrawal of the Turks from Europe back to their native
Asia, and slow expulsion of the Tartar tribes from Russia to the barren
Asiatic limits of their former territory. [See map page 225.]
[Sidenote: Regions of attraction and repulsion.]
Voluntary historical movements, seeking congenial or choice regions of
the earth, have left its less favored spots undisturbed. Paucity of
resources and isolation have generally insured to a region a peaceful
history; natural wealth has always brought the conqueror. In ancient
Greece the fruitful plains of Thessaly, Boeotia, Elis and Laconia had a
fatal attraction for every migrating horde; Attica's rugged surface,
poor soil, and side-tracked location off the main line of travel
between Hellas and the Peloponnesus saved it from many a rough
visitant,[210] and hence left the Athenians, according to Thucydides, an
indigenous race. The fertility of the Rhine Valley has always attracted
invasion, the barren Black Forest range has repelled and obstructed it.
The security of such unproductive highlands lies more in their failure
to attract than in their power to resist conquest. When to abundant
natural resources, a single spot adds a reputation for wealth,
magnificence, an exceptional position for the control of territory or
commerce, it becomes a geographical magnet. Such was Delphi for the
Gauls of the Balkan Peninsula in the third century, Rome for the
Germanic and Hunnish tribes of the _Völkerwanderung_, Constantinople for
the Normans, Turks and Russians, Venice for land-locked Austria, the
Mississippi highway and the outlet at New Orleans for our
Trans-Allegheny pioneers.
[Sidenote: Psychical influences in certain movements.]
Sometimes the goal is fabulous or mythical, but potent to lure, like the
land of El Dorado, abounding in gold and jewels, which for two centuries
spurred on Spanish exploration in America. Other than purely material
motives may initiate or maintain such a movement, an ideal or a dream of
good, like the fountain of eternal youth which brought Ponce de Leon to
Florida, the search for the Islands of the Blessed, or the spirit of
religious propaganda which stimulated the spread of the Spanish in
Mexico and the French in Canada, or the hope of religious toleration
which has drawn Quaker, Puritan, Huguenot, and Jew to America. It was an
idea of purely spiritual import which directed the century-long movement
of the Crusades toward Jerusalem, half Latinized the Levant, and widened
the intellectual horizon of Europe. A national or racial sentiment which
enhaloes a certain spot may be pregnant with historical results, because
at any moment it may start some band of enthusiasts on a path of
migration or conquest. The Zionist agitation for the return of oppressed
Jews to Palestine, and the establishment of the Liberian Republic for
the negroes in Africa rest upon such a sentiment. The reverence of the
Christian world for Rome as a goal of pilgrimages materially enhanced
the influence of Italy as a school of culture during the Middle Ages.
The spiritual and ethnic association of the Mohammedan world with Mecca
is always fraught with possible political results. The dominant tribes
of the Sudan, followers of Islam, who proudly trace back a fictitious
line of ancestry to the Arabs of Yemen, are readily incited to support a
new prophet sprung from the race of Mecca.[211] The pilgrimages which the
Buddhists of the Asiatic highlands make to the sacred city of Lhassa
ensure China's control over the restless nomads through the
instrumentality of the Grand Lama of Tibet.
[Sidenote: Results of historical movement.]
Historical movements are varied as to motive, direction, numerical
strength, and character, but their final results are two,
differentiation and assimilation. Both are important phases of the
process of evolution, but the latter gains force with the progress of
history and the increase of the world's population.
[Sidenote: Differentiation and area.]
A people or race which, in its process of numerical growth, spreads over
a large territory subjects itself to a widening range of geographic
conditions, and therefore of differentiation. The broad expansion of the
Teutonic race in Europe, America, Australia and South Africa has brought
it into every variety of habitat. If the territory has a monotonous
relief like Russia, nevertheless, its mere extent involves diversity of
climate and location. The diversity of climate incident to large area
involves in turn different animal and plant life, different crops,
different economic activities. Even in lowlands the relief, geologic
structure, and soil are prone to vary over wide districts. The
monotonous surface of Holland shows such contrasts. So do the North
German lowlands; here the sandy barren flats of the "geest" alternate
with stretches of fertile silt deposited by the rivers or the sea,[212]
and support different types of communities, which have been admirably
described by Gustav Frenssen in his great novel of Jön Uhl. The flat
surface of southern Illinois shows in small compass the teeming
fertility of the famous "American bottom," the poor clay soil of "Egypt"
with its backward population, and the rich prairie land just to the
north with its prosperous and progressive farmer class.
When the relief includes mountains, the character not only of the land
but of the climate changes, and therewith the type of community. Hence
neighboring districts may produce strongly contrasted types of society.
Madison County of Kentucky, lying on the eastern margin of the Bluegrass
region, contains the rich landed estates, negro laboring class and
aristocratic society characteristic of the "planter" communities of the
old South; and only twenty miles southeast of Richmond, the center of
this wealth and refinement, it includes also the rough barren hill
country of the Cumberland Plateau, where are found one-room cabins,
moonshine stills, feuds, and a backward population sprung from the same
pure English stock as the Bluegrass people.
[Sidenote: Contrasted environments.]
Here is differentiation due to the immediate influences of environment.
The phenomenon reappears in every part of the world, in every race and
every age. The contrast between the ancient Greeks of the mountains,
coasts and alluvial valleys shows the power of environment to direct
economic activities and to modify culture and social organization. So
does the differences between the coast, steppe, and forest Indians of
Guiana,[213] the Kirghis of the Pamir pastures and the Irtysh River
valley, the agricultural Berbers of the Atlas Mountains and the Berber
nomads of the Sahara, the Swiss of the high, lonely Engadine and those
of the crowded Aar valley.
Contrasted environments effect a natural selection in another way and
thereby greatly stimulate differentiation, whenever an intruding people
contest the ownership of the territory with the inhabitants. The
struggle for land means a struggle also for the best land, which
therefore falls to the share of the strongest peoples. Weaklings must
content themselves with poor soils, inaccessible regions of mountain,
swamp or desert. There they deteriorate, or at best strike a slower pace
of increase or progress. The difference between the people of the
highlands and plains of Great Britain or of France is therefore in part
a distinction of race due to this geographical selection,[214] in part a
distinction of economic development and culture due to geographic
influences. Therefore the piedmont belts of the world, except in arid
lands, are cultural, ethnic and often political lines of cleavage,
showing marked differentiation on either side. Isotherms are other such
cleavage lines, marking the limits beyond which an aggressive people did
not desire to expand because of an uncongenial climate. The distinction
between Anglo-Saxon and Latin America is one of zone as well as race.
Everywhere in North America the English stock has dominated or displaced
French and Spanish competitors down to the Mexican frontier.
As the great process of European colonization has permeated the earth
and multiplied its population, not only the best land but the amount of
this has commenced to differentiate the history of various European
nations, and that in a way whose end cannot yet be definitely predicted.
The best lands have fallen to the first-comers strong enough to hold
them. People who early develop powers of expansion, like the English, or
who, like the French and Russians, formulate and execute vast
territorial policies, secure for their future growth a wide base which
will for all time distinguish them from late-comers into the colonial
field, like Germany and Italy. These countries see the fecundity of
their people redounding to the benefit of alien colonial lands, which
have been acquired by enterprising rivals in the choice sections of the
temperate zone. German and Italian colonies in torrid, unhealthy, or
barren tropical lands, fail to attract emigrants from the mother
country, and therefore to enhance national growth.
[Sidenote: Two-type populations.]
When colonizers or conquerors appropriate the land of a lower race, we
find a territory occupied at least for a time by two types of
population, constituting an ethnic, social and often economic
differentiation. The separation may be made geographical also. The
Indians in the United States have been confined to reservations, like
the Hottentots to the twenty or more "locations" in Cape Colony. This is
the simplest arrangement. Whether the second or lower type survives
depends upon their economic and social utility, into which again
geographic conditions enter. The Indians of Canada are a distinct
economic factor in that country as trappers for the Hudson Bay Company,
and they will so remain till the hunting grounds of the far north are
exhausted. The native agriculturists in the Tropics are indispensable to
the unacclimated whites. The negroes of the South, introduced for an
economic purpose, find their natural habitat in the Black Belt. Here we
have an ethnic division of labor for geographical reasons. Castes or
social classes, often distinguished by shades of color as in Brahman
India, survive as differentiations indicating old lines of race
cleavage. There is abundant evidence that the upper classes in Germany,
France, Austria, and the British Isles are distinctly lighter of hair
and eyes than the peasantry.[215] The high-class Japanese are taller and
fairer than the masses. Nearly all the African tribes of the Sudan and
bordering Sahara include two distinct classes, one of lighter and one of
darker shade. Many Fulbe tribes distinguish these classes by the names
of "Blacks" and "Whites."[216] The two-type people are the result of
historical movements.
[Sidenote: Differentiation and isolation.]
Differentiation results not only from contrasted geographic conditions,
but also from segregation. A moving or expanding throng in search of
more and better lands drops off one group to occupy a fertile valley or
plain, while the main body goes on its way, till it reaches a
satisfactory destination or destinations. The tendency to split and
divide, characteristic of primitive peoples, is thus stimulated by
migration and expansion. Each offshoot, detached from the main body,
tends to diverge from the stock type. If it reaches a naturally isolated
region, where its contact without is practically cut off, it grows from
its own loins, emphasizes its group characteristic by close in-breeding,
and tends to show a development related to biological divergence under
conditions of isolation. Since man is essentially a gregarious animal,
the size of every such migrating band will always prevent the evolution
of any sharply defined variety, according to the standard of biology.
