Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
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An illustration is found in the mediæval history of Spain. The intercontinental location of the Iberian Peninsula exposed it to the Saracen conquest and to the constant reinforcements to Islam power furnished by the Mohammedanized Berbers of North Africa. For seven centuries this location was the dominant geographic factor in Spain's history. It made the expulsion of the Moors the sole object of all the Iberian states, converted the country into an armed camp, made the gentleman adventurer and Christian knight the national ideal. It placed the center of political control high up on the barren plateau of Castile, far from the centers of population and culture in the river lowlands or along the coast. It excluded the industrial and commercial development which was giving bone and sinew to the other European states. The release of the national energies by the fall of Granada in 1492 and the now ingrained spirit of adventure enabled Spain and Portugal to utilize the unparalleled advantage of their geographical position at the junction of the Mediterranean and Atlantic highways, and by their great maritime explorations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to become foremost among European colonial powers. But the development was sporadic, not supported by any widespread national movement. In a few decades the maritime preëminence of the Iberian Peninsula began to yield to the competition of the Dutch and English, who were, so to speak, saturated with their own maritime environment. Then followed the rapid decay of the sea power of Spain, followed by that of Portugal, till by 1648 even her coasting trade was in the hands of the Dutch, and Dutch vessels were employed to maintain communication with the West Indies.30
We have a later instance of sporadic development under the stimulus of new and favorable geographic conditions, a similar anti-climax. The expansion of the Russians across the lowlands of Siberia was quite in harmony with the genius of that land-bred people; but when they reached Bering Sea, the enclosed basin, the proximity of the American continent, the island stepping-stones between, and the lure of rich sealskins to the fur-hunting Cossacks determined a sudden maritime expansion, for which the Russian people were unfitted. Beginning in 1747, it swept the coast of Alaska, located its American administrative center first on Kadiak, then on Baranof Island, and by 1812 placed its southern outposts on the California coast near San Francisco Bay and on the Farralone Islands.31 Russian convicts were employed to man the crazy boats built of green lumber on the shores of Bering Sea, and Aleutian hunters with their bidarkas were impressed to catch the seal.32 The movement was productive only of countless shipwrecks, many seal skins, and an opportunity to satisfy an old grudge against England. The territory gained was sold to the United States in 1867. This is the one instance in Russian history of any attempt at maritime expansion, and also of any withdrawal from territory to which the Muscovite power had once established its claim. This fact alone would indicate that only excessively tempting geographic conditions led the Russians into an economic and political venture which neither the previously developed aptitudes of the people nor the conditions of population and historical development on the Siberian seaboard were able to sustain.
The history and culture of a people embody the effects of previous habitats and of their final environment; but this means something more than local geographic conditions. It involves influences emanating from far beyond the borders. No country, no continent, no sea, mountain or river is restricted to itself in the influence which it either exercises or receives. The history of Austria cannot be understood merely from Austrian ground. Austrian territory is part of the Mediterranean hinterland, and therefore has been linked historically with Rome, Italy, and the Adriatic. It is a part of the upper Danube Valley and therefore shares much of its history with Bavaria and Germany, while the lower Danube has linked it with the Black Sea, Greece, the Russian steppes, and Asia. The Asiatic Hungarians have pushed forward their ethnic boundary nearly to Vienna. The Austrian capital has seen the warring Turks beneath its walls, and shapes its foreign policy with a view to the relative strength of the Sultan and the Czar.
The earth is an inseparable whole. Each country or sea is physically and historically intelligible only as a portion of that whole. Currents and wind-systems of the oceans modify the climate of the nearby continents, and direct the first daring navigations of their peoples. The alternating monsoons of the Indian Ocean guided Arab merchantmen from ancient times back and forth between the Red Sea and the Malabar coast of India.33 The Equatorial Current and the northeast trade-wind carried the timid ships of Columbus across the Atlantic to America. The Gulf Stream and the prevailing westerlies later gave English vessels the advantage on the return voyage. Europe is a part of the Atlantic coast. This is a fact so significant that the North Atlantic has become a European sea. The United States also is a part of the Atlantic coast: this is the dominant fact of American history. China forms a section of the Pacific rim. This is the fact back of the geographic distribution of Chinese emigration to Annam, Tonkin, Siam, Malacca, the Philippines, East Indies, Borneo, Australia, Hawaiian Islands, the Pacific Coast States, British Columbia, the Alaskan coast southward from Bristol Bay in Bering Sea, Ecuador and Peru.
