Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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