Nevertheless, the divergent types of men and societies developed in
segregated regions are an echo of the formation of new species under
conditions of isolation which is now generally acknowledged by
biological science. Isolation was recognized by Darwin as an occasional
factor in the origin of species and especially of divergence; in
combination with migration it was made the basis of a theory of
evolution by Moritz Wagner in 1873;[217] and in recent years has come to
be regarded as an essential in the explanation of divergence of types,
as opposed to differentiation.[218]
[Sidenote: Differentiation and digression.]
The traditions of the Delaware Indians and Sioux in the north of the
United States territory, and of the Creeks in the south, commence with
each stock group as a united body, which, as it migrates, splits into
tribes and sends out offshoots developing different dialects. Here was
tribal differentiation after entry into the general stock area, the
process going on during migration as well as after the tribes had become
established in their respective habitats. Culture, however, made little
progress till after they became sedentary and took up agriculture to
supplement the chase.[219] Tribes sometimes wander far beyond the limits
of their stock, like the Iroquoian Cherokees of East Tennessee and North
Carolina or the Athapascan Navajos and Apaches of arid New Mexico and
Arizona, who had placed twenty or thirty degrees of latitude between
themselves and their brethren in the basins of the Yukon and Mackenzie
rivers. Such inevitably come into contrasted climatic conditions, which
further modify the immigrants. [See map page 54.]
Wide digressions differentiate them still further from the parent stock
by landing them amid different ethnic and social groups, by contact with
whom they are inevitably modified. The Namaqua Hottentots, living on the
southern margin of the Hottentot country near the frontier of the
European settlements in Cape Colony, acquired some elements of
civilization, together with a strain of Boer and English blood, and in
some cases even the Dutch vernacular. They were therefore differentiated
from their nomadic and warlike kinsmen in the grasslands north of the
Orange River, which formed the center of the Hottentot area.[220] A view
of the ancient Germans during the first five or six centuries after
Christ reveals differentiation by various contacts in process along all
the ragged borders of the Germanic area. The offshoots who pushed
westward across the Rhine into Belgian Gaul were rapidly Celticized,
abandoning their semi-nomadic life for sedentary agriculture,
assimilating the superior civilization which they found there, and
steadily merging with the native population. They became _Belgae_,
though still conscious of their Teutonic origin.[221] The Batavians, an
offshoot of the ancient Chatti living near the Thuringian Forest,
appropriated the river island between the Rhine and the Waal. There in
the seclusion of their swamps, they became a distinct national unit,
retaining their backward German culture and primitive type of German
speech, which the Chatti themselves lost by contact with the High
Germans.[222] Far away on the southeastern margin of the Teutonic area
the same process of assimilation to a foreign civilization went on a
little later when the Visigoths, after a century of residence on the
lower Danube in contact with the Eastern Empire, adopted the Arian form
of Christianity which had arisen in the Greek peninsula.[223] The border
regions of the world show the typical results of the historical
movement--differentiation from the core or central group through
assimilation to a new group which meets and blends with it along the
frontier.
[Sidenote: Geographic conditions of heterogeneity and homogeneity.]
Entrance into a naturally isolated district, from which subsequent
incursions are debarred, gives conditions for divergence and the
creation of a new type. On the other hand, where few physical barriers
are present to form these natural pockets, the process of assimilation
goes on over a wide field. Europe is peculiar among the family of
continents for its "much divided" geography, commented upon by Strabo.
Hence its islands, peninsulas and mountain-rimmed basins have produced a
variegated assemblage of peoples, languages and culture. Only where it
runs off into the monotonous immensity of Russia do we find a people who
in their physical traits, language, and civilization reflect the
uniformity of their environment.[224]
Africa's smooth outline, its plateau surface rimmed with mountains which
enclose but fail to divide, and its monotonous configuration have
produced a racial and cultural uniformity as striking as Europe's
heterogeneity. Constant movements and commixture, migration and
conquest, have been the history of the black races, varied by victorious
incursions of the Hamitic and Semitic whites from the north, which,
however, have resulted in the amalgamation of the two races after
conquest.[225] Constant fusion has leveled also the social and political
relations of the people to one type; it has eliminated primordial
groups, except where the dwarf hunters have taken refuge in the
equatorial forests and the Bushmen in the southwestern deserts, just as
it has thwarted the development of higher social groups by failure to
segregate and protect. It has sown the Bantu speech broadcast over the
immense area of Central Africa, and is disseminating the Hausa language
through the agency of a highly mixed commercial folk over a wide tract
of the western Sudan. The long east-and-west stretch of the Sudan
grasslands presents an unobstructed zone between the thousand-mile belt
of desert to the north and the dense equatorial forests to the south,
between hunger and thirst on one side, heat and fever and impenetrable
forests on the other. Hence the Sudan in all history has been the
crowded Broadway of Africa. Here pass commercial caravans, hybrid
merchant tribes like the Hausa, throngs of pilgrims, streams of peoples,
herds of cattle moving to busy markets, rude incursive shoppers or
looters from the desert, coming to buy or rob or rule in this highway
belt. [See map page 105.]
[Sidenote: Differentiation versus assimilation.]
Historical development advances by means of differentiation and
assimilation. A change of environment stimulates variation. Primitive
culture is loath to change; its inertia is deep-seated. Only a sharp
prod will start it moving or accelerate its speed; such a prod is found
in new geographic conditions or new social contacts. Divergence in a
segregated spot may be overdone. Progress crawls among a people too long
isolated, though incipient civilization thrives for a time in seclusion.
But in general, accessibility, exposure to some measure of ethnic
amalgamation and social contact is essential to sustained progress.[226]
As the world has become more closely populated and means of
communication have improved, geographical segregation is increasingly
rare. The earth has lost its "corners." All parts are being drawn into
the circle of intercourse. Therefore differentiation, the first effect
of the historical movement, abates; the second effect, assimilation,
takes the lead.
[Sidenote: Elimination by historical movement.]
The ceaseless human movements making for new combinations have
stimulated development. They have lifted the level of culture, and
worked towards homogeneity of race and civilization on a higher plane.
Since the period of the great discoveries inaugurated by Columbus
enabled the historical movement to compass the world, whole continents,
like North America and Australia, have been reclaimed to civilization by
colonization. The process of assimilation is often ruthless in its
method. Hence it has been attended by a marked reduction in the number
of different ethnic stocks, tribes, languages, dialects, social and
cultural types through wide-spread elimination of the weak, backward or
unfit.[227] These have been wiped out, either by extermination or the
slower process of absorption. The Indian linguistic stocks in the United
States have been reduced from fifty-three to thirty-two; and of those
thirty-two, many survive as a single tribe or the shrinking remnant of
one.[228] In Africa the slave trade has caused the annihilation of many
small tribes.[229] The history of the Hottentots, who have been passive
before the active advance of the English, Dutch and Kaffirs about them,
shows a race undergoing a widespread process of hybridization[230] and
extermination.[231]
Strong peoples, like the English, French, Russians and Chinese, occupy
ever larger areas. Where an adverse climate precludes genuine
colonization, as it did for the Spanish in Central and South America,
and for the English and Dutch in the Indies, they make their
civilization, if not their race, permeate the acquired territory, and
gradually impose on it their language and economic methods. The Poles,
who once boasted a large and distinguished nationality, are being
Germanized and Russified to their final national extinction. The Finns,
whose Scandinavian offshoot has been almost absorbed in Sweden,[232] are
being forcibly dissolved in the Muscovite dominion by powerful reägents,
by Russian schoolmasters, a Russian priesthood, Russian military
service.
[Sidenote: No new ethnic types.]
No new types of races have been developed either by amalgamation or by
transfer to new climatic and economic conditions in historic times.
Contrasted geographic conditions long ago lost their power to work
radical physical changes in the race type, because man even with the
beginnings of civilization learned to protect himself against extremes
of climate. He therefore preserved his race type, which consequently in
the course of ages lost much of its plasticity and therewith its
capacity to evolve new varieties.[233] Where ethnic amalgamations on a
large scale have occurred as a result of the historical movement, as in
Mexico, the Sudan and Central Africa, the local race, being numerically
stronger than the intruders and better adapted to the environment, has
succeeded in maintaining its type, though slightly modified, side by
side with the intruders. The great historical movements of modern times,
however, have been the expansion of European peoples over the retarded
regions of the world. These peoples, coming into contact with inferior
races, and armed generally with a race pride which was antagonistic to
hybrid marriages, preserved their blood from extensive intermixture.
Hybridism, where it existed, was an ephemeral feature restricted to
pioneer days, when white women were scarce, or to regions of extreme
heat or cold, where white women and children could with difficulty
survive. Even in Spanish America, where ethnic blendings were most
extensive, something of the old Spanish pride of race has reasserted
itself.
[Sidenote: Checks to differentiation.]
