Soil, of course, has profound effects on the kind of agriculture that is possible—and
therefore on the kinds of societies that are possible. A pattern of farms that
are passed down through the same family for generations is possible in fertile regions,
but not in places where the soil is exhausted in a few years and has to be abandoned and a new site
found while the first land recovers its fertility. Whole societies may have to be mobile when the
land in any given location cannot permanently sustain them. This means that there cannot
be cities and all the cultural developments facilitated by cities. Mobile, slash-and-burn
agriculture has been common in those parts of tropical Africa and Asia where great cities failed
to develop and where the indigenous people long remained vulnerable to conquest or enslavement
by peoples from more urbanized societies and larger nation-states elsewhere.
In early medieval Europe as well, Slavs in East Central Europe practiced slash-and-burn
agriculture, which necessitated very different forms of social organization from those which
emerged after the use of the plow enabled them to create sedentary societies. Moreover,
just as the nature of agriculture has influenced where urban life is or is not feasible,
so the economic and technological advances associated with cities influence agriculture.
Thus, in the sixteenth century, the hinterlands of such flourishing cities as Venice, Milan,
and Genoa saw great improvements in agricultural methods introduced.
Deserts and steppes, such as those of North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia,
have often produced societies on the move. These nomads have included
some of the great conquerors of all time. Wave after wave of conquerors from Central
Asia and the Caucasus have pushed other peoples before them into eastern and southern Europe over
the centuries, creating a chain-reaction series of conquests in the Ukrainian,
Polish, and Hungarian plains and in the Balkans, as those displaced moved on to displace others.
Less dramatic and less extreme have been the seasonal movements in places where sheep,
goats, and other animals are herded in different places at different times of the year,
rather than exhaust the vegetation in one place. Here there may be permanent dwellings where the
women and children stay while the men migrate seasonally with their herds,
as in the Balkans, for example. The significance of particular geographic features—mountains,
rivers, climate, soil, etc.—is even greater when these features are viewed in combination.
For example, the effect of rainfall on agriculture depends not only on how much rainfall there is
but also on the ability of the soil to hold it. Thus a modest amount of rainfall may be sufficient
for a flourishing agriculture on the absorbent loess soils of northern China, while rain falling
on the limestone soils of the Balkans may disappear rapidly underground. Similarly,
the economic value of navigable waterways depends on the lands adjacent to them. Navigable rivers
which go through land without the resources for either industry or agriculture—the Amazon for
example—are of little economic value, even though navigable waterways in general have been crucial
to the economic and cultural development of other regions more fully endowed with other resources.
In Russia as well, waterways isolated from the major natural resources of the country,
as well as from each other, cannot match the economic role of rivers which flow into one
another and into the sea after passing through agriculturally or industrially productive regions.
Conversely, harbors that are not as deep, not as wide,
nor as well-sheltered as other harbors may nevertheless become busy ports
if they represent the only outlets for productive regions in the vicinity, as was the case of Genoa
in northwestern Italy or Mombasa in East Africa. Similarly, the port of Dubrovnik on the
Dalmatian coast, strategically located for the international trade routes of the Middle Ages,
flourished despite a harbor that was not particularly impressive in itself.
Sometimes a variety of favorable geographical features exist in combination within a given
region, as in northwestern Europe, and sometimes virtually all are lacking, as in parts of tropical
Africa, while still other parts of the world have some of these favorable features but not others.
The consequences include not only variations in economic well-being but, more fundamentally,
variations in the skills and experience—the human capital—of the people themselves.
Given the enormous range of combinations of geographical features, the peoples from different
regions of the earth have had highly disparate opportunities to develop particular skills and
work experience. International migrations then put these peoples with disparate skills, aptitudes,
and outlooks in proximity to one another and in competition with one another in other lands.
While geographical influences may distinguish one cultural universe from another,
even another located nearby, the existence of similar geographical influences and similar social
patterns in distant regions of the world—marauding and feuds among mountain men, for example—means
that such patterns are not “national character” or “racial traits,” but are international in scope
and geographical in origin. Nor are these patterns necessarily
racial characteristics even in the limited sense of characteristics differing from one race to
another for non-genetic reasons. Particular cultural universes may be largely coextensive
with particular races—the Japanese culture for example—but this is not always or inherently so.
