Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (i love reading books .TXT) 📖
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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It is necessary to distinguish two general classes of continental articulations; first, marginal dependences, like the fringe of European peninsulas and islands, resulting from a deeply serrated contour; and second, surface subdivisions of the interior, resulting from differences of relief or defined often by enclosing mountains or deserts, like the Tibetan Plateau, the Basin of Bohemia, the Po River trough, or the sand-rimmed valley of the Nile. The first class is by far the more important, because of the intense historical activity which results from the vitalizing contact with the sea. But in considering coast articulations, anthropo-geography is led astray unless it discriminates between these on the basis of size and location. Without stopping to discuss the obvious results of a contrasted zonal location, such as that between Labrador and Yucatan, the Kola Peninsula and Spain, it is necessary to keep in mind always the effect of vicinal location. An outlying coastal dependency like Ireland has had its history impoverished by excessive isolation, in contrast to the richer development of England, Jutland, and Zealand in the same latitude, because these have profited from the closer neighborhood of other peripheral regions. So from ancient times, Greece has had a similar advantage over the Crimea, the Tunisian Peninsula of North Africa over Spain, the Cotentin Peninsula of France over Brittany, and Kent over Cornwall or Caithness in Great Britain.
Articulations on a vast scale, like the southern peninsulas of Asia, produce quite different cultural and historical effects from small physical sub-divisions, like the fiord promontories and "skerries" of Norway and southern Alaska, or the finger peninsulas of the Peloponnesus. The significant difference lies in the degree of isolation which the two types yield. Large continental dependencies of the Asiatic class resemble small continents in their power to segregate; while overgrown capes like ancient Attica and Argolis or the more bulky Peloponnesus have their exclusiveness tempered by the mediating power of the small marine inlets between them. Small articulations, by making a coast accessible, tend to counteract the excessive isolation of a large articulation. They themselves develop in their people only minor or inner differentiations, which serve to enrich the life of the island or peninsula as a whole, but do not invade its essential unity. The contrast in the history of Hellas and the Peloponnesus was due largely to their separation from one another; yet neither was able to make of its people anything but Greeks. Wales and Cornwall show in English history the same contrast and the same underlying unity.
In discussing continental articulations, therefore, it makes a great difference whether we draw our deductions from small projections of the coast, like Wales, the Peloponnesus, Brittany and the Crimea, whose areas range from 7442 to 10,023 square miles (19,082 to 25,700 square kilometers); or the four Mediterranean peninsulas, which range in size from the 58,110 square miles (149,000 square kilometers) of the Apennine Peninsula to the 197,600 square miles (506,-600 square kilometers) of Asia Minor and the 227,700 square miles (584,000 square kilometers) of the Iberian; or the vast continental alcoves of southern Asia, like Farther India with its 650,000 square miles (1,667,000 square kilometers), Hither India with 814,320 square miles (2,088,000 square kilometers) and Arabia with 1,064,700 square miles (2,730,-000 square kilometers).784 The fact that the large compound peninsula of western Europe which comprises Spain, Portugal, France, Jutland, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Italy and western Germany, and has its base in the stricture between the Adriatic and the Baltic, is about the size of peninsular India, suggests how profound may be the difference in geographic effects between large and small peripheral divisions. The three huge extremities which Asia thrusts forward into the Indian Ocean are geographical entities, which in point of size and individualization rank just below the continents; and in relation to the solid mass of Central Asia, they have exhibited in many respects an aloofness and self-sufficiency, that have resulted in an historical divergence approximating that of the several continents. India, which has more productive territory than Australia and a population not much smaller than that of Europe, becomes to the administrators of its government "the Continent of India," as it is regularly termed in the Statistical Atlas published at Calcutta. Farther India has in the long-drawn pendant of Malacca a sub-peninsula half as large again as Italy. The Deccan has in Ceylon an insular dependency the size of Tasmania. The whole scale is continental. It appears again somewhat diminished, in the largest articulations of Europe, in Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas. This continental scale stamps also the anthropo-geography of such large individualized fields. They are big enough for each to comprise one or even several nations, and isolated enough to keep their historical processes for long periods at a time to a certain extent detached from those of their respective continents.
The most favorable conditions for historical development obtain where the two classes of marginal articulation are combined, and where they occur in groups, as we find them in the Mediterranean and the North Sea-Baltic basin. Here the smaller indentations multiply contact with the sea, and provide the harbors, bays and breakwaters of capes and promontories which make the coast accessible. The larger articulations, by their close grouping, break up the sea into the minor thalassic basins which encourage navigation, and thus insure the exchange of their respective cultural achievements. In other words, such conditions present the pre-eminent advantages of vicinal location around an enclosed sea.