Improved communication maintains or increases the ranks of the intruders
from the home supply. The negroes in North America, imported as they
were _en masse_, then steadily recruited by two centuries of the slave
trade, while their race integrity was somewhat protected by social
ostracism, have not been seriously modified physically by several
generations of residence in a temperate land. Their changes have been
chiefly cultural. The Englishman has altered only superficially in the
various British colonial lands. Constant intercourse and the progress of
inventions have enabled him to maintain in diverse regions approximate
uniformity of physical well-being, similar social and political ideals.
The changed environment modifies him in details of thought, manner, and
speech, but not in fundamentals.
Moreover, civilized man spreading everywhere and turning all parts of
the earth's surface to his uses, has succeeded to some extent in
reducing its physical differences. The earth as modified by human action
is a conspicuous fact of historical development.[234] Irrigation,
drainage, fertilization of soils, terrace agriculture, denudation of
forests and forestration of prairies have all combined to diminish the
contrasts between diverse environments, while the acclimatization of
plants, animals and men works even more plainly to the same end of
uniformity. The unity of the human race, varied only by superficial
differences, reflects the unity of the spherical earth, whose
diversities of geographical feature nowhere depart greatly from the mean
except in point of climate. Differentiation due to geography, therefore,
early reached its limits. For assimilation no limit can be forseen.
[Sidenote: Geographical origins.]
In view of this constant differentiation on the one hand, and
assimilation on the other, the historical movement has made it difficult
to trace race types to their origin; and yet this is a task in which
geography must have a hand. Borrowed civilizations and purloined
languages are often so many disguises which conceal the truth of ethnic
relationships. A long migration to a radically different habitat, into
an outskirt or detached location protected from the swamping effects of
cross-breeding, results eventually in a divergence great enough to
obliterate almost every cue to the ancient kinship. The long-headed
Teutonic race of northern Europe is regarded now by ethnologists as an
offshoot of the long-headed brunette Mediterranean race of African
origin, which became bleached out under the pale suns of Scandinavian
skies. The present distribution of the various Teutonic stocks is a
geographical fact; their supposed cradle in the Mediterranean basin is a
geographical hypothesis. The connecting links must also be geographical.
They must prove the former presence of the migrating folk in the
intervening territory. A dolichocephalic substratum of population, with
a negroid type of skull, has in fact been traced by archaeologists all
over Europe through the early and late Stone Ages. The remains of these
aboriginal inhabitants are marked in France, even in sparsely tenanted
districts like the Auvergne Plateau, which is now occupied by the
broad-headed Alpine race; and they are found to underlie, in point of
time, other brachycephalic areas, like the Po Valley, Bavaria and
Russia.[235]
The origin of a people can be investigated and stated only in terms of
geography. The problem of origin can be solved only by tracing a people
from its present habitat, through the country over which it has
migrated, back to its original seat. Here are three geographical
entities which can be laid down upon a map, though seldom with sharply
defined boundaries. They represent three successive geographic
locations, all embodying geographic conditions potent to influence the
people and their movement. Hence the geographical element emerges in
every investigation as to origins; whether in ethnology, history,
philology, mythology or religion. The transit land, the course between
start and finish, is of supreme importance. Especially is this true for
religion, which is transformed by travel. Christianity did not conquer
the world in the form in which it issued from the cramped and isolated
environment of Palestine, but only after it had been remodelled in Asia
Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and cosmopolized in the wide contact of
the Mediterranean basin. The Roman speech and civilization, which spread
through the Romance speaking peoples of Europe, were variously diluted
and alloyed before being transplanted by French, Spaniard and Portuguese
to American shores, there to be further transformed.
[Sidenote: Large centers of dispersion.]
In view of the countless springs and tributaries that combine to swell
the current of every historical movement, anthropo-geography looks for
the origin of a people not in a narrowly defined area, but in a broad,
ill-defined center of dispersion, from which many streams simultaneously
and successively flow out as from a low-rimmed basin, and which has been
filled from many remoter sources. Autochthones, aborigines are therefore
merely scientific tropes, indicating the limit beyond which the movement
of people cannot be traced in the gray light of an uncertain dawn. The
vaguer and more complex these movements on account of their historical
remoteness, the wider their probable range. The question as to the
geographical origin of the Aryan linguistic family of peoples brings us
to speculative sources, more or less scientifically based, reaching from
Scandinavia and Lithuania to the Hindu Kush Mountains and northern
Africa.[236] The sum total of all these conjectural cradles, amounting
to a large geographical area, would more nearly approximate the truth as
to Aryan origins. For the study of the historical movement makes it
clear that a large, highly differentiated ethnic or linguistic family
presupposes a big center end a long period of dispersion, protracted
wanderings, and a diversified area both for their migrations and
successive settlements.
[Sidenote: Small centers.]
The slighter the inner differences in an ethnic stock, whether in
culture, language or physical traits, the smaller was their center of
distribution and the more rapid their dispersal. The small initial
habitat restricts the chances of variation through isolation and
contrasted geographic conditions, as does also the short duration of
their subsequent separation. The amazing uniformity of the Eskimo type
from Bering Strait to eastern Greenland can only thus be explained, even
after making allowance for the monotony of their geographic conditions
and remoteness from outside influences. The distribution of the Bantu
dialects over so wide a region in Central Africa and with such slight
divergences presupposes narrow limits both of space and time for their
origin, and a short period since their dispersal.[237]
Small centers of dispersion are generally natural districts with fixed
boundaries, favored by their geographical location or natural resources
or by both for the development of a relatively dense population. When
this increases beyond the local limits of subsistence, there follows an
emigration in point of number and duration out of all proportion to the
small area whence it issues. Ancient Phoenicia, Crete, Samos, mediæval
Norway, Venice, Yemen, modern Malta, Gilbert Islands, England and Japan
furnish examples. Such small favored areas, when they embody also strong
political power, may get the start in the occupation of colonial lands.
This gives them a permanent advantage, if their colonies are chosen with
a view to settlement in congenial climates, as were those of the
English, rather than the more ephemeral advantage of trade, as were
those of the Dutch and Portuguese in the Tropics. It seems also
essential to these centers of dispersion, that, to be effective, they
must command the wide choice of outlet and destination afforded by the
mighty common of the sea. Only the Inca Empire in South America gives
us an example of the extensive political expansion of a small mountain
state.
[Sidenote: Tests of origin.]
The question arises whether any single rule can as yet be formulated for
identifying the original seats of existing peoples. By some ethnologists
and historians such homes have been sought where the people are
distributed in the largest area, as the Athapascan and Algonquin Indians
are assigned to a northern source, because their territories attained
their greatest continuous extent in Canada, but were intermittent or
attenuated farther south. The fact that colonial peoples often multiply
inordinately in new lands, and there occupy a territory vastly greater
than that of the mother country, points to the danger in such a
generalization. Of the ten millions of Jews in the world, only a handful
remain in the ancient center of dispersion in Palestine, while about
eight millions are found in Poland and the contiguous territories of
western Russia, Roumania, Austria-Hungary and eastern Germany. Moreover,
history and the German element in the "Yiddish" speech of the Russian
Jews point to a secondary center of dispersion in the Rhine cities and
Franconia, whither the Jews were drawn by the trade route up the Rhone
Valley in the third century.[238]
A more scientific procedure is to look for the early home of a race in
the locality around which its people or family of peoples centers in
modern times. Therefore we place the cradle of the negro race in Africa,
rather than Melanesia. Density often supplies a test, because colonial
lands are generally more sparsely inhabited than the mother country. But
even this conclusion fails always to apply, as in the case of Samos,
which has a population vastly more dense than any section of the Grecian
mainland. The largest compact area including at once the greatest
density of population and the greatest purity of race would more nearly
indicate the center of dispersion; because purity of race is
incompatible with long migrations, as we have seen, though in the native
seat it may be affected by intrusive elements. When this purity of race
is combined with archaic forms of language and culture, as among the
Lithuanians of Aryan speech among the Baltic swamps, it may indicate
that the locality formed a segregated corner of the early center of
dispersion. It seems essential to such an original seat that, whether
large or small, it should be marked by some degree of isolation, as the
condition for the development of specific racial characteristics.
The complexity of this question of ethnic origins is typical of
anthropo-geographic problems, typical also in the warning which it gives
against any rigidly systematic method of solution. The whole science of
anthropo-geography is as yet too young for hard-and-fast rules, and its
subject matter too complex for formulas.
NOTES TO CHAPTER IV
[126] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 179-187. London,
1904. W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 306-310, 319-326. New York,
1899.
[127] Compare observations of Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa,
Vol. I, pp. 312-313. London, 1873.
[128] Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. lvii. Philadelphia, 1868.
[129] D.M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 151-155. New York, 1904.
[130] Thucydides, Book I, chap. II.
[131] Strabo, Book II, chap. III, 7.
[132] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 408-414, Vol. XIX
of _History of North America_, edited by T.N. Thorpe. Philadelphia,
1905.
[133] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 214. Oxford, 1892.
[134] Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, p. 587. New York, 1872.
[135] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 116-119. Philadelphia, 1901.
[136] O.T. Mason, Primitive Travel and Transportation, pp. 249-250.
_Smithsonian Report_, Washington, 1896.
[137] Thucydides, Book I, chap. II.
[138] Edward A. Boss, Foundations of Sociology, pp. 359-363, 386-389.
New York, 1905.
