Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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The historical development of island peoples bears always in greater or less degree the stamp of isolation; but this isolation may lead to opposite cultural results. It may mean in one case retardation, in another accelerated development. Its geographical advantages are distinctly relative, increasing rapidly with a rising scale of civilization. Therefore in an island habitat the race factor may operate with or against the geographic factor in producing a desirable historical result. If the isolation is almost complete, the cultural status of the inhabitants low, and therefore their need of stimulation from without very great, the lack of it will sink them deeper in barbarism than their kinsmen on the mainland. The negroes of Africa, taken as a whole, occupy a higher economic and cultural rank than the black races of Australia and Melanesia; and for this difference one cause at least is to be found in the difference of their habitats. The knowledge of iron, stock-raising, and many branches of agriculture were continental achievements, which belonged to the great eastern land-mass and spread from Egypt over Africa even to the Hottentot country; the lack of them among the Australians must be attributed to their insularity, which barred them from this knowledge, just as the ignorance of iron and other metals among the native Canary Islanders883 can only be ascribed to a sea barrier fifty-two miles wide. The scant acquaintance of the Balearic Islanders with iron in Roman days884 points to insular detachment. The lack of native domesticable animals in the Pacific archipelagoes illustrates another limitation incident to the restricted fauna of islands, though this particular lack also retarded the cultural development of primitive North America.
On the other hand, people who have already secured the fundamental elements of civilization find the partial seclusion of an island environment favorable to their further progress, because it permits their powers to unfold unhindered, protects them from the friction of border quarrels, from the disturbance and desolation of invading armies, to which continental peoples are constantly exposed. But even here the advantage lies in insulation but not in isolation,885 in a location like that of England or Japan, near enough to a continent to draw thence culture, commerce and occasional new strains of blood, but detached by sea-girt boundaries broad enough to ward off overwhelming aggressions. Such a location insures enough segregation for protection, but also opportunity for universal contact over the vast commons of the sea.
Excessive isolation may mean impoverishment in purse and progress even for an advanced race. Ireland has long suffered from its outskirt location. It lies too much in the shadow of England, and has been barred by the larger island from many warming rays of immigration, culture and commerce that would have vitalized its national existence. The "round barrow" men of the Bronze Age, the Romans, and the Normans never carried thither their respective contributions to civilization. The Scandinavians infused into its population only inconsiderable strains of their vigorous northern blood.886 In consequence the Irish are to-day substantially the same race as in Cæsar's time, except for the small, unassimilated group of antagonistic English and Lowland Scotch, both Teutonic, in Ulster.887 Barred by Great Britain from direct contact with the Continent and all its stimulating influences, suffering from unfavorable conditions of climate and topography, Ireland's political evolution progressed at a snail's pace. It tarried in the tribal stage till after the English conquest, presenting a primitive social organization such as existed nowhere in continental Europe. Property was communal till the time of the Tudors, and all law was customary.888 Over-protected by excessive isolation, it failed to learn the salutary lesson of political co-operation and centralization for defense, such as Scotland learned from England's aggressions, and England from her close continental neighbors. Great Britain, meanwhile, intercepted the best that the Continent had to give, both blows and blessings, and found an advantage in each. The steady prosecution of her continental wars demanded the gradual erection of a standing army, which weakened the power of feudalism; and the voting of funds for the conduct of these same wars put a whip into the hand of Parliament.
The history of Iceland illustrates the advantage and subsequently the drawback of isolation. The energetic spirits who, at the end of the ninth century, resented the centralization of political power in Norway and escaped from the turmoil and oppression of the home country to the remote asylum offered by Iceland, maintained there till 1262 the only absolutely free republic in the world.889 They had brought with them various seeds of culture and progress, which grew and flowered richly in this peaceful soil. Iceland became the center of brilliant maritime and colonial achievements, the home of a native literature which surpassed that of all its contemporaries except Dante's Italy.890 But after the decay of the Greenland colonies converted Iceland from a focal into a remote terminal point, and after the progress of the world became based upon complex and far-reaching commercial relations, the blight of extreme isolation settled upon the island; peace became stagnation.
