Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
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From the border character of many islands there follow often far-reaching historical effects. Like all border regions they are natural battlegrounds. Their historical episodes are small, often slow and insidious in their movement, but large in their final content; for they are prone to end in a sudden dramatic denouement that draws the startled gaze of all the neighboring world. It was the destiny of Sicily to make and unmake the fortunes of ancient Carthage. Ceylon, from the dawn of history, lured traders who enriched and conquerors who oppressed peninsular India. The advance of Spain to the Canary Isles was the drowsy prologue to the brilliant drama of American discovery. The island of Tsushima in the Korean Strait was seized by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1280 as the base of their attack upon Japan;875 and when in 1857 the Russian bear tried to plant a foot on this island, Japan saw danger in the movement and ordered him off.876 Now we find Japan newly established in Sakhalin, the Elliot Islands and Formosa, by means of which and her own archipelago she blankets the coast of Asia for twenty-two hundred miles. This geographical situation may be productive of history.
Islands are detached areas physically and readily detached politically. Though insularity gives them some measure of protection, their relatively small size and consequently small populations make them easy victims for a conquering sea power, and easy to hold in subjection. The security of an island habitat against aggression therefore, increases with its size, its efficiency in naval warfare, and its degree of isolation, the last of which factors depends in turn upon its location as thalassic or oceanic. Islands of enclosed seas, necessarily small and never far from the close encircling lands, are engulfed by every tide of conquest emanating from the nearby shores. Oesel and Dago have been held in succession by every Baltic power, by the Teutonic Orders, Denmark, Sweden and Russia. Gotland has acknowledged allegiance to the Hanseatic League, to Denmark and Sweden. Sardinia, occupying the center of the western Mediterranean, has figured in a varied series of political combinations,—with ancient Carthage, Rome, the Saracens of North Africa, with Sicily, Pisa, Aragon, Piedmont, and finally now with united Italy.877 To the land-bred Teutonic hordes which swept over western Europe in the early centuries of our era, a narrow strip of sea was some protection for Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta and the Balearic Isles. Hence we find these islands slow in succumbing to their non-maritime conquerors, and readily regained by the energetic Justinian. Later they fell victim to the sea-wise Saracens, but again gravitated back to their closer and more natural European connections.
More often the small area of an island facilitates its retention in bondage, when the large and less isolated continental districts have thrown off an unwelcome yoke. Athens, with her strong navy, found it an easy task to whip back into the ranks of the Delian Confederacy her recalcitrant island subjects like Naxos, Samos and Thasos; but her mutinous cities in peninsular Chalcidice and isthmian Megara, incited to revolt and aided by their neighbors,878 were less at her mercy. This principle was recognized by Thucydides,879 and taken advantage of by the Lacedæmonians during the great war for Spartan supremacy. England has been able to hold Ireland in a vise. Of all her former French territory, she retains only the Channel Isles. Cuba and Porto Rico remained in the crushing grasp of Spain sixty-four years after Mexico and the continental states of Central and South America, by mutual help and encouragement, had secured independence. The islands found that the isolation which confers protection from outside aggression meant for them detachment from friendly sources of succor on the mainland. The desultory help of filibuster expeditions, easily checked at the port of departure or landing, availed little to supplement the inadequate forces of rebellion pent up on their relatively small areas. By contrast, Mexico's larger area and population, continually stirred by American example and encouragement, reinforced by American volunteers and even by United States army officers, found revolt from 1812 to 1824 a comparatively easy task.
Cuba suffered from its geographic aloofness. So did little Crete, which submitted to Turkish oppression sixty years after the continental Greeks had made good their claim to freedom. Nor was this the first time that Cretan liberty had suffered from the detachment of an island environment. Aristotle recognized the principle when he wrote: "The people of Crete have hitherto submitted to the rule of the leading families as Cosmi, because the insular situation of Crete cuts off the interference of strangers or foreigners which might stir up rebellion against the unjust or partial government." And then he adds that this insular exclusion of outside incitement long rendered the fidelity of the Perioeci or serf-like peasants of Crete a striking contrast to the uneasy spirit of the Spartan Helots, who were constantly stirred to revolt by the free farmers of Argos, Messinia and Arcadia.880 Thus ancient like modern Crete missed those beneficient stimuli which penetrate a land frontier, but are cut off by the absolute boundary of the sea.
