Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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The history of nomad conquerors shows that they become weakened by the enervating climate and the effeminating luxury of the moist and fertile lowlands. They lose eventually their warlike spirit, like the Fellatah or Fulbe founders of the Sudanese states,1100 and are either displaced from their insecure thrones by other conquerors sprung from the same nomad-breeding steppe, as the Aryan princes of India by the Mongol Emperor, and the Saracen invaders of Mesopotamia by the victorious Turkomans; or they are expelled in time by their conquered subjects, as the Tartars were from Russia, the Moors from Spain, and the Turks from the Danube Valley.
Nomad hordes unite for concerted action to resist encroachment upon their pastures, or for marauding expeditions, or for widespread conquest; but such unions are from their nature temporary, though a career of conquest may be sustained for decades. The geographically determined mobility which facilitates such concentration favors also dispersal, decentralization. This is the paradox in nomadism. Geographic conditions in arid lands necessitate sparse distribution of population and of herds. Pastoral life requires large spaces and small social groups. When Abraham and Lot went to Canaan from Egypt, "the land was not able to bear them that they might dwell together, for their substance was great." Strife for the pasturage ensued between their respective herdsmen, so the two sheiks separated, Lot taking the plains of Jordan and Abraham the hill pastures of Hebron. Jacob and Esau separated for the same reason. The encampment of the Kirghis shepherds rarely averages over five or six tents, except on the best grazing grounds at the best season of the year. The flow of spring, well or stream also helps to regulate their size. The groups of Mongol yurts or felt tents along the piedmont margin of the Gobi vary from four tents to a large encampment, according to water and grass.1101 Prevalsky mentions a population of 70 families or 300 souls in the Lob Nor district distributed in 11 villages, or less than 28 in each group.1102 Barth noticed the smallness of all the oasis towns of the Sahara, even those occupying favorable locations for trade on the caravan routes.1103
The nature-made necessity of scattering in small groups to seek pasturage induces in the nomad a spirit of independence. The Bedouin is personally free. The power of the sheik is only nominal,1104 and depends much upon his personal qualities. The gift of eloquence among the ancient Arabs has been attributed to the necessity of persuading a people to whom restraint was irksome.1105 Political organization is conspicuously lacking among the Tibbus of the Sahara1106 and the Turkoman tribes of the Trans-Caspian steppes. "We are a people without a head," they say. The title of sheik is an empty one. Custom and usage are their rulers.1107 Though the temporary union of nomadic tribes forms an effective army, the union is short-lived. Groups form, dissolve and re-form, with little inner cohesion. The Boers in South African grasslands showed the same development. The government of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Colony found it difficult to control the wandering cattlemen of the interior plateau. They loved independence and isolation; their dissociative instincts, bred by the lonely life of the thin-pastured veldt, were overcome only by the necessity of defense against the Bushmen. Then they organized themselves into commandos and sallied out on punitive expeditions, like the Cossack tribes of the Don against marauding Tartars. Scattered over wide tracts of pasture land, they were exempt from the control of either Dutch or English authority; but when an energetic administration pursued them into their widespread ranches, they eluded control by trekking.1108 Here was the independent spirit of the steppe, reinforced by the spirit of the frontier.
Though the desert and steppe have bred conquerors, they are the last parts of the earth's surface to yield to conquest from without. The untameable spirit of freedom in the shepherd tribes finds an ally against aggression in the trackless sands, meager water and food supply of their wilderness. Pursuit of the retreating tribesmen is dangerous and often futile. They need only to burn off the pasture and fill up or pollute the water-holes to cripple the transportation and commissariat of the invading army. This is the way the Damaras have fought the German subjugation of Southwest Africa.1109 Moreover, the paucity of economic and political possibilities in deserts and grasslands discourages conquest. Conquest pays only where it is a police measure to check depredations on the bordering agricultural lands, or where such barren areas are transit lands to a desirable territory beyond. It is chiefly the "Gates of Herat" and the lure of India which have drawn Russian dominion across the scorched plains of Turkestan. France has assumed the big task of controlling the Sahara to secure a safe passway between French Tunisia and the rich Niger basin of the French Sudan. The recent British-Egyptian expansion southward across the Nubian steppes had for its objective the better watered districts of the upper Nile above Khartum. This desert advance is essentially a latter day phenomenon, the outcome of modern territorial standards; it is attended or secured by the railroad. To this fact the projected Trans-Saharan line is the strongest witness.
