The leading point of view in H. F. Helmolt’s The History of the World, a Survey of Man’s Record,[[192]] is the treatment of man’s relation to his physical environment, the relation of geography to history, the dependence of man on his geographical surroundings. “It [Helmolt’s History] deals with history in the light of physical environment.... Its ground plan, so to speak, is primarily geographical....”[[193]] It was conceived in the spirit of Ratzel;[[194]] it is said to have brought for the first time “die Länder- und Völkerkunde in den Dienst der Weltgeschichtsdarstellung.”[[195]] Helmolt’s “great co-operative History of Mankind ... emphasizes the sovereign influences of nature and geography,” says Gooch.[[196]]
Rev. H. B. George, in The Relations of Geography and History,[[197]] attempts to “point out systematically how these [geographical] causes work [all history through], first in general, and then in reference to the various countries of Europe,”[[198]] although “This work does not pretend to attempt the impossible task of describing all the influence exerted by geographical conditions on human history. All that it professes to do is to indicate the modes in which that influence works, with sufficient illustrations from actual history.”[[199]]
Professor Geddes, of Edinburgh, is the most energetic expounder of this idea—the anthropo-geographical conception of history—in the English-speaking world, says Small.[[200]]
Throughout the entire treatment of Guglielmo Ferrero’s[[201]] History of Rome (one of the most original and important historical works of recent years), geography thoroughly permeates history.[[202]]
Robert Sieger[[203]] attempts to explain the history and policies of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy “aus ihren geographischen Grundlagen.”[[204]]
Ellsworth Huntington, in The Pulse of Asia,[[205]] illustrates the geographic basis of history.[[206]]
The Columbia School of sociological historians, and others, interpret history partly in terms of the milieu: physical (economic and geographic) and social.[[207]]
Human geography, and political geography, have long been divided into fragmentary parts, contended for by economics, history, and sociology.[[208]] Yet the discipline of anthropo-geography has now become “eine mächtige Hilfswissenschaft der geschichtlichen Auffassung.”[[209]] So that, today, it has become a custom to include in textbooks of history one or more chapters on the relation of geography to history, to show the dependence of history on environment.[[210]] The study of the latter is a part of Kulturgeschichte or History of Civilization which is defined as embracing the non-political aspects of civilization such as the influence of nature, the pressure of economic factors, the origin and transformation of ideas, the contribution of science and art, religion and philosophy, literature and law, the material conditions of life, the fortunes of the masses.[[211]] Likewise, only on a broader scale, the milieu is being examined in a new branch of study, which is one resultant of anthropo-geographical research. This new branch of study is economic geography, which, according to John McFarlane,[[212]] “may be defined as the study of the influence exerted upon the economic activities of man by his physical environment, and more especially by the form and structure of the surface of the land, the climatic conditions which prevail upon it, and the place relations in which its different regions stand to one another.” Seligman says that the modern study of economic geography is but an expansion of the study of the influence of milieu.[[213]]
Indeed, geography itself, i.e., the new geography, is conceived of as the science or study of the responses of organisms to inorganic, and to a certain extent organic, environmental control.[[214]] Professor William Morris Davis, of Harvard University, is one of the chief exponents of this theory in the United States. Very recently, Rollin D. Salisbury said:[[215]] “By common consent, Geography (as distinct from physical geography) is the science which deals with the relations of physical environment to life and its activities. In this sense, geography is a connecting link between geology, physiography, and climatology, on the one hand, and zoölogy, botany, sociology, economics, and history on the other. Its subject-matter is in process of formulation....”[[216]]