...Here we have illustrated the essential difference between
the Saracen and the Turkish controls of the Nearer East. The Saracens were a
branch of the Semitic race, essentially peoples of the Euphrates and Nile and
of the smaller cases of Lower Asia . They
created a great empire by availing themselves of the two mobilities permitted
by their land – that of the horse and camel on the one hand, that of the ship
on the other. At different times their fleets controlled both the
Mediterranean as far as Spain , and the Indian ocean
to the Malay islands. From their strategically central position between the
eastern and western oceans, they attempted the conquest of all the marginal
lands of the Old World , imitating Alexander
and anticipating Napoleon. They could even threaten the steppe land. Wholly
distinct from Arabia as from Europe, India ,
and China were Turanian
pagans from the closed heart of Asia , the
Turks who destroyed the Saracen civilization.
Mobility upon the ocean is the natural rival of horse and
camel mobility in the heart of the continent. It was upon navigation of oceanic
rivers that was based the Potamic stage of civilization, that of China and Yangtse, that of India and Ganges, that of Babylonia on the
Euphrates, that on Egypt on Nile . It was essentially upon the navigation of the Mediterranean that was based what has been described as
the Thalassic stage of civilization, that of the Greeks and Romans. The
Saracens and the Vikings held sway by navigation of the oceanic coasts.
The all-important result of the discovery of the Cape road
to the Indies was to connect the western and
eastern coastal navigations of Euro-Asia, even though by a circuitous route,
and thus in some measure to neutralize the strategical advantage of the central
position of the steppe-nomads by pressing on them in rear. The revolution
commenced by the great mariners of the Columbian generation endowed Christendom
with the wildest possible mobility of power, short of the wing mobility. The
one and continuous ocean enveloping the divided and insular lands is, of
course, the geographical condition of ultimate unity in the command of the sea,
and of the whole theory of modern naval strategy and policy as expounded by
such writers as Captain Mahan and Mr. Spencer Wilkinson. The broad political
effect was to reverse the relations of Europe and Asia, for whereas in the
Middle Ages Europe was caged between an impassable desert to the south, and
unknown ocean on the west, and icy of forested wastes to north and north-east,
and in the east and south-east was constantly threatened by the superior
mobility of the horsemen and camel-men, she now emerged upon the world,
multiplying more than thirty-fold the sea surface and coastal lands to which
she had access, and wrapping her influence round the Euro-Asiatic land-power
which had hitherto threatened her very existence. New Europes were created in
the vacant lands discovered in the midst of the waters, and what Britain and Scandinavia to Europe in the earlier
times, that have America and
Australia ,
and in some measures even Trans-Saharan Africa, now become to Euro-Asia. Britain , Canada ,
the United States , South Africa , Australia ,
and Japan
are now ring of outer and insular bases for sea-power and commerce,
inaccessible to the land-power of Euro-Asia.
But the land power still remains, and recent events have
again increased its significance. While the maritime peoples of Western Europe
have covered the ocean with their fleets, settle the outer continents, and in
varying degree made tributary the oceanic margins of Asia, Russia has organized
the Cossacks, and, emerging from her northern forests, has policed the steppe
by setting her own nomads to meet the Tartar nomads. The Tudor century, which
saw the expansion of Western Europe over the sea, also saw Russian power
carried from Moscow through Siberia .
The eastward swoop of the horsemen across the Asia was an event almost as
pregnant with political consequences as was rounding of the Cape ,
although the two movements long remained apart.
It is probably one of the most striking coincidences of
history that the seaward and the landward expansion of Europe
should, in a sense, continue the ancient opposition between Romans and Greek.
Few great failures have had more far-reaching consequences that the failure of Rome to Latinize the Greek. The Teuton was civilized and
Christianized by the Roman, the Slav in the main by Greek. It was the
Graeco-Slav who rode over the steppes, conquering the Turanian. Thus the modern
land-power differs from the sea power no less in the source of its ideals than
in the material conditions of its mobility.
In the wake of the Cossack, Russia has safely emerged from her
former seclusion in the northern forests. Perhaps the change of the greatest
intrinsic importance which took place in Europe in the last century was the
southward migration of the Russian peasants, so that whereas agricultural
settlements formerly ended at the forest boundary, the center of the population
of all European Russia now lies to south of that boundary, in the midst of the
wheat-fields which have replaced the more western steppes. Odessa has here risen to importance with the
rapidity of an American city.
A generation ago steam and the Suez
canal appeared to have increased the mobility of the sea-power relatively
to land-power. Railways acted chiefly as feeders to ocean-going commerce. But
trans-continental railways are now transmuting the conditions of land-power,
and nowhere can they have such effect as in closed heart-land of Euro-Asia, in
vast areas of which neither timber nor accessible stone was available for
road-making. Railways work the greater wonders in the steppe, because they
directly replace horse and camel mobility, the road stage of development having
here being omitted.
In the matter of commerce it must not be forgotten that
ocean-going traffic, however relatively cheap, usually involves the fourfold
handling of goods – at the factory of origin, at the export wharf, at the
import wharf and in the inland warehouse for retail distribution; whereas the
continental railway truck may run direct from the exporting factory to the
importing warehouse. Thus marginal ocean-fed commerce tends, other things being
equal, to form a zone of penetration round the continents, whose inner limit is
roughly marked by the line which the cost of four handlings, the oceanic
freight, and the railway fright from the neighbouring coast, is equivalent to
the cost of two handlings and the continental railway freight. English and German
coals are said to compete on such terms midway through Lombardy .
The Russian railway have a clear run of 6.000 miles from
Wirballen in the west to Vladivostok
in the east. The Russian army in Manchuria is as significant evidence of mobile
land-power as the British army in South Africa was of sea-power.
True, that the Trans-Siberian railway is still a single and precarious line of
communication, but the century will not be old before all Asia
is covered with railways. The space within the Russian empire and Mongolia are so
vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel, and metals,
so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more
or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.
As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents in
history, does not certain persistence of geographical relationship become
evident? Is not the pivot region of the world politics that vast area of
Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to
horse-riding nomads, and is today about to be covered with network of railways?
There have been and are here the conditions of a mobility of military and
economic power of a far-reaching and yet limited character. Russia replaces
the Mongol Empire. Her pressure on Finland ,
on Scandinavia, on Poland ,
on Turkey , on Persia , on India ,
and on China ,
replaces the centrifugal raids of the steppe-men. In the world at large she
occupies the central strategical position held by Germany
in Europe . She can strike on all sides and be
struck from all sides, save the north. The full development of her modern
railway mobility is merely a matter of time. Nor is it likely that any possible
social revolution will alter her essential relations to the great geographical
limits of her existence.
…
(The Geographical Journal, Vol. 23. No. 4 Apr. 1904,
421-437.)
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