[139] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 73-75. Philadelphia, 1901.
[140] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 9-11,
45-46, 52-54, 57, 62. London, 1904.
[141] James Bryce, The Migration of the Races of Men Considered
Historically, _Scottish Geographical Magazine_, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421,
and _Smithsonian Report_ for 1893, pp. 567-588.
[142] Cæsar, _De Bello Gallico_, Book II, chap. 29.
[143] Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, Vol. I, p. 5. New York, 1883.
[144] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, p. 46. London,
1904.
[145] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. V, pp. 99-101. Oxford,
1895.
[146] _Ibid._, Vol. V, pp. 156-157.
[147] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, pp. 107, 195. Oxford,
1892.
[148] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 219-223, 230.
[149] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 276-277. New York, 1899.
[150] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, pp. 214-219. Oxford,
1892.
[151] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 296. London, 1896-1898.
[152] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 408-412, Vol. XIX
of _History of North America._ Philadelphia, 1905.
[153] Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, p. 858. New York, 1902.
[154] Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues,_ pp. 44-48.
Stuttgart, 1888.
[155] Cyrus Thomas, The Indians of North America in Historical Times, p.
261. Vol. II of _History of North America,_ Philadelphia, 1903.
[156] Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 134-135, 250. New
York, 1895. Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 16. Boston, 1899.
[157] Eleventh Census, _Report on the Indians_, p. 54. Washington, 1894.
[158] _Ibid._, p. 531.
[159] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, p. 411. New York,
1902-1906.
[160] Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol.
II, pp. 57-58. Oxford, 1899.
[161] _II Kings_, Chap. XVII, 6-24.
[162] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 432-434. New York, 1899.
[163] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. V, pp. 353-354. New York,
1902-1906.
[164] _Ibid._, Vol. VI, p. 15.
[165] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 247. London, 1902.
[166] Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. I, p. 248. New York, 1895.
[167] C.C. Royce, The Cherokee Nation of Indians, pp. 130-131. Maps VIII
and IX. _Fifth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology_, Washington, 1887.
[168] Albert Gallatin, Report on the Indians in 1836, reprinted in
Eleventh Census, _Report on the Indians_, p. 33. Washington, 1894.
[169] Cyrus Thomas, Indians of North America in Historical Times, pp.
94, 96. Vol. II of _History of North America_, Philadelphia, 1903.
[170] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 100-101.
[171] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. III, pp.
333-334. New York, 1902.
[172] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 437-438. New York, 1899.
[173] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 115-116. Philadelphia, 1901.
[174] H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. III, pp. 559, 635-638. San
Francisco, 1886.
[175] Cyrus Thomas, Indians of North America in Historical Times, pp.
381-382, Vol. II of _History of North America_. Philadelphia, 1903.
[176] Eleventh Census, _Report on the Indians_, p. 35. Washington, 1894.
[177] Eleventh Census, _Report on Population_, Vol. I, p. cxxxviii.
Washington, 1894.
[178] Justus Perthes, _Taschen Atlas_, p. 38. Gotha, 1905.
[179] Richmond Mayo-Smith, Emigration and Immigration, p. 24. New York.
[180] _Ibid._, pp. 79-80, 113-115.
[181] Capt. A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 27-28.
Boston, 1902.
[182] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 247, 272-274. New York, 1899.
[183] Cæsar, _Bella Gallico_, Book III, chap. I.
[184] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 34-43.
Oxford, 1892.
[185] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 242, 245, 250, 257.
London, 1896-1898.
[186] John Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, pp. 316-317. Boston,
1893.
[187] Elliott Coues, History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Vol. I.
pp. 193-198, 203-212, 240. New York, 1893.
[188] Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, pp.
39-40, Note 2. Boston, 1904.
[189] George G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 56-57. London, 1904.
[190] Herodotus, Book II, 60.
[191] Encyclopædia Britanica, Article Pilgrimages.
[192] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 88. Boston, 1907.
[193] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 3-7.
London, 1907.
[194] C.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, pp. 3-4,
144-145, 280-284. London, 1906.
[195] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191. Map p.
190. New York and London, 1902-1906.
[196] J.W. Powell, Map of Linguistic Stocks of American Indians, Annual
Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Vol. VII.
[197] Archibald Little, The Far East, Ethnological Map, p. 8. Oxford,
1905.
[198] Census of India, 1901, General Report by H.H. Risley and E.A.
Gait, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 500-504; and Ethnographic Appendices by H.H.
Risley, Vol. I, map, p. 60. Calcutta, 1903. P. Vidal de la Blache, _Le
Peuple de l'Inde, d'après la série des recensements_, pp. 431-434,
_Annales de Géographie_, Vol. XV. Paris, 1906.
[199] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 422, 424,
434-436. New York, 1902-1906.
[200] D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 97-102. New York, 1858.
[201] James Bryce, Migrations of the Races of Men Considered
Historically, _Scottish Geographical Magazine_, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421,
May, 1892.
[202] Justus Perthes, _Taschen Atlas_, p. 78. Gotha, 1905.
[203] _Ibid._, p. 80.
[204] Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, p. 878. New York, 1902.
[205] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191. New York,
1902-1906.
[206] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. VI, pp. 23-27, 38-42, 63-68,
83-87. Oxford, 1896.
[207] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, Chap. XXI, Vol. XIX
of _History of North America_, Philadelphia, 1905.
[208] _Ibid._, pp. 83, 87, Map of Migrations, p. 3.
[209] Archibald Little, The Far East, pp. 34-38. Oxford, 1905.
[210] Strabo, Book VIII, chap. I, 2.
[211] Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. II, p.
548. New York, 1857.
[212] Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 104-105. London, 1903.
[213] E.F. im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 167-171, 202-207.
London, 1883.
[214] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 237. New York, 1899.
[215] _Ibid._, p. 469.
[216] H. Barth, Human Society in Northern Central Africa, _Journal of
the Royal Geog. Society_, Vol. XXX, p. 116. London, 1860.
[217] Moritz Wagner, _Die Entstehung der Arten durch räumliche
Sonderung_. Basel, 1889.
[218] H.W. Conn, The Method of Evolution, pp. 282-295. New York, 1900.
[219] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 418, 424, Vol.
XIX of _History of North America_. Philadelphia, 1905.
[220] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 280-283. London,
1896-1898.
[221] Cæsar, _Bella Gallico_, Book II, chap. IV.
[222] H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 32-33. New York,
1902-1906.
[223] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 75, 81, 82.
Oxford, 1895.
[224] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 34, 341-342. New York, 1899.
[225] H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 400, 417, New
York, 1902-1906.
[226] A.C. Haddon, The Study of Man, p. xix. New York and London, 1898.
[227] James Bryce, Migrations of the Races of Men Considered
Historically, _Scottish Geographical Magazine_, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421.
May, 1892.
[228] Eleventh Census, _Report on the Indians_, pp. 34-35. Washington,
1894.
[229] H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, p. 42. New York,
1902-1906.
[230] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 279-283, London, 1896-98.
[231] Jerome Dowd, The Negro Races, Vol. I, pp. 47-48, 61-62. New York,
1907.
[232] Sweden, Its People and Its Industries, p. 93. Edited by G.
Sundbärg, Stockholm, 1904.
[233] Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 589-593. New York, 1872.
[234] G.P. Marsh, The Earth as Modified by Human Action, New York, 1877.
[235] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 261-267. New York, 1899.
[236] _Ibid._, pp. 475-485.
[237] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 402-405. London,
1896-1898.
[238] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 371-372. Map, p. 374. New York.
1899.
CHAPTER V
GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION
[Sidenote: Importance of geographical location.]
The location of a country or people is always the supreme geographical
fact in its history. It outweighs every other single geographic force.
All that has been said of Russia's vast area, of her steppes and tundra
wastes, of her impotent seaboard on land-locked basins or ice-bound
coasts, of her poverty of mountains and wealth of rivers, fades into the
background before her location on the border of Asia. From her defeat by
the Tartar hordes in 1224 to her attack upon the Mongolian rulers of the
Bosporus in 1877, and her recent struggle with Japan, most of her wars
have been waged against Asiatics. Location made her the bulwark of
Central Europe against Asiatic invasion and the apostle of Western
civilization to the heart of Asia. If this position on the outskirts of
Europe, remote from its great centers of development, has made Russia
only partially accessible to European culture and, furthermore, has
subjected her to the retarding ethnic and social influences emanating
from her Asiatic neighbors,[239] and if the rough tasks imposed by her
frontier situation have hampered her progress, these are all the
limitations of her geographical location, limitations which not even the
advantage of her vast area has been able to outweigh.
Area itself, important as it is, must yield to location. Location may
mean only a single spot, and yet from this spot powerful influences may
radiate. No one thinks of size when mention is made of Rome or Athens,
of Jerusalem or Mecca, of Gibraltar or Port Arthur. Iceland and
Greenland guided early Norse ships to the continent of America, as the
Canaries and Antilles did those of Spain; but the location of the
smaller islands in sub-tropical latitudes and in the course of the
northeast trade-winds made them determine the first permanent path
across the western seas.
The historical significance of many small peoples, and the historical
insignificance of many big ones even to the _nil_ point, is merely the
expression of the preponderant importance of location over area. The
Phoenicians, from their narrow strip of coast at the foot of Mount
Lebanon, were disseminators of culture over the whole Mediterranean.
