Colonization, the most potent instrument of organized expansion, has in recent centuries changed the relative significance of the great colonial nations of Europe. It raised England from a small insular country to the center of a world power. It gave sudden though temporary preeminence to Spain and Portugal, a new lease of life to little Holland, and ominous importance to Russia. Germany, who entered the colonial field only in 1880, found little desirable land left; and yet it was especially Germany who needed an outlet for her redundant population. With all these states, as with ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Yemen, the initial purpose was commerce or in some form the exploitation of the new territory. Colonies were originally trading stations established as safe termini for trade routes.[181] Colonial government, as administered by the mother country, originally had an eye single for the profits of trade: witness the experience of the Thirteen Colonies with Great Britain. Colonial wars have largely meant the rivalry of competing nations seeking the same markets, as the history of the Portuguese and Dutch in the East Indies, and the English and French in America prove. The first Punic War had a like commercial origin--rivalry for the trade of _Magna Graecia_ between Rome and Carthage, the dominant colonial powers of the western Mediterranean. Such wars result in expansion for the victor. [Sidenote: Commerce.] Commerce, which so largely underlies colonization, is itself a form of historical movement. It both causes and stimulates great movements of peoples, yet it differs from these fundamentally in its relation to the land. Commerce traverses the land to reach its destination, but takes account of natural features only as these affect transportation and travel. It has to do with systems of routes and goals, which it aims to reach as quickly as possible. It reduces its cortege to essentials; eliminates women and children. Therefore it surmounts natural barriers which block the advance of other forms of the historical movement. Merchant caravans are constantly crossing the desert, but not so peoples. Traders with loaded yaks or ponies push across the Karakorum Mountains by passes where a migrating horde would starve and freeze. The northern limit of the Mediterranean race in Spain lies sharply defined along the crest of the Pyrenees, whose long unbroken wall forms one of the most pronounced boundaries in Europe;[182] yet traders and smugglers have pushed their way through from time immemorial. Long after Etruscan merchants had crossed northward over the Alps, Roman expansion and colonization made a detour around the mountains westward into Gaul, with the result that the Germans received Roman civilization not straight from the south, but secondhand through their Gallic neighbors west of the Rhine. [Sidenote: Commerce a guide to various movements.]