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
Coast peoples tend to show something more than the hybridism resulting
from the mingling of two stocks. So soon as the art of navigation
developed beyond its initial phase of mere coastwise travel, and began
to strike out across the deep, all coast peoples bordered upon each
other, and the sea became a common waste boundary between. Unlike a land
boundary, which is in general accessible from only two sides and tends
to show, therefore, only two constituent elements in its border
population, a sea boundary is accessible from many directions with
almost equal ease; it therefore draws from many lands, and gives its
population a variety of ethnic elements and a cosmopolitan stamp. This,
however, is most marked in great seaports, but from them it penetrates
into the surrounding country. The whole southern and eastern coast
population of England, from Cornwall to the Wash, received during
Elizabeth's reign valuable accessions of industrious Flemings and
Huguenots, refugees from Catholic persecution in the Netherlands and
France.[497] Our North Atlantic States, whose population is more than
half (50.9 per cent.) made up of aliens and natives born of foreign
parents,[498] have drawn these elements from almost the whole circle of
Atlantic shores, from Norway to Argentine and from Argentine to
Newfoundland. Even the Southern States, so long unattractive to
immigrants on account of the low status of labor, show a fringe of
various foreign elements along the Gulf coast, the deeper tint of which
on the census maps fades off rapidly toward the interior. The same
phenomenon appears with Asiatic and Australian elements in our Pacific
seaboard states.[499] The cosmopolitan population of New York, with its
"Chinatown," its "Little Italy," its Russian and Hungarian quarters, has
its counterpart in the mixed population of Mascat, peopled by Hindu,
Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Afghans, and Baluchis, settled here for purposes
of trade; or in the equally mongrel inhabitants of Aden and Zanzibar, of
Marseilles, Constantinople, Alexandria, Port Said, and other
Mediterranean ports.
[Sidenote: Lingua franca of coasts.]
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