Holland owed her commercial and maritime supremacy, from the thirteenth
to the middle of the seventeenth century, to her exceptional position at
the mouth of the great Rhine highway and at the southern angle of the
North Sea near the entrance to the unexploited regions of the Baltic.
The Iroquois tribes, located where the Mohawk Valley opened a way
through the Appalachian barrier between the Hudson River and Lake
Ontario, occupied both in the French wars and in the Revolution a
strategic position which gave them a power and importance out of all
proportion to their numbers.
Location often assumes a fictitious political value, due to a
combination of political interests. The Turkish power owes its survival
on the soil of Europe to-day wholly to its position on the Bosporus.
Holland owes the integrity of her kingdom, and Roumania that of hers, to
their respective locations at the mouths of the Rhine and the Danube,
because the interest of western Europe demands that these two important
arteries of commerce should be held by powers too weak ever to tie them
up. The same principle has guaranteed the neutrality of Switzerland,
whose position puts it in control of the passes of the Central Alps from
Savoy to the Tyrol; and, more recently, that of the young state of
Panama, through which the Isthmian Canal is to pass.
[Sidenote: Content of the term location.]
Geographical location necessarily includes the idea of the size and form
of a country. Even the most general statement of the zonal and
interoceanic situation of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the
Russian Empire, indicates the area and contour of their territories.
This is still more conspicuously the case with naturally defined
regions, such as island and peninsula countries. But location includes a
complex of yet larger and more potent relations which go with mere
attachment to this or that continent, or to one or another side of a
continent. Every part of the world gives to its lands and its people
some of its own qualities; and so again every part of this part.
Arabia, India and Farther India, spurs of the Asiatic land-mass, have
had and will always have a radically different ethnic and political
history from Greece, Italy and Spain, the corresponding peninsulas of
Europe, because the histories of these two groups are bound up in their
respective continents. The idea of a European state has a different
content from that of an Asiatic, or North American or African state; it
includes a different race or combination of races, different social and
economic development, different political ideals. Location, therefore,
means climate and plant life at one end of the scale, civilization and
political status at the other.
[Sidenote: Intercontinental location.]
This larger conception of location brings a correspondingly larger
conception of environment, which affords the solution of many otherwise
hopeless problems of anthropo-geography. It is embodied in the law that
the influences of a land upon its people spring not only from the
physical features of the land itself, but also from a wide circle of
lands into which it has been grouped by virtue of its location. Almost
every geographical interpretation of the ancient and modern history of
Greece has been inadequate, because it has failed sufficiently to
emphasize the most essential factor in this history, namely, Greece's
location at the threshold of the Orient. This location has given to
Greek history a strong Asiatic color. It comes out in the accessibility
of Greece to ancient Oriental civilization and commerce, and is
conspicuous in every period from the Argonautic Expedition to the
achievement of independence in 1832 and the recent efforts for the
liberation of Crete. This outpost location before the Mediterranean
portals of the vast and arid plains of southwestern Asia, exposed to
every tide of migration or conquest sent out by those hungry lands, had
in it always an element of weakness. In comparison with the shadow of
Asia, which constantly overhung the Greek people and from 1401 to 1832
enveloped them, only secondary importance can be attributed to
advantageous local conditions as factors in Greek history.
It is a similar intercontinental location in the isthmian region between
the Mediterranean on the west and the ancient maritime routes of the
Red Sea and Persian Gulf on the east, which gave to Phoenicia the office
of middleman between the Orient and Occident,[240] and predestined its
conquest, now by the various Asiatic powers of Mesopotamia, now by the
Pharaohs of Egypt, now by European Greeks and Romans, now by a
succession of Asiatic peoples, till to-day we find it incorporated in
the Asiatic-European Empire of Turkey. Proximity to Africa has closely
allied Spain to the southern continent in flora, fauna, and ethnic
stock. The long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race occupies the Iberian
Peninsula and the Berber territory of northwest Africa.[241] This
community of race is also reflected in the political union of the two
districts for long periods, first under the Carthaginians, then the
Romans, who secured Hispania by a victory on African soil, and finally
by the Saracens. This same African note in Spanish history recurs to-day
in Spain's interest in Morocco and the influence in Moroccan affairs
yielded her by France and Germany at the Algeciras convention in 1905,
and in her ownership of Ceuta and five smaller _presidios_ on the
Moroccan coast. Compare Portugal's former ownership of Tangier.
In contradistinction to continental and intercontinental location,
anthropo-geography recognizes two other narrower meanings of the term.
The innate mobility of the human race, due primarily to the eternal
food-quest and increase of numbers, leads a people to spread out over a
territory till they reach the barriers which nature has set up, or meet
the frontiers of other tribes and nations. Their habitat or their
specific geographic location is thus defined by natural features of
mountain, desert and sea, or by the neighbors whom they are unable to
displace, or more often by both.
[Sidenote: Natural versus vicinal location.]
A people has, therefore, a twofold location, an immediate one, based
upon their actual territory, and a mediate or vicinal one, growing out
of its relations to the countries nearest them. The first is a question
of the land under their feet; the other, of the neighbors about them.
The first or natural location embodies the complex of local geographic
conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national
existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an oasis,
an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The stronger
the vicinal location, the more dependent is the people upon the
neighboring states, but the more potent the influence which it can,
under certain circumstances, exert upon them. Witness Germany in
relation to Holland, France, Austria and Poland. The stronger the
natural location, on the other hand, the more independent is the people
and the more strongly marked is the national character. This is
exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia
and Nepal; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain and Scandinavia; and of
islands like England and Japan. To-day we stand amazed at that strong
primordial brand of the Japanese character which nothing can blur or
erase.
[Sidenote: Naturally defined location.]
Clearly defined natural locations, in which barriers of mountains and
sea draw the boundaries and guarantee some degree of isolation, tend to
hold their people in a calm embrace, to guard them against outside
interference and infusion of foreign blood, and thus to make them
develop the national genius in such direction as the local geographic
conditions permit. In the unceasing movements which have made up most of
the historic and prehistoric life of the human race, in their migrations
and counter-migrations, their incursions, retreats, and expansions over
the face of the earth, vast unfenced areas, like the open lowlands of
Russia and the grasslands of Africa, present the picture of a great
thoroughfare swept by pressing throngs. Other regions, more secluded,
appear as quiet nooks, made for a temporary halt or a permanent rest.
Here some part of the passing human flow is caught as in a vessel and
held till it crystallizes into a nation. These are the conspicuous areas
of race characterization. The development of the various ethnic and
political offspring of the Roman Empire in the naturally defined areas
of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and France illustrates the process of
national differentiation which goes on in such secluded locations.
A marked influence upon this development is generally ascribed to the
protection afforded by such segregated districts. But protection alone
is only a negative force in the life of a people; it leaves them free to
develop in their own way, but does not say what that way shall be. On
the other hand, the fact that such a district embraces a certain number
of geographic features, and encompasses them by obstructive boundaries,
is of immense historical importance; because this restriction leads to
the concentration of the national powers, to the more thorough
utilization of natural advantages, both racial and geographical, and
thereby to the growth of an historical individuality. Nothing robs the
historical process of so much of its greatness or weakens so much its
effects as its dispersion over a wide, boundless area. This was the
disintegrating force which sapped the strength of the French colonies in
America. The endless valleys of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi and
the alluring fur trade tempted them to an expansion that was their
political and economic undoing. Russia's history illustrates the curse
of a distant horizon. On the other hand, out of a restricted
geographical base, with its power to concentrate and intensify the
national forces, grew Rome and Greece, England and Japan, ancient Peru
and the Thirteen Colonies of America.
[Sidenote: Vicinal location.]
If even the most detached and isolated of these natural locations be
examined, its people will, nevertheless, reveal a transitional
character, intermediate between those of its neighbors, because from
these it has borrowed both ethnic stock and culture, Great Britain is an
island, but its vicinal location groups it with the North Sea family of
people. Even in historic times it has derived ancient Belgian stock,
Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Scandinavian from the long semi-circle of
nearby continental lands, which have likewise contributed so much to the
civilization of the island. Similarly, Japan traces the sources of its
population to the north of Asia by way of the island of Sakhalin, to the
west through Korea, and to the Malay district of the south, whence the
Kuro Siwa has swept stragglers to the shores of Kiu-siu. Like England,
Japan also has drawn its civilization from its neighbors, and then,
under the isolating influence of its local environment, has
individualized both race and culture. Here we have the interplay of the
forces of natural and vicinal location.
A people situated between two other peoples form an ethnic and cultural
link between the two. The transitional type is as familiar in
anthropo-geography as in biology. The only exception is found in the
young intrusion of a migrating or conquering people, like that of the
Hungarians and Turks in southeastern Europe, and of the Berger Tuaregs
and Fulbes among the negroes of western Sudan; or of a colonizing
people, like that of the Russians in Mongolian Siberia and of Europeans
among the aborigines of South Africa. Even in these instances race
amalgamation tends to take place along the frontiers, as was the case in
Latin America and as occurs to-day in Alaska and northern Canada, where
the "squaw man" is no rarity. The assimilation of culture, at least in a
superficial sense, may be yet more rapid, especially where hard climatic
conditions force the interloper to imitate the life of the native. The
industrial and commercial Hollander, when transplanted to the dry
grasslands of South Africa, became pastoral like the native Kaffirs. The
French voyageur of Canada could scarcely be distinguished from the
Indian trapper; occupation, food, dress, and spouse were the same. Only
a lighter tint of skin distinguished the half-breed children of the
Frenchman. The settlers of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths, at
least for a generation or two, showed little outward difference in mode
of life from that of the savage community among which they dwelt.[242]
[Sidenote: Vicinal groups of similar or diverse race and culture.]
