Influences of Geographic Environment Part 14

[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.

Sundbarg, 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 j.a.pan, 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 r.e.t.a.r.ding 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 lat.i.tudes 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 a.s.sumes a fict.i.tious 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 pa.s.ses of the Central Alps from Savoy to the Tyrol; and, more recently, that of the young state of Panama, through which the Isthmian Ca.n.a.l is to pa.s.s.

[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-ma.s.s, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 j.a.pan. To-day we stand amazed at that strong primordial brand of the j.a.panese 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 gra.s.slands 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 pa.s.sing 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 encompa.s.ses 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 j.a.pan, 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, j.a.pan 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 sh.o.r.es of Kiu-siu. Like England, j.a.pan 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 a.s.similation 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 gra.s.slands 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 const.i.tuted 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 part.i.tion 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: Thala.s.sic 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 sh.o.r.es, 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 circ.u.mthala.s.sic 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 j.a.pan Seas. Community of race and culture stamps China, Korea and j.a.pan. A general advance in civilization under the leadership of j.a.pan, 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 gra.s.slands, 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 part.i.tion in 1795; Bolivia, Switzerland, and Afghanistan.