The concomitant of isolation is protection. Though this protection, if the result of extreme isolation, may mean an early cessation of development, history shows that in the lower stages of civilization, when the social organism is small and weak, and its germs of progress easily blighted, islands offer the sheltered environment in which imported flowers of culture not only survive but improve; in less protected fields they deteriorate or disappear. When learning and Christianity had been almost wiped out on the continent of Europe by the ravages of barbarian invasion between 450 and 800 A. D., in Ireland they grew and flourished. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the high scholarship of the Irish monks and their enthusiastic love of learning for its own sake drew to their schools students of the noblest rank from both England and France.891 It was from Irish teachers that the Picts of Scotland and the Angles of northern England received their first lessons in Christianity. These fixed their mission stations again on islands, on Iona off southwestern Scotland and on Lindisfarne or Holy Isle near the east coast of Northumbria.892 It was in the protected environment of the medieval Iceland that Scandinavian literature reached its highest development.
Insular protection was undoubtedly a factor in the brilliant cultural development of Crete. The progress of the early civilization from the late Stone Age through the Bronze Age was continuous; it bears no trace of any strong outside influence or sudden transition, no evidence of disturbance like an invasion or conquest by an alien people till 1200 B. C. when the latest stage of Minoan art was crushed by barbarian incursion from the north.893
The early history of the Singhalese monarchy in Ceylon from 250 B. C. to 416 A. D., when even the narrow moat of Palk Strait discouraged Tamil invasions from the mainland, shows the brilliant development possible under even a slight degree of protection.894 However, in the case of these Ceylon Aryans, as in that of the Icelandic Norse, we must keep in mind the fact that the bearers of this culture were picked men, as are early maritime colonists the world over. The sea selects and then protects its island folk. But the seclusion of Ceylon was more favorable to progress than the mainland of India, with its incessant political and religious upheavals. Japan, in contrast to China's long list of invasions, shows the peace of an insular location. She never suffered any overwhelming influx of alien races or any foreign conquest. The armada sent by Kublai Khan in 1281 to subdue the islands paralleled the experience of the famous Spanish fleet three centuries later in English waters. This is the only attempt to invade Japan that recorded history shows.895 In the original peopling of the island by Mongolian stock at the cost of the Aino aborigines, there is evidence of two distinct and perhaps widely separated immigrations from the mainland, one from Korea and another from more northern Asia. Thus Japan's population contained two continental elements, which seem to have held themselves in the relation of governing and governed class, much as Norman and Saxon did in England, while the Ainos lingered in the geographical background of mountain fastness and outlying islands, as the primitive Celts did in the British Isles.896 In the case both of England and Japan, the island location made the occupation by continental races a fitful, piecemeal process, not an inundation, because only small parties could land from time to time. The result was gradual or partial amalgamation of the various stocks, but nowhere annihilation.
But island location was not the sole factor in the equation. Similarity of race and relative parity of civilization between the successive immigrants and the original population, as well as the small numbers of the Invaders, made the struggle for the ownership of the island not wholly one-sided, and was later favorable to amalgamation in England as in Japan; whereas very small bands of far-coming Spaniards in the Canaries, Cuba, and Porto Rico resulted in the extinction of the original inhabitants, by the process operating now in New Zealand and Australia. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the Antilles, the conquest of these islands by South American Caribs had resulted in race intermixture. These sea-marauders brought no women with them in their small boats from the distant mainland, so they killed off the men and married the Arawak women of the islands. Here again insular location plus similarity of race and culture produced amalgamation, as opposed to extermination of the vanquished by over-sea invaders.
While the insular security of a primitive folk like the Tasmanians, Hawaiians and Malagasies is only passive, that of a civilized people like the English and modern Japanese is active, consciously utilized and reinforced. It is therefore more effective, and productive of more varied political and cultural results. Such people can allow themselves extensive contact with other nations, because they know it is in their power to control or check such contact at will. Japan took refuge in its medieval period in a policy of seclusion suggested by its island habitat,897 relying on the passive protection of isolation. England, on the other hand, from the time of King Alfred, built up a navy to resist invasion. The effect, after the political unification of Great Britain, was a guarantee of protection against foreign attack, the concentration of the national defenses in a navy,898 the elimination of the standing army which despotic monarchs might have used to crush the people, the consequent release of a large working force from military service, and the application of these to the development of English Industry.899
Islands, as naturally protected districts, are often sought places of refuge by the weak or vanquished, and thus are drawn into the field of historical
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