The more alike the components of such a vicinal group of people, the
easier, freer and more effective will be the mediating function of the
central one. Germany has demonstrated this in her long history as
intermediary between the nations of southeastern and western Europe. The
people of Poland, occupying a portion of the Baltic slope of northern
Europe, fended by no natural barriers from their eastern and western
neighbors, long constituted a transition form between the two. Though
affiliated with Russia in point of language, the Poles are Occidental in
their religion; and their head-form resembles that of northern Germany
rather than that of Russia.[243] The country belongs to western Europe in
the density of its population (74 to the square kilometer or 190 to the
square mile), which is quadruple that of remaining European Russia, and
also in its industrial and social development. The partition of Poland
among the three neighboring powers was the final expression of its
intermediate location and character.[244] One part was joined politically
to the Slav-German western border of Russia, and another to the
German-Slav border of Germany, while the portion that fell to the
Austrian Empire simply extended the northern Slav area of that country
found in Bohemia, Moravia, and the Slovak border of Hungary. [Map page
223.]
If the intermediate people greatly differs in race or civilization from
both neighbors, it exercises and receives slight influence. The Mongols
of Central Asia, between China on one side and Persia and India on the
other, have been poor vehicles for the exchange of culture between these
two great districts. The Hungarians, located between the Roumanians and
Germans on the east and west, Slovaks and Croatians on the north and
south, have helped little to reconcile race differences in the great
empire of the Danube.
[Sidenote: Thalassic vicinal location.]
The unifying effect of vicinal location is greatly enhanced if the
neighboring people are grouped about an enclosed sea which affords an
easy highway for communication. The integrating force of such a basin
will often overcome the disintegrating force of race antagonisms. The
Roman Empire in the Mediterranean was able to evolve an effective
centralized government and to spread one culture over the neighboring
shores, despite great variety of nationality and language and every
degree of cultural development. A certain similarity of natural
conditions, climatic and otherwise, from the Iberian Peninsula to the
borders of the Syrian desert, also aided in the process of amalgamation.
Where similarity of race already forms a basis for congeniality, such
circumthalassic groups display the highest degree of interactive
influence. These contribute to a further blending of population and
unification of culture, by which the whole circle of the enclosing lands
tends to approach one standard of civilization. This was the history of
the Baltic coast from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, when
the German Hansa distributed the material products of Europe's highest
civilization from Russian Novgorod to Norway. The North Sea group,
first under the leadership of Holland, later under England's guidance,
became a single community of advancing culture, which was a later
reflection of the early community of race stretching from the Faroe and
Shetland Islands to the Rhine and the Elbe. This same process has been
going on for ages about the marginal basins of eastern Asia, the Yellow
and Japan Seas. Community of race and culture stamps China, Korea and
Japan. A general advance in civilization under the leadership of Japan,
the England of the East, now inaugurates the elevation of the whole
group.
[Sidenote: Complementary locations.]
An even closer connection exists between adjoining peoples who are
united by ties of blood and are further made economically dependent upon
one another, because of a contrast in the physical conditions and,
therefore, in the products of their respective territories. Numerous
coast and inland tribes, pastoral and agricultural tribes are united
because they are mutually necessary. In British Columbia and Alaska the
fishing Indians of the seaboard long held a definite commercial relation
to the hunting tribes of the interior, selling them the products and
wares of the coast, while monopolizing their market for the inland furs.
Such was the position of the Ugalentz tribe of Tlingits near the mouth
of the Copper River in relation to the up-stream Athapascans; of the
Kinik tribe at the head of Cook's Inlet in relation to the inland
Atnas,[245] of the Chilcats of Chilkoot Inlet to the mountain Tinnehs.
Similarly, the hunting folk of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa
attach themselves to influential tribesmen of the adjacent Bechuana
grasslands, in order to exchange the skins of the desert animals for
spears, knives, and tobacco.[246] Fertile agricultural lands adjoining
pastoral regions of deserts and steppes have in all times drawn to their
border markets the mounted plainsmen, bringing the products of their
herds to exchange for grain; and in all times the abundance of their
green fields has tempted their ill-fed neighbors to conquest, so that
the economic bond becomes a preliminary to a political bond and an
ethnic amalgamation growing out of this strong vicinal location. The
forest lands of Great Russia supplement the grain-bearing Black Lands
of Little Russia; the two are united through geographico-economic
conditions, which would not permit an independent existence to the
smaller, weaker section of the south, ever open to hostile invasion from
Asia.[247]
[Sidenote: Types of location.]
Leaving now the ethnic and economic ties which may strengthen the
cohesive power of such vicinal grouping, and considering only its purely
geographic aspects, we distinguish the following types:
I. Central location. Examples: The Magyars in the Danube Valley;
the Iroquois Indians on the Mohawk River and the Finger Lakes;
Russia from the 10th to the 18th century; Poland from 1000 to its
final partition in 1795; Bolivia, Switzerland, and Afghanistan.
II. Peripheral location: Ancient Phoenicia; Greek colonies in Asia
Minor and southern Italy; the Roman Empire at the accession of
Augustus; the Thirteen Colonies in 1750; island and peninsula
lands.
III. Scattered location: English and French settlements in America
prior to 1700; Indians in the United States and the Kaffirs in
South Africa; Portuguese holdings in the Orient, and French in
India.
IV. Location in a related series: Oasis states grouped along desert
routes; islands along great marine routes.
[Sidenote: Continuous and scattered location.]
All peoples in their geographical distribution tend to follow a social
and political law of gravitation, in accordance with which members of
the same tribe or race gather around a common center or occupy a
continuous stretch of territory, as compactly as their own economic
status, and the physical conditions of climate and soil will permit.
This is characteristic of all mature and historically significant
peoples who have risen to sedentary life, maintained their hold on a
given territory, and, with increase of population, have widened their
boundaries. The nucleus of such a people may be situated somewhere in
the interior of a continent, and with growing strength it may expand in
every direction; or it may originate on some advantageous inlet of the
sea and spread thence up and down the coast, till the people have
possessed themselves of a long-drawn hem of land and used this
peripheral location to intercept the trade between their back country
and the sea.
These are the two types of continuous location. In contrast to them, a
discontinuous or scattered location characterizes the sparse
distribution of primitive hunting and pastoral tribes; or the shattered
fragments of a conquered people, whose territory has been honeycombed by
the land appropriation of the victors; or a declining, moribund people,
who, owing to bad government, poor economic methods, and excessive
competition in the struggle for existence, have shrunk to mere patches.
As a favorable symptom, scattered location regularly marks the healthy
growth of an expanding people, who throw out here and there detached
centers of settlement far beyond the compact frontier, and fix these as
the goal for the advance of their boundary. It is also a familiar
feature of maritime commercial expansion, which is guided by no
territorial ambition but merely aims to secure widely distributed
trading stations at favorable coast points, in order to make the circle
of commerce as ample and resourceful as possible. But this latter form
of scattered location is not permanently sound. Back of it lies the
short-sighted policy of the middleman nation, which makes wholly
inadequate estimate of the value of land, and is content with an
ephemeral prosperity.
[Sidenote: Central versus peripheral location.]
A broad territorial base and security of possession are the guarantees
of national survival. The geographic conditions which favor one often
operate against the other. Peripheral location means a narrow base but a
protected frontier along the sea; central location means opportunity for
widening the territory, but it also means danger. A state embedded in
the heart of a continent has, if strong, every prospect of radial
expansion and the exercise of widespread influence; but if weak, its
very existence is imperilled, because it is exposed to encroachments on
every side. A central location minus the bulwark of natural boundaries
enabled the kingdom of Poland to be devoured piecemeal by its voracious
neighbors. The kingdom of Burgundy, always a state of fluctuating
boundaries and shifting allegiances, fell at last a victim to its
central location, and saw its name obliterated from the map. Hungary,
which, in the year 1000, occupied a restricted inland location on the
middle Danube, by the 14th century broke through the barriers of its
close-hugging neighbors, and stretched its boundaries from the Adriatic
to the Euxine; two hundred years later its territory contracted to a
fragment before the encroachments of the Turks, but afterwards recovered
in part its old dimensions. Germany has, in common with the little
Sudanese state of Wadai, an influential and dangerous position. A
central location in the Sudan has made Wadai accessible to the rich
caravan trade from Tripoli and Barca on the north, from the great market
town of Kano in Sokoto on the west, and from the Nile Valley and Red Sea
on the east. But the little state has had to fight for its life against
the aggressions of its western rival Bornu and its eastern neighbor
Darfur. And now more formidable enemies menace it in the French, who
have occupied the territory between it and Bornu, and the English, who
have already caught Darfur in the dragnet of the Egyptian Sudan.[248]
[Sidenote: Danger of central location.]