In short, geographical influences cut across national borders and racial lines, producing
similar effects in different countries and different effects in various regions of
the same country or among culturally different members of the same race.
This is not to say that there are no national cultural influences. Clearly there are. Language,
religion, and political traditions are just some of the cultural values holding together
nations composed of peoples subjected to disparate other influences. The point here is simply that a
recognition of distinct cultural patterns, whether originating in geography, history, or otherwise,
is not the same as a belief in “national character” or “racial traits.” These things
may overlap or even be congruent in some cases, but they may also be quite separate.
While continents or other regions of the world may not be geographically unique, nor homogeneous
within themselves, nevertheless the ensemble of geographical influences operating in one
region of the world has differed significantly from the geographical (and other) influences
operating elsewhere. These differences are not confined to their original locations but are also
imbedded in the cultures of peoples migrating from these different regions of the world.
One of the more geographically fortunate parts of the world,
in terms of having the natural resources needed for the development of a modern
industrial economy, has been northern and western Europe. Iron ore and coal deposits,
the key ingredients of steel manufacturing and the heavy industry dependent on it,
are concentrated in the Ruhr valley, in Wales, in Sweden, and in the region so bitterly fought
over by France and Germany, Alsace-Lorraine. The broad coastal plains of northern Europe
have also provided the peoples of that region with much prime agricultural land and with navigable
rivers crisscrossing these lands, knitting large areas together economically and culturally.
The fact that Europe has many peninsulas, islands, and numerous harbors
gives the continent excellent access to the sea. The Gulf Stream warms Western Europe to
give it milder winters than places at similar latitudes in the Western Hemisphere or in Asia.
London, for example, is farther north than any place in the 48 contiguous United States,
yet it has milder winters than New York City, much less cities in Minnesota or Wisconsin.
Eastern, Central, and Mediterranean Europe do not share all these advantages. The Gulf
Stream’s influence on the climate of European nations on the Atlantic becomes progressively
less in the more distant central and eastern portions of the continent, where rivers are
frozen for more days of the year and where winters are longer and more bitterly cold.
The natural resources required for modern industry are also less abundant and in many places
virtually non-existent in central and eastern Europe. The broad coastal plains of northern
Europe have no counterparts in the Balkans, where hills and mountains come down close to the sea
and the coastal harbors often have no navigable rivers to link them to the hinterlands. Spain
has likewise been lacking in navigable rivers and Sicily lacking in both rivers and rainfall.
These sharp differences in geographical advantages have been reflected not only in great disparities
in wealth among the different regions of Europe, but also in similarly large differences in skills,
industrial experience, and whole ways of life among the peoples of these regions.
Thus, when the peoples of the Mediterranean migrated to the United States or to Australia,
for example, they did not bring with them the industrial skills or the whole modern way of
life found among German or English immigrants. What they did bring with them was a frugality born
of centuries of struggle for survival in the less productive lands and waters of the Mediterranean,
and a power of endurance and persistence born of the same circumstances. The ability of the Italian
immigrants to endure poor and cramped living conditions and to save out of very low wages,
which caused comment among those around them, whether in other European countries
or in the Western Hemisphere or Australia, had both geographical and historical roots.
Similar characteristics have marked various other Mediterranean peoples,
but the Italians are a particularly interesting group to study because they include not only the
Mediterranean people of the south but also people from the industrial world of the Po River valley
in the north, whose geographical, economic, and cultural characteristics are much more similar to
those found among northern and western Europeans. The enduring consequences of the different skills
and experiences possessed by people from different parts of Europe can be seen in the fact that the
average income of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to the United States in
the early twentieth century was equal to what was earned by the bottom 15 percent among immigrants
from England, Scotland, Holland, or Norway. Illiteracy was higher among immigrants from
southern and eastern Europe. In school, their children tended to lag behind the children of
either native-born Americans or the children of immigrants from northern and western Europe,
and their I.Q. scores were often very similar to those of American blacks,
and were sometimes lower. Nor was all this peculiar to American society. In pre-World
War II Australia, immigrants from southern Italy, Dalmatia, Macedonia, and the Greek countryside
were typically illiterate and spoke primarily their local dialects rather than the official
languages of their respective home countries. More than three quarters of these southern
European immigrants to Australia were from the rugged hills or mountains,
the steep coastlines or islands of the region, rather than from the urban areas or plains.
