Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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In vast unobstructed territories, on the other hand, the evil of wide, sparse dispersal is checked only by natural increase of population and the impinging of one growing people upon another, which restricts the territory of either. When the boundary waste between the small scattered tribal groups has been occupied, encroachment from the side of the stronger follows; then comes war, incorporation of territory, amalgamation of race and coalescence, or the extinction of the weaker. The larger people, commanding its larger area, expands numerically and territorially, and continues to throw out wider frontiers, till it meets insurmountable natural obstacles or the confines of a people strong as itself. After a pause, during which the existing area is outgrown and population begins to press harder upon the limits of subsistence, the weight of a nation is thrown against the barrier, be it physical or political. In consequence, the old boundaries are enlarged, either by successful encroachment upon a neighbor, or, in case of defeat, by incorporation in the antagonist's territory. But even defeat brings participation in a larger geographic base, wider coöperation, a greater sum total of common national interests, and especially the protection of the larger social group. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State find compensation for the loss of independence by their incorporation in the British Empire, even if gradual absorption be the destiny of the Boer stock.
Of adjacent areas equally advanced in civilization and in density of population but of unequal size, the larger must dominate because its people have the resistance and aggressive force inherent in the larger mass. This is the explanation of the absorption of so many colonies and conquerors by the native races, when no great cultural abyss or race antagonism separates the two. The long rule of the Scandinavians in the Hebrides ended in their absorption by the local Gaelic stock, simply because their settlements were too small and the number of their women too few. The lowlands on the eastern coasts of Scotland accommodated larger bands of Norse, who even to-day can be distinguished from the neighboring Scotch of the Highlands; but on the rugged western coast, where only small and widely separated deltas at the heads of the fiords offered a narrow foothold to the invaders, their scattered ethnic islands were soon inundated by the contiguous population.312 The Teutonic elements, both English and Norwegian, which for centuries filtered into Ireland, have been swallowed up in the native Celtic stock, except where religious antagonisms served to keep the two apart. So the dominant Anglo-Saxon population of England was a solvent for the Norman French, and the densely packed humanity of China for their Manchu conquerors.
On the other hand, extensive areas, like early North America and Australia, sparsely inhabited by small scattered groups who have only an attenuated connection with their soil and therefore only a feeble hold upon their land, cannot compete with small areas, if these have the dense and evenly distributed population which ensures a firm tenure of the land. Small, geographically confined areas foster this compact and systematic occupation on the part of their inhabitants, since they put barriers in the way of precipitate and disintegrating expansion; and this characteristic compensates in some degree and for a period at least for the weakness otherwise inherent in the narrow territorial base.
Every race, people, and state has had the history of progress from a small to a large area. All have been small in their youth. The bit of land covered by Roma Quadrata has given language, customs, laws, culture, and a faint strain of Latin blood to nations now occupying half a million square miles of Europe. The Arab inundation, which flooded the vast domain of the Caliphs, traced back to that spring of ethnic and religious energy which welled up in the arid plain of Mecca and the Arabian oases. The world-wide maritime expansion of the English-speaking people had its starting point in the lowlands of the Elbe. The makers of empire in northern China were cradled in the small highland valley of the Wei River. The little principality of Moscow was the nucleus of the Russian Empire.
Penetration into a people's remote past comes always upon some limited spot which has nurtured the young nation, and reveals the fact that territorial expansion is the incontestible feature of their history. This advance from small to large characterizes their political area, the scope of their trade relations, their spheres of activity, the size of their known world, and finally the sway of their religions. Every religion in its early stages of development bears the stamp of a narrow origin, traceable to the circumscribed habitat of the primitive social group, or back of that to the small circle of lands constituting the known world whence it sprang. First it is tribal, and makes a distinction between my God and thy God; but even when it has expanded to embody a universal system, it still retains vestigial forms of its narrow past. Jerusalem, Mecca and Rome remain the sacred goal of pilgrimages, while the vaster import of a monotheistic faith and the higher ethical teaching of the brotherhood of man have encircled the world.