Germany, crowded in among three powerful neighbors like France, Russia,
and Austria, has had no choice about maintaining a strong standing army
and impregnable frontier defenses. The location of the Central European
states between the Baltic and the Balkans has exposed them to all the
limitations and dangers arising from a narrow circle of land neighbors.
Moreover, the diversified character of the area, its complex mountain
systems, and diverging river courses have acted as disintegrating forces
which have prevented the political concentration necessary to repel
interference from without. The Muscovite power, which had its beginning
in a modest central location about the sources of the Dwina, Dnieper and
Volga, was aided by the physical unity of its unobstructed plains, which
facilitated political combination. Hence, on every side it burst through
its encompassing neighbors and stretched its boundaries to the
untenanted frontier of the sea. Central location was the undoing of the
Transvaal Republic. Its efforts to expand to the Indian Ocean were
blocked by its powerful British rival at every point--at Delagoa Bay in
1875 by treaty with Portugal, at Santa Lucia Bay in 1884, and through
Swaziland in 1894. The Orange Free State was maimed in the same way
when, in 1868, she tried to stretch out an arm through Basutoland to the
sea.[249] Here even weak neighbors were effective to curtail the seaward
growth of these inland states, because they were made the tools of one
strong, rapacious neighbor. A central position teaches always the lesson
of vigilance and preparedness for hostilities, as the Boer equipment in
1899, the military organization of Germany, and the bristling fortresses
on the Swiss Alpine passes prove.
[Sidenote: Mutual relations between center and periphery.]
How intimate and necessary are the relations between central and
peripheral location is shown by the fact that all states strive to
combine the two. In countries like Norway, France, Spain, Japan, Korea
and Chile, peripheral location predominates, and therefore confers upon
them at once the security and commercial accessibility which result from
contact with the sea. Other countries, like Russia, Germany and
Austro-Hungary, chiefly central in location, have the strategic and even
the commercial value of their coasts reduced by the long, tortuous
course which connects them with the open ocean. Therefore, we find
Russia planning to make a great port at Ekaterina Harbor on the
northernmost point of her Lapland coast, where an out-runner from the
Gulf Stream ensures an ice-free port on the open sea.[250] An admirable
combination of central and peripheral location is seen in the United
States. Here the value of periphery is greatly enhanced by the
interoceanic location of the country; and the danger of entanglements
arising from a marked central location is reduced by the simplicity of
the political neighborhood. But our country has paid for this security
by an historical aloofness and poverty of influence. Civilized countries
which are wholly central in their location are very few, only nine in
all. Six of these are mountain or plateau states, like Switzerland and
Abyssinia, which have used the fortress character of their land to
resist conquest, and have preferred independence to the commercial
advantages to be gained only by affiliation with their peripheral
neighbors.
[Sidenote: Inland and coastward expansion.]
Central and peripheral location presuppose and supplement one another.
One people inhabits the interior of an island or continent whose rim is
occupied by another. The first suffers from exclusion from the sea and
therefore strives to get a strip of coast. The coast people feel the
drawback of their narrow foothold upon the land, want a broader base in
order to exploit fully the advantages of their maritime location, fear
the pressure of their hinterland when the great forces there imprisoned
shall begin to move; so they tend to expand inland to strengthen
themselves and weaken the neighbor in their rear. The English colonies
of America, prior to 1763, held a long cordon of coast, hemmed in
between the Appalachian Mountains and the sea. Despite threats of French
encroachments from the interior, they expanded from this narrow
peripheral base into the heart of the continent, and after the
Revolution reached the Mississippi River and the northern boundary of
the Spanish Floridas. They now held a central location in relation to
the long Spanish periphery of the Gulf of Mexico. True to the instincts
of that location, they began to throw the weight of their vast
hinterland against the weak coastal barrier. This gave way, either to
forcible appropriation of territory or diplomacy or war, till the United
States had incorporated in her own territory the peripheral lands of the
Gulf from Florida Strait to the Rio Grande. [See map page 156.]
[Sidenote: Russian expansion in Asia.]
In Asia this same process has been perennial and on a far greater scale.
The big arid core of that continent, containing many million square
miles, has been charged with an expansive force. From the appearance of
the Aryans in the Indus Valley and the Scythians on the borders of
Macedonia, it has sent out hordes to overwhelm the peripheral lands from
the Yellow Sea to the Black, and from the Indian Ocean to the White
Sea.[251] To-day Russia is making history there on the pattern set by
geographic conditions. From her most southerly province in Trans-Caspia,
conquered a short twenty-five years ago, she is heading towards the
Indian Ocean. The Anglo-Russian convention of August 31st, 1907,
yielding to Russia all northern Persia as her sphere of influence,
enables her to advance half way to the Persian Gulf, though British
statesmen regard it as a check upon her ambition, because England has
secured right to the littoral. But Russia by this great stride toward
her goal is working with causes, satisfied to let the effects follow at
their leisure. She has gained the best portion of Persia, comprising
the six largest cities and the most important lines of communication
radiating from the capital.[252] This country will make a solid base for
her further advance to the Persian Gulf; and, when developed by Russian
enterprise in railroad building and commerce, it will make a heavy
weight bearing down upon the coast. The Muscovite area which is pressing
upon England's Persian littoral reaches from Ispahan and Yezd to the
far-away shores of the Arctic Ocean.
[Sidenote: Periphery as goal of expansion.]
In the essentially complementary character of interior and periphery are
rooted all these coastward and landward movements of expansion. Where an
equilibrium seems to have been reached, the peoples who have accepted
either the one or the other one-sided location have generally for the
time being ceased to grow. Such a location has therefore a passive
character. But the surprising elasticity of many nations may start up an
unexpected activity which will upset this equilibrium. Where the central
location is that of small mountain states, which are handicapped by
limited resources and population, like Nepal and Afghanistan, or
overshadowed by far more powerful neighbors, like Switzerland, the
passive character is plain enough. In the case of larger states, like
Servia, Abyssinia, and Bolivia, which offer the material and
geographical base for larger populations than they now support, it is
often difficult to say whether progression or retrogression is to be
their fate. As a rule, however, the expulsion of a people from a
peripheral point of advantage and their confinement in the interior
gives the sign of national decay, as did Poland's loss of her Baltic
seaboard. Russia's loss of her Manchurian port and the resignation of
her ambition on the Chinese coasts is at least a serious check. On the
other hand, if an inland country enclosed by neighbors succeeds in
somewhere getting a maritime outlet, the sign is hopeful. The
century-old political slogan of Hungary, "To the sea, Magyars!" has
borne fruit in the Adriatic harbor of Fiume, which is to-day the pride
of the nation and in no small degree a basis for its hope of autonomy.
The history of Montenegro took on a new phase when from its mountain
seclusion it recently secured the short strip of seaboard which it had
won and lost so often. Such peripheral holdings are the lungs through
which states breathe.
[Sidenote: Reaction between center and periphery.]
History and the study of race distribution reveal a mass of facts which
represent the contrast and reaction between interior and periphery. The
marginal lands of Asia, from northern Japan, where climatic conditions
first make historical development possible, around the whole fringe of
islands, peninsulas and border lowlands to the Aegean coast of Asia
Minor, present a picture of culture and progress as compared with the
high, mountain-rimmed core of the continent, condemned by its remoteness
and inaccessibility to eternal retardation. Europe shows the same
contrast, though in less pronounced form. Its ragged periphery, all the
way from the Balkan Gibraltar at Constantinople to the far northern
projections of Scandinavia and Finland, shows the value of a seaward
outlook both in culture and climate. Germany beyond the Elbe and Austria
beyond the Danube begin to feel the shadow of the continental mass
behind them; and from their eastern borders on through Russia the
benumbing influence of a central location grows, till beyond the Volga
the climatic, economic, social and political conditions of Asia prevail.
Africa is all core: contour and relief have combined to reduce its
periphery to a narrow coastal hem, offering at best a few vantage points
for exploitation to the great maritime merchant peoples of the world.
Egypt, embedded in an endless stretch of desert like a jewel in its
matrix, was powerless to shake off the influence of its continental
environment. Its location was predominantly central; its culture bore
the stamp of isolation and finally of arrested development. Australia,
the classic ground of retardation, where only shades of savagery can be
distinguished, offered the natives of its northern coast some faint
stimuli in the visits of Malay seamen from the nearby Sunda Islands; but
its central tribes, shielded by geographic segregation from external
influences, have retained the most primitive customs and beliefs.[253]
Expanding Europe has long been wrestling with Africa, but it can not get
a grip, owing to the form of its antagonist; it finds no limb by which
the giant can be tripped and thrown. Asia presents a wide border of
marginal lands, some of them like Arabia and India being almost
continental in their proportions. Since Europe began her career of
maritime and colonial expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, she has seized upon these peripheral projections as if they
were the handles on a pilot wheel, and by them she has steered the
course of Asia ever since. These semi-detached outlyers of the continent
have enabled her to stretch a girdle of European influences around the
central core. Such influences, through the avenues of commerce, railway
concessions, missionary propaganda, or political dominion, have
permeated the accessible periphery and are slowly spreading thence into
the interior. China and Persia have felt these influences not less than
India and Tongking; Japan, which has most effectually preserved its
political autonomy, has profited by them most.