Although these remote areas were eventually drawn into the modern world, the skills of their peoples
continued to lag behind the skills of peoples in other parts of Europe that were more industrially
advanced and this was reflected in their earnings in Australia, as in the United States.
As late as the 1970s, the median earnings of immigrants to Australia from Greece,
Italy, or Yugoslavia fell below the earnings of immigrants from West Germany
or from English-speaking countries. Southern Europeans in Australia remained under-represented
in professional and technical occupations and from nearly half among the Italian immigrants
to an absolute majority among the Greek and Yugoslavian immigrants were unskilled laborers.
Asia has likewise had sharp cultural divisions, many growing out of its geography. The world’s
highest mountain range—the Himalayas—separated Asia’s two great ancient civilizations,
those of China and India, which developed independently of one another to a greater
extent than any of the civilizations of Europe or the Middle East. China, in particular,
was a world of its own and clearly the most advanced nation on Earth for many centuries.
One sign of its preeminence was that Chinese goods were for long in great demand in Europe
while Europe had nothing to offer in return except gold and silver. The compass was in use in China’s
maritime trade decades before it was introduced to Europeans by the Arabs, and books were printed in
China centuries before the Gutenberg Bible was printed in Europe. Chinese silks and porcelain
were in demand in Asia, Europe, and Africa. While Chinese culture had a major impact on
the cultures of Korea and Japan, and an influence felt as far away as Persia and Russia, there were
few external cultural influences on China itself from the eighth through the thirteenth centuries.
Yet very little of China’s culture was spread by migration—certainly nothing to compare with
the later massive spread of European culture to the Western Hemisphere, not only by the
movement of millions of Europeans but also by the Europeanization of both the indigenous populations
of the Western Hemisphere and the millions of descendants of Africans brought to the New World.
The Japanese are a reminder that a meager natural resource base alone is not enough to prevent
industrial development, though it may prevent such development from arising spontaneously from within
the given society. Japan’s industrialization was transplanted from western Europe—notably
England and Scotland—and from the United States, as a result of deliberate decisions
made by the Japanese government amid a national fervor to catch up with the West.
Why this happened in Japan but not in India, Abyssinia, or the Balkans,
is a profound question with few answers or even systematic explorations. Many centuries earlier,
Japan was likewise very receptive to cultural and technological imports from China,
which at that point represented the most advanced culture in the world.
In short, geography is a major influence but not a predestination. Otherwise nations like Japan and
Switzerland would be among the poorer nations of the world, instead of among the most prosperous.
Even after large numbers of Chinese, Japanese, and Indians migrated to other countries around
the world, the cultures they took with them had little or no effect on others outside their own
respective groups. To a greater or lesser extent, these migrants from Asia tended to assimilate at
least the outward veneer of the Western societies in which they settled, though retaining their
own work patterns and discipline which enabled them to rise to prosperity in these countries.
The southwestern part of Asia known as the Middle East has also sent abroad migrants
whose cultural endowments reflect the geographical circumstances in which their societies evolved.
Lacking both the spontaneous abundance of food found in parts of the tropics and the natural
resources for modern industry found in northern Europe, the peoples of the Middle East have
historically had to struggle to make a living, whether in the nomadic pattern of the bedouins
of the desert or in the irrigated farming of others, or—perhaps most striking of all—in
the middleman traders who originated in this region and spread throughout the world.
The economically strategic location of the Middle East, for centuries a crossroads of trade between
Europe and Asia, fostered the development of many trading ports and many trading peoples,
of whom the Jews, the Armenians, and the Lebanese have been particularly prominent,
not only in the Middle East itself but also in other countries on every inhabited continent.
These kinds of immigrants—middleman minorities—from this part of the world have
had patterns of skills and aptitudes strikingly similar to those of the overseas Chinese
who originated in similarly demanding regions of southern China, where trade was part of their
survival skills in a geographically unpromising region for industry, but which had trading ports.