The enormous articulations of southern Asia suffer from their paucity of small indentations, all the more because of their vast size and sub-tropical location. The Grecian type of peninsula, with its broken shoreline, finds here its large-scale homologue only in Farther India, to which the Sunda Islands have played in history the part of a gigantic Cyclades. The European type of articulation is found only about the Yellow-Japan Sea, where the island of Hondo and the peninsulas of Shangtung and Korea reproduce approximately the proportions of Great Britain, Jutland and Italy respectively. Arabia and India, like the angular shoulder of Africa which protrudes into the Indian Ocean, measure an imposing length of coastline, but this length shrinks in comparison with the vast area of the peninsulas. The contour of a peninsula is like the surface of the brain: in both it is convolutions that count. Southern Asia has had lobes enough but too few convolutions. For this reason, the northern Indian Ocean, despite its exceptional location as the eastward extension of the Mediterranean route to the Orient, found its development constantly arrested till the advent of European navigators.
Although the peripheral articulations of a continent differ anthropo-geographically according to their size, their zonal and vicinal location, yet large and small, arctic and tropical, are grouped indiscriminately together in the figures that state the length of coastlines. For this reason, statistics of continental coastlines have little value. For instance, the fact that Eurasia has 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) and North America 46,500 miles (75,000 kilometers) of contact with the ocean is not illuminating; these figures do not reveal the fact that the former has its greatest coastal length on its tropical and sub-tropical side, while the latter continent has wasted inlets and islands innumerable in the long, bleak stretch from Newfoundland poleward around to Bering Sea.
Peninsulas are accessible from the sea according to the configuration of their coasts, but from their hinterland, according to the length and nature of their connection with the same. This determines the degree of their isolation from the land-mass. If they hang from the continent by a frayed string, as does the Peloponnesus, Crimea, Malacca, Indian Gutjerat, and Nova Scotia, they are segregated from the life of the mainland almost as completely as if they were islands. The same effects follow where the base of a peninsula is defined by a high mountain barrier, as in all the Mediterranean peninsulas, in the two Indias, and in Korea; or by a desert like that which scantily links Arabia to Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia; or by a blur of swamps and lakes such as half detaches Scandinavia, Courland, Estland and Finland from Russia.
Held to their continents by bonds that often fail to bind, subjected by their outward-facing peripheral location to every centrifugal force, feeling only slightly the pull of the great central mass behind, peninsulas are often further detached economically and historically by their own contrasted local conditions. A sharp transition in geological formation and therefore in soil, a difference of climate, rainfall, drainage system, of flora or fauna, serve greatly to emphasize the lack of community of interests with the continental interior, and therefore produce an inevitable diversity of historical development.785 Hence, many peninsulas insulate their people as completely as islands. It is hard to say whether the Pyrenean peninsula or Sicily, Scandinavia or Great Britain, has held itself more aloof from the political history of remaining Europe; whether Korea is not more entitled to its name of the Hermit Kingdom than island Japan could ever be; whether the Peloponnesus or Euboea was more intimately associated with the radiant life of ancient Hellas. These questions lead to another, namely, whether a high mountain wall like the Pyrenees, or a narrow strait like that of Messina is the more effective geographical boundary.
Peninsulas not infrequently gain in breadth as they approach the continent; here they tend to abate their distinctive character as lobes of the mainland, together with the ethnic and historical marks of isolation. Here they form a doubtful boundary zone of mingled continental and peninsular development. Such peninsulas fall naturally, therefore, into a continental and a peninsular section, and reveal this segmentation in the differentiated history of the two portions. That great military geographer Napoleon distinguished the Italy of the Po basin as Italie continentale, and the Apennine section as Presqu'ile. Not only is the former broader, but, expanding like a tree trunk near the ground, it sends its roots well back into the massive interior of the continent; it is dominated more by the Alps than by the Apennines; it contains a lowland and a river of continental proportions, for which there is no space on the long, narrow spur of southern Italy. If its geographical character approximates that of the mainland, so does its ethnic and historical. The Po basin is a well defined area of race characterization, in which influences have made for intermixture. South of the crest of the Apennines the Italian language in its purity begins, in contrast to the Gallo-Italian of the north. This mountain ridge has also held apart the dark, short dolichocephalic stock of the Mediterranean race from the fairer, taller, broad-headed Celts, who have moved down into the Po basin from the Alps, and the Germans and Illyrians who have entered it from the northeast.786 Northern Italy is therefore allied ethnically, as it has often been united politically, to the neighboring countries abutting upon the Alps, so that it has experienced only in a partial degree that detachment which has stamped the history of the Apennine section.
The Balkan Peninsula tells much the same story of contrasted geographic conditions and development in its continental and peninsular sections. Greece proper, in ancient as in modern times, reached its northern confines where the peninsula suddenly widens its base through Macedonia and Thrace. In this narrow southern section to-day, especially in isolated Peloponnesus, Attica, and the high-walled garden of Thessaly, are found people of the pure, long-headed, Hellenic type, and here the Greek language prevails.787 But that broad and alien north, long excluded from the Amphictyonic Council and a stranger to Aegean culture in
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