Island fragments of broken empires are found everywhere. They figure conspicuously in that scattered location indicative of declining power. Little St. Pierre and Miquelon are the last geographical evidences of France's former dominion in Canada. The English Bermudas and Bahamas point back to the time when Great Britain held the long-drawn opposite coast. The British, French, Dutch, Danish, as once even Swedish, holdings in the Lesser Antilles are island monuments to lost continental domains, as recently were Cuba and Porto Rico to Spain's once vast American empire. Of Portugal's widespread dominion in the Orient there remain to her only the island fragments of Timor, Kambing, Macao and Diu, besides two coastal points on the western face of peninsular India. All the former continental holdings of the Sultan of Zanzibar have been absorbed into the neighboring German and British territories, and only the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba remain to him by the temporary indulgence of his strong neighbors. The Sheik of the Bahrein Islands originally held also the large kingdom of El Hasa on the nearby Persian Gulf littoral of Arabia; but he lost this to the Turks in 1840, and now retains the Bahrein Islands as the residuum of his former territories.881
The insular remnants of empires are tolerated, because their small size, when unsupported by important location, usually renders them innocuous; and their geographic isolation removes them from international entanglements, unless some far-reaching anthropo-geographic readjustment lends them a new strategic or commercial importance. The construction of the Suez Canal gave England a motive for the acquisition of Cyprus in 1878, as a nearer base than Malta for the protection of Port Said, just as the present Panama Canal project led the United States to re-open negotiations for the purchase of the Danish Isles. One cannot get away from the impression that the law of political detachability will operate again to make some new distribution of the parti-colored political holdings in the Lesser Antilles. The small size of these islands, and their thalassic location commanding approaches to a large region of only partially developed resources and to the interoceanic passway across it, will pitch them into the dice-box on the occasion of every naval war between their sovereign powers.
The shifting fate of political detachability becomes moderated in islands of the open ocean, because of their remoteness from the colonizing or conquering movements emanating from the continents. In contrast to the changing political connections of thalassic isles, consider the calm or monotonous political history of outlying islands like the Shetland, Faroes, Iceland, Canaries, Madeira, Cape Verde, Azores, St. Helena, Ascension and Hawaii. The Norse colony of Iceland, as a republic, maintained loose connections with its mother country from 874 to 1264; then for nearly six centuries it followed the political fate of Norway till 1814, when an oversight left it in the hands of Denmark on the dissolution of the union of Denmark and Norway. The Azores have known no history except that which came to them from Portugal; even their discovery goes back to a Saracen navigator who, in 1147, sailed from the mouth of the Tagus a thousand miles straight into the sunset.882 For two hundred years thereafter extreme isolation kept them outside the pale of history till their rediscovery by Prince Henry, the Navigator.
Land-masses, as we have found, are independent by location or independent by size. Large islands, especially where they occupy an outskirt location, may long succeed in maintaining an independent national existence; but to render this permanent, they must supplement their area by the acquisition of continental lands, according to the law of increasing territorial aggregates. Great Britain and Japan, though ethnically and culturally appendages of the nearby mainland, were large enough, aided by the dividing sea, to maintain political autonomy. They absorbed all the insular fragments lying about them to extend their areas, and then each in turn entered upon a career of continental expansion. To Japan this movement as a determined policy came late, only when she faced the alternative of absorbing territory or being absorbed by all-devouring Russia. The isolation of Madagascar resulted in only slight community of race with Africa, and combined with large area, has kept the island to a great extent distinct from the political history of Africa. The impulses which swept the eastern coast of the continent reached the outlying island with abated force. Arab, Portuguese, Dutch and English only scratched its rim. The character of its western coasts, of its vigorous Malayan population, and of the intervening Mozambique Current rendered conquest difficult from the African shore. Its large size, with the promise of abundant resources, offered a bait to conquest, yet put a barrier in its way. Hence we find that not till 1895, when the partition of continental Africa was almost accomplished, did the French conquest of Madagascar occur.
By contrast, the closely grouped East Indies, long coveted for their tropical products, suffered a contagion of conquest. The large size of these islands, so far from granting them immunity, only enabled the epidemic of Portuguese and Dutch dominion to pass from one to the other more readily, and that even when the spice and pepper trade languished from a plethora of products. But even here the size of the islands, plus the sub-equatorial climate which bars genuine white colonization, has restricted the effective political dominion of Europeans to the coasts, and thus favored the survival of the natives undisturbed in the interior, with all their primitive institutions. The largest islands, like Borneo and Sumatra, have vast inland tracts still unexplored and devoted to savagery, thus illustrating the contrast between center and periphery. When Australia, the largest of all the Pacific island group, became an object of European expansion, its temperate and sub-tropical location adapted it for white colonization, and the easy task of conquering its weak and retarded native tribes encouraged its appropriation; but the natural autonomy which belongs to large area and detached location asserted itself in the history
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