As the earth is one, so is humanity. Its unity of species points to some degree of communication through a long prehistoric past. Universal history is not entitled to the name unless it embraces all parts of the earth and all peoples, whether savage or civilized. To fill the gaps in the written record it must turn to ethnology and geography, which by tracing the distribution and movements of primitive peoples can often reconstruct the most important features of their history.
Anthropo-geographic problems are never simple. They must all be viewed in the long perspective of evolution and the historical past. They require allowance for the dominance of different geographic factors at different periods, and for a possible range of geographic influences wide as the earth itself. In the investigator they call for pains-taking analysis and, above all, an open mind.
NOTES TO CHAPTER I
1.
George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 149-157. New York, 1897.
2.A.P. Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History, Chap. I. Boston, 1903.
3.R.H. Whitbeck, Geographic Influences in the Development of New Jersey, Journal of Geography, Vol. V, No. 6. January, 1908.
4.Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, p. 372. London and New York, 1902-1906.
5.Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, 1641-1667. Vol. I, chap. V and map. London, 1889.
6.Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 305. London, 1905.
7.Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 464-465, 469. London, 1883.
8.Imperial Gazetteer for India, Vol. III, p. 109. London, 1885.
9.G.G. Chisholm, The Relativity of Geographic Advantages, Scottish Geog. Mag., Vol. XIII, No. 9, Sept. 1897.
10.Hugh Robert Mill, International Geography, p. 347. New York, 1902.
11.Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 228-230. London, 1903.
12.H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 317-323. London, 1904.
13.Captain A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 36-38. Boston, 1902.
14.G.G. Chisholm, Economic Geography, Scottish Geog. Mag., March, 1908.
15.Captain A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 37-38. Boston, 1902.
16.Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 123, 124, 145-147. Philadelphia, 1891.
17.Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV, chap. IV.
18.Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. I, pp. 86-106.
19.Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, p. 225. Leipzig, 1897. This whole chapter on Land und Leute is suggestive.
20.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 524-525. New York, 1899.
21.Ibid., 526.
22.Ibid., 517-520, 533-536.
23.Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 256-257, 268-271. London, 1903.
24.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 89. New York, 1899.
25.Strabo, Book VII, chap. I, 2.
26.Strabo, Book II, chap. III, 7.
27.Plutarch, Solon, pp. 13, 29, 154.
28.Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 244-245. New York, 1902-1906.
29.Roscher, National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 33, note 3. Stuttgart, 1888.
30.Captain A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 41-42, 50-53. Boston, 1902.
31.H. Bancroft, History of California, Vol. I, pp. 298, 628-635. San Francisco.
32.Agnes Laut, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 64-82. New York, 1905.
33.Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 351, 470-471. London, 1883.
Into almost every anthropo-geographical problem the element of environment enters in different phases, with different modes of operation and varying degrees of importance. Since the causal conception of geography demands a detailed analysis of all the relations between environment and human development, it is advisable to distinguish the various classes of geographic influences.
Four fundamental classes of effects can be distinguished.
1. The first class includes direct physical effects of environment, similar to those exerted on plants and animals by their habitat. Certain geographic conditions, more conspicuously those of climate, apply certain stimuli to which man, like the lower animals, responds by an adaption of his organism to his environment. Many physiological peculiarities of man are due to physical effects of environment, which doubtless operated very strongly in the earliest stages of human development, and in those shadowy ages contributed to the differentiation of races. The unity of the human species is as clearly established as the diversity of races and peoples, whose divergences must be interpreted chiefly as modifications in response to various habitats in long periods of time.
Such modifications have probably been numerous in the persistent and unending movements, shiftings, and migrations which have made up the long prehistoric history of man. If the origin of species is found in variability and inheritance, variation is undoubtedly influenced by a change of natural conditions. To quote Darwin, "In one sense the conditions of life may be said, not only to cause variability, either directly or indirectly, but likewise to include natural selection, for the conditions determine whether this or that variety shall survive."34 The variability of man does not mean that every external influence leaves its mark upon him, but that man as an organism, by the preservation of beneficent variations and the elimination of deleterious ones, is gradually adapted to his environment, so that he can utilize most completely that which it contributes to his needs. This self-maintenance under outward influences is an essential part of the conception of life which Herbert Spencer defines as the correspondence between internal conditions and external circumstances, or August Comte as the harmony between the living being and the surrounding medium or milieu.
According to Virchow, the distinction of races rests upon hereditary variations, but heredity itself cannot become active till the characteristic or Zustand is produced which is to be handed down.35 But environment determines what variation shall become stable enough to be passed on by heredity. For instance, we can hardly err in attributing the great lung capacity, massive chests, and
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