Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (best romantic books to read .txt) 📕
The protection of a water frontier--Pile villages of ancienttimes--Modern pile dwellings--Their geographicdistribution--River-dwellers in old and popular lands--Man'sencroachment upon the sea by reclamation of land--The struggle with thewater--Mound villages in river flood-plains--Social and political gainby control of the water--A factor in early civilization of aridlands--The economy of the water--Fisheries--Factors in maritimeexpansion--Fisheries as nurseries of seamen--Anthropo-geographicimportance of navigation.
CHAPTER XI.
THE ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY OF RIVERS
Rivers as intermediaries between land and sea--Sea navigation mergesinto river navigation--Historical importance of seas and oceansinfluenced by their debouching streams--Lack of coast articulationssupplied by rivers--River highways as basis of commercialpreëminence--Importance of rivers in large countries--Rivers as highwaysof expansion--Determinants of routes in arid or semi-aridlands--Increa
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George G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 56-57. London, 1904.
190.Herodotus, Book II, 60.
191.Encyclopædia Britanica, Article Pilgrimages.
192.E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 88. Boston, 1907.
193.Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 3-7. London, 1907.
194.C.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, pp. 3-4, 144-145, 280-284. London, 1906.
195.Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191. Map p. 190. New York and London, 1902-1906.
196.J.W. Powell, Map of Linguistic Stocks of American Indians, Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Vol. VII.
197.Archibald Little, The Far East, Ethnological Map, p. 8. Oxford, 1905.
198.Census of India, 1901, General Report by H.H. Risley and E.A. Gait, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 500-504; and Ethnographic Appendices by H.H. Risley, Vol. I, map, p. 60. Calcutta, 1903. P. Vidal de la Blache, Le Peuple de l'Inde, d'après la série des recensements, pp. 431-434, Annales de Géographie, Vol. XV. Paris, 1906.
199.Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 422, 424, 434-436. New York, 1902-1906.
200.D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 97-102. New York, 1858.
201.James Bryce, Migrations of the Races of Men Considered Historically, Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421, May, 1892.
202.Justus Perthes, Taschen Atlas, p. 78. Gotha, 1905.
203.Ibid., p. 80.
204.Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, p. 878. New York, 1902.
205.Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191. New York, 1902-1906.
206.Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. VI, pp. 23-27, 38-42, 63-68, 83-87. Oxford, 1896.
207.McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, Chap. XXI, Vol. XIX of History of North America, Philadelphia, 1905.
208.Ibid., pp. 83, 87, Map of Migrations, p. 3.
209.Archibald Little, The Far East, pp. 34-38. Oxford, 1905.
210.Strabo, Book VIII, chap. I, 2.
211.Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. II, p. 548. New York, 1857.
212.Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 104-105. London, 1903.
213.E.F. im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 167-171, 202-207. London, 1883.
214.W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 237. New York, 1899.
215.Ibid., p. 469.
216.H. Barth, Human Society in Northern Central Africa, Journal of the Royal Geog. Society, Vol. XXX, p. 116. London, 1860.
217.Moritz Wagner, Die Entstehung der Arten durch räumliche Sonderung. Basel, 1889.
218.H. W. Conn, The Method of Evolution, pp. 282-295. New York, 1900.
219.McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 418, 424, Vol. XIX of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1905.
220.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 280-283. London, 1896-1898.
221.Cæsar, Bella Gallico, Book II, chap. IV.
222.H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 32-33. New York, 1902-1906.
223.Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 75, 81, 82. Oxford, 1895.
224.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 34, 341-342. New York, 1899.
225.H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 400, 417, New York, 1902-1906.
226.A.C. Haddon, The Study of Man, p. xix. New York and London, 1898.
227.James Bryce, Migrations of the Races of Men Considered Historically, Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421. May, 1892.
228.Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, pp. 34-35. Washington, 1894.
229.H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, p. 42. New York, 1902-1906.
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. Sundbärg, 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.
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 Japan, 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 retarding 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 latitudes 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 assumes a fictitious 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 passes of the Central Alps from Savoy to the Tyrol; and, more recently, that of the young state of Panama, through which the Isthmian Canal is to pass.
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-mass, 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.
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
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