Nature everywhere postpones, obstructs, jeopardizes the political conquest of arid lands. The unstable, fanatical tribesmen of the Egyptian Sudan, temporarily but effectively united under the Mahdi, made it necessary for Kitchener to do again in 1898 the work of subjugation which Gordon had done thirty years before. The body of the Arabian people is still free. The Turkish sovereignty over them to-day is nominal, rather an alliance with a people whom it is dangerous to provoke and difficult to attack. Only the coast provinces of Hejaz, Yemen and Hasa are subject to Turkey, while the tribes of the interior and of the southeastern seaboard are wholly independent.1110 The Turkoman tribes of Trans-Caspia have been subordinated to Russia largely by a process of extermination.1111 China is satisfied with a nominal dominion over the roaming populations of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan. The French pacification and control of Northwest Africa meets a peculiar problem, due to the extreme restlessness and restiveness of the dominant Arab race. The whole population is unstable as water; a disturbance or movement in one tribe is soon communicated to the whole mass.1112
The steppe or desert policy for the curtailment of nomadism, and the reclamation of both land and people is to encourage or enforce sedentary life. The French, to settle the wandering tribes on the Atlas border of the Sahara, have opened a vast number of artesian wells through the agency of skillful engineers, and thus created oases in which the fecund sands support abundant date-palm groves.1113 The method pursued energetically by the Russians is to compress the tribes into ever narrowing limits of territory, taking away their area of plunder and then so restricting their pasture lands, that they are forced to the drudgery of irrigation and tillage. In this way the Yomuts and Goklans occupying the Caspian border of Trans-Caspia have been compelled to abandon their old marauding, nomadic life and become to some extent agriculturists.1114 The method of the Chinese is to push forward the frontier of agricultural settlement into the grasslands, dislodging the shepherd tribes into poorer pastures. They have thus reclaimed for grain and poppy fields considerable parts of the Ordos country in the great northern bend of the Hoangho, which used to be a nursery for nomadic invaders. A similar substitution of agriculture for pastoral nomadism of another type has in recent decades taken place in the semi-arid plains of the American West. Sheep-grazing on open range was with difficulty dislodged from the San Joaquin Valley of California by expanding farms in the sixties. More recently "dry farming" and scientific agriculture adapted to semi-arid conditions have "pushed the desert off the map" in Kansas, and advanced the frontier of tillage across the previous domain of natural pastures to the western border of the state.
Pastoral nomadism has been gradually dislodged from Europe, except in the salt steppes of the Caspian depression, where a vast tract, 300,000 square miles in area and wholly unfit for agriculture, still harbors a sparse population of Asiatic Kalmuck and Kirghis hordes, leading the life of the Asiatic steppes.1115 In Asia, too, the regions of pastoral nomadism have been curtailed, but in Africa they still maintain for the most part the growing, expanding geographical forms which they once showed in Europe, when nomadism prevailed as far as the Alps and the Rhine. In Africa shepherd tribes cover not only the natural grasslands, but lap over into many districts destined by nature for agriculture. Hence it is safe to predict that a conspicuous part of the future economic and cultural history of the Dark Continent will consist in the release of agricultural regions from nomad occupancy and dominion.
Though agriculture is regarded with contempt and aversion by pastoral nomads and is resorted to for a livelihood only when they lose their herds by a pest or robbery, or find their pasture lands seriously curtailed, nevertheless nomadism yields such a precarious and monotonous subsistence that it is not infrequently combined with a primitive, shifting tillage. The Kalmucks of the Russian steppes employ men to harvest hay for the winter feeding. The Nogai Tartars practice a little haphazard tillage on the alluvial hem of the steppe streams.1116 Certain Arab tribes living east of the Atbara and Gash Rivers resort with their herds during the dry season to the fruitful region of Cassala, which is inundated by the drainage streams from Abyssinia, and there they cultivate dourra and other grains.1117 The Bechuana tribes inhabiting the rich, streamless grassland of the so-called Kalahari Desert rear small herds of goats and cultivate melons and pumpkins; among the other Bechuana tribes on the eastern margin of the desert, the men hunt, herd the cattle and milk the cows, while the women raise dourra, maize, pumpkins, melons, cucumbers and beans.1118 [Compare maps pages 105, 487.]
Such supplementary agriculture usually shifts with the nomad group. But where high mountains border rainless tracts, their piedmont districts regularly develop permanent cultivation. Here periodic rains or melting snows on the ranges fill the
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