When religion, language and race have spread, in their wake comes the growing state. Everywhere the political area tends gradually to embrace the whole linguistic area of which it forms a part, and finally the yet larger race area. Only the diplomacy of united Europe has availed to prevent France from absorbing French-speaking Belgium, or Russia from incorporating into her domain that vast Slav region extending from the Drave and Danube almost to the Gulf of Corinth, now parcelled out among seven different states, but bound to the Muscovite empire by ties of related speech, by race and religion. The detachment of the various Danubian principalities from the uncongenial dominion of the Turks, though a dismemberment of a large political territory and a seeming backward step, can be regarded only as a leisurely preliminary for a new territorial alignment. History's movements are unhurried; the backward step may prepare for the longer leap forward. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that the vigorous, reorganized German Empire will one day try to incorporate the Germanic areas found in Austria, Switzerland and Holland.
Throughout the life of any people, from its foetal period in some small locality to its well rounded adult era marked by the occupation and organization of a wide national territory, gradations in area mark gradations of development. And this is true whether we consider the compass of their commercial exchanges, the scope of their maritime ventures, the extent of their linguistic area, the measure of their territorial ambitions, or the range of their intellectual interests and human sympathies. From land to ethics, the rule holds good. Peoples in the lower stages of civilization have contracted spacial ideas, desire and need at a given time only a limited territory, though they may change that territory often; they think in small linear terms, have a small horizon, a small circle of contact with others, a small range of influence, only tribal sympathies; they have an exaggerated conception of their own size and importance, because their basis of comparison is fatally limited. With a mature, widespread people like the English or French, all this is different; they have made the earth their own, so far as possible.
Just because of this universal tendency towards the occupation of ever larger areas and the formation of vaster political aggregates, in making a sociological or political estimate of different peoples, we should never lose sight of the fact that all racial and national characteristics which operate towards the absorption of more land and impel to political expansion are of fundamental value. A ship of state manned by such a crew has its sails set to catch the winds of the world.
Territorial expansion is always preceded by an extension of the circle of influence which a people exerts through its traders, its deep-sea fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries, and earlier still by a widening of its mere geographical horizon through fortuitous or systematic exploration. The Northmen visited the coasts of Britain and France first as pirates, then as settlers. Norman and Breton fishermen were drawing in their nets on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland thirty years before Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence. Japanese fishing boats preceded Japanese colonists to the coasts of Yezo. Trading fleets were the forerunners of the Greek colonies along the Black Sea and Mediterranean, and of Phoenician settlements in North Africa, Sicily and Spain. It was in the wake of trapper and fur trader that English and American pioneer advanced across our continent to the Pacific; just as in French Canada Jesuit priest and voyageur opened the way for the settler. Religious propaganda was yoked with greed of conquest in the campaigns of Cortez and Pizarro. Modern statesmen pushing a policy of expansion are alive to the diplomatic possibilities of missionaries endangered or their property destroyed. They find a still better asset to be realized on territorially in enterprising capitalists settled among a weaker people, by whom their property is threatened or overtaxed, or their trade interfered with. The British acquisition of Hongkong in 1842 followed a war with China to prevent the exclusion of the English opium trade from the Celestial Empire. The annexation of the Transvaal resulted from the expansion of English capitalists to the Rand mines, much as the advance of the United States flag to the Hawaiian Islands followed American sugar planters thither. American capital in the Caribbean states of South America has repeatedly tried to embroil those countries with the United States government; and its increasing presence in Cuba is undoubtedly ominous for the independence of the island, because with capital go men and influence.
When the foreign investor is not a corporation but a government, the expanding commercial influence looks still more surely to tangible political results; because such national enterprises have at bottom a political motive, however much overlaid by an economic exterior. When the British government secured a working majority of the Suez Canal stock, it sealed the fate of Egypt to become ultimately a province of the British Empire. Russian railroads in Manchuria were the well-selected tool for the Russification and final annexation of the province. The weight of American national enterprise in the Panama Canal Zone sufficed to split off from the Colombian federation a peripheral state, whose detachment is obviously a preliminary for eventual incorporation into United States domain. The efforts of the German government to secure from the Sultan of Turkey railroad concessions through Asia Minor for German capitalists has aroused jealousy in financial and political circles in St. Petersburg, and prompted a demand from the Russian Foreign Office upon Turkey for the privilege of constructing railroads through eastern Asia Minor.313
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