This historical contrast between center and periphery of continents
reappears in smaller land masses, such as peninsulas and islands. The
principle holds good regardless of size. The whole fringe of Arabia,
from Antioch to Aden and from Mocha to Mascat, has been the scene of
incoming and outgoing activities, has developed live bases of trade,
maritime growth, and culture, while the inert, somnolent interior has
drowsed away its long eventless existence. The rugged, inaccessible
heart of little Sardinia repeats the story of central Arabia in its
aloofness, its impregnability, backwardness, and in the purity of its
race. Its accessible coast, forming a convenient way-station on the
maritime crossroads of the western Mediterranean, has received a
succession of conquerors and an intermittent influx of every ethnic
strain known in the great basin.
[Sidenote: Periphery of colonization.]
The story of discovery and colonization, from the days of ancient Greek
enterprise in the Mediterranean to the recent German expansion along the
Gulf of Guinea, shows the appropriation first of the rims of islands and
continents, and later that of the interior. A difference of race and
culture between inland and peripheral inhabitants meets us almost
everywhere in retarded colonial lands. In the Philippines, the wild
people of Luzon, Mindoro and the Visayas are confined almost entirely
to the interior, while civilized or Christianized Malays occupy the
whole seaboard, except where the rugged Sierra Madre Mountains, fronting
the Pacific in Luzon, harbor a sparse population of primitive
Negritos.[254] For centuries Arabs held the coast of East Africa, where
their narrow zone of settlement bordered on that of native blacks, with
whom they traded. Even ancient Greece showed a wide difference in type
of character and culture between the inland and maritime states. The
Greek landsman was courageous and steadfast, but crude, illiterate,
unenterprising, showing sterility of imagination and intellect; while
his brother of the seaboard was active, daring, mercurial, imaginative,
open to all the influences of a refining civilization.[255] To-day the
distribution of the Greeks along the rim of the Balkan peninsula and
Asia Minor, in contrast to the Turks and Slavs of the interior, is
distinctly a peripheral phenomenon.[256]
The rapid inland advance from the coast of oversea colonists is part of
that restless activity which is fostered by contact with the sea and
supported by the command of abundant resources conferred by maritime
superiority. The Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, as later the English
colonization of America, seized the rim of the land, and promptly pushed
up the rivers in sea-going boats far into the interior. But periphery
may give to central region something more than conquerors and colonists.
From its active markets and cosmopolitan exchanges there steadily filter
into the interior culture and commodities, carried by peaceful merchant
and missionary, who, however, are often only the harbingers of the
conqueror. The accessibility of the periphery tends to raise it in
culture, wealth, density of population, and often in political
importance, far in advance of the center.
[Illustration: PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. Distribution of Civilized and Wild
Peoples]
[Sidenote: Dominant historical side.]
The maritime periphery of a country receives a variety of oversea
influences, blends and assimilates these to its own culture, Hellenizes,
Americanizes or Japanizes them, as the case may be, and then passes them
on into the interior. Here no one foreign influence prevails. On the
land boundaries the case is different. Each inland frontier has to
reckon with a different neighbor and its undiluted influence. A
predominant central location means a succession of such neighbors, on
all sides friction which may polish or rub sore. The distinction
between a many-sided and a one-sided historical development depends upon
the contact of a people with its neighbors. Consider the multiplicity of
influences which have flowed in upon Austria from all sides. But not all
such influences are similar in kind or in degree. The most powerful
neighbor will chiefly determine on which boundary of a country its
dominant historical processes are to work themselves out in a given
epoch. Therefore, it is of supreme importance to the character of a
peopled history on which side this most powerful neighbor is located.
Russia had for several centuries such a neighbor in the Tartar hordes
along its southeastern frontier, and therefore its history received an
Asiatic stamp; so, too, did that of Austria and Hungary in the long
resistance to Turkish invasion. All three states suffered in consequence
a retardation of development on their western sides. After the turmoil
on the Asiatic frontier had subsided, the great centers of European
culture and commerce in Italy, Germany and the Baltic lands began to
assert their powers of attraction. The young Roman Republic drew up its
forces to face the threatening power of Carthage in the south, and
thereby was forced into rapid maritime development; the Roman Empire
faced north to meet the inroads of the barbarians, and thereby was drawn
into inland expansion. All these instances show that a vital historical
turning-point is reached in the development of every country, when the
scene of its great historical happenings shifts from one side to
another.
[Sidenote: The Mediterranean side of Europe.]
In addition to the aggressive neighbor, there is often a more sustained
force that may draw the activities of a people toward one or another
boundary of their territory. This may be the abundance of land and
unexploited resources lying on a colonial frontier and attracting the
unemployed energies of the people, such as existed till recently in the
United States,[257] and such as is now transferring the most active
scenes of Russian history to far-away Siberia. But a stronger attraction
is that of a higher civilization and dominant economic interests. So
long as the known world was confined to the temperate regions of Europe,
Asia and Africa, together with the tropical districts of the Indian
Ocean, the necessities of trade between Orient and Occident and the
historical prestige of the lands bordering on the Mediterranean placed
in this basin the center of gravity of the cultural, commercial and
political life of Europe. The continent was dominated by its Asiatic
corner; its every country took on an historical significance
proportionate to its proximity and accessibility to this center. The
Papacy was a Mediterranean power. The Crusades were Mediterranean wars.
Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Venice, and Genoa held in turn the focal
positions in this Asiatic-European sea; they were on the sunny side of
the continent, while Portugal and England lay in shadow. Only that
portion of Britain facing France felt the cultural influences of the
southern lands. The estuaries of the Mersey and Clyde were marshy
solitudes, echoing to the cry of the bittern and the ripple of Celtic
fishing-boat.
[Sidenote: Change of historical front.]
After the year 1492 inaugurated the Atlantic period of history, the
western front of Europe superseded the Mediterranean side in the
historical leadership of the continent. The Breton coast of France waked
up, the southern seaboard dozed. The old centers in the Aegean and
Adriatic became drowsy corners. The busy traffic of the Mediterranean
was transferred to the open ocean, where, from Trafalger to Norway, the
western states of Europe held the choice location on the world's new
highway. Liverpool, Plymouth, Glasgow, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp,
Cherbourg, Lisbon and Cadiz were shifted from shadowy margin to
illuminated center, and became the foci of the new activity. Theirs was
a new continental location, maintaining relations of trade and
colonization with two hemispheres. Their neighbors were now found on the
Atlantic shores of the Americas and the peripheral lands of Asia. These
cities became the exponents of the intensity with which their respective
states exploited the natural advantages of this location.
The experience of Germany was typical of the change of front. From the
tenth to the middle of the sixteenth century, this heir of the old Roman
Empire was drawn toward Italy by every tie of culture, commerce, and
political ideal. This concentration of interest in its southern neighbor
made it ignore a fact so important as the maritime development of the
Hanse Towns, wherein lay the real promise of its future, the hope of its
commercial and colonial expansion. The shifting of its historical center
of gravity to the Atlantic seaboard therefore came late, further
retarded by lack of national unity and national purposes. But the
present wide circle of Germany's transoceanic commerce incident upon its
recent industrial development, the phenomenal increase of its merchant
marine, the growth of Hamburg and Bremen, the construction of ship
canals to that short North Sea coast, and the enormous utilization of
Dutch ports for German commerce, all point to the attraction of distant
economic interests, even when meagerly supported by colonial
possessions.
Location, therefore, while it is the most important single geographic
factor, is at the same time the one most subject to the vicissitudes
attending the anthropo-geographical evolution of the earth. Its value
changes with the transfer of the seats of the higher civilizations from
sub-tropical to temperate lands; from the margin of enclosed sea to the
hem of the open ocean; from small, naturally defined territories to
large, elastic areas; from mere periphery to a combination of periphery
and interior, commanding at once the freedom of the sea and the
resources of a wide hinterland.
[Sidenote: Contrasted historical sides.]
Even in Europe, however, where the Atlantic leaning of all the states is
so marked as to suggest a certain dependence, the strength of this
one-sided attraction is weakened by the complexity and closeness of the
vicinal grouping of the several nations. Germany's reliance upon the
neighboring grain fields of Russia and Hungary and the leather of the
southern steppes counteracts somewhat the far-off magnet of America's
wheat and cattle. England experienced a radical change of geographic
front with the sailing of the Cabots; but the enormous tonnage entering
and passing from the North Sea and Channel ports for her European
trade[258] show the attraction of the nearby Continent. Oftentimes we
find two sides of a country each playing simultaneously a different, yet
an equally important historical part, and thus distributing the
historical activities, while diversifying the historical development of
the people. The young United States were profoundly influenced as to
national ideals and their eventual territorial career by the free, eager
life and the untrammeled enterprise of its wilderness frontier beyond
the Alleghenies, while through the Atlantic seaboard it was kept in
steadying contact with England and the inherited ideals of the race.
Russia is subjected to different influences on its various fronts; it is
progressive, industrial, socialistic on its European side in Poland;
expansive and radical in a different way in colonial Siberia; aggressive
in the south, bending its energies toward political expansion along the
Mediterranean and Persian Gulf seaboards. In all such countries there is
a constant shifting and readjustment of extra-territorial influences.
[Sidenote: One-sided historical relations.]