Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-GeographySemple, Ellen Churchill
History
Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography
Semple, Ellen Churchill
Human beings -- Effect of environment on; Human geography
When colonizers or conquerors appropriate the land of a lower race, we
find a territory occupied at least for a time by two types of
population, constituting an ethnic, social and often economic
differentiation. The separation may be made geographical also. The
Indians in the United States have been confined to reservations, like
the Hottentots to the twenty or more "locations" in Cape Colony. This is
the simplest arrangement. Whether the second or lower type survives
depends upon their economic and social utility, into which again
geographic conditions enter. The Indians of Canada are a distinct
economic factor in that country as trappers for the Hudson Bay Company,
and they will so remain till the hunting grounds of the far north are
exhausted. The native agriculturists in the Tropics are indispensable to
the unacclimated whites. The negroes of the South, introduced for an
economic purpose, find their natural habitat in the Black Belt. Here we
have an ethnic division of labor for geographical reasons. Castes or
social classes, often distinguished by shades of color as in Brahman
India, survive as differentiations indicating old lines of race
cleavage. There is abundant evidence that the upper classes in Germany,
France, Austria, and the British Isles are distinctly lighter of hair
and eyes than the peasantry.[215] The high-class Japanese are taller and
fairer than the masses. Nearly all the African tribes of the Sudan and
bordering Sahara include two distinct classes, one of lighter and one of
darker shade. Many Fulbe tribes distinguish these classes by the names
of "Blacks" and "Whites."[216] The two-type people are the result of
historical movements.
[Sidenote: Differentiation and isolation.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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