Criticism of this formula.
But this method is open to the legitimate and fundamental criticism that, starting from the conception of a coast as a mere line instead of a zone, it ignores all those features which belong to every littoral as a strip of the earth's surface—location, geologic structure, relief, area, accessibility to the sea in front and to the land behind, all which vary from one part of the world's seaboard to another, and serve to differentiate the human history of every littoral. Moreover, of all parts of the earth's surface, the coast as the hem of the sea and land, combining the characters of each, is most complex. It is the coast as a human habitat that primarily concerns anthropo-geography. A careful analysis of the multifarious influences modifying one another in this mingled environment of land and water reveals an intricate interplay of geographic forces, varying from inland basin to marginal sea, from marginal sea to open ocean, and changing from one historical period to another—an interplay so mercurial that it could find only a most inadequate expression in the rigid mathematical formula of Carl Ritter.
Accessibility of coasts from hinterland.
As the coast, then, is the border zone between the solid, inhabited land and the mobile, untenanted deep, two important factors in its history are the accessibility of its back country on the one hand, and the accessibility of the sea on the other. A littoral population barred from its hinterland by mountain range or steep plateau escarpment or desert tract feels little influence from the land; level or fertile soil is too limited in amount to draw inland the growing people, intercourse is too difficult and infrequent, transportation too slow and costly. Hence the inhabitants of such a coast are forced to look seaward for their racial and commercial expansion, even if a paucity of good harbors limits the accessibility of the sea; they must lead a somewhat detached and independent existence, so far as the territory behind them is concerned. Here the coast, as a peripheral organ of the interior, as the outlet for its products, the market for its foreign exchanges, and the medium for intercourse with its maritime neighbors, sees its special function impaired. But it takes advantage of its isolation and the protection of a long sea boundary to detach itself politically from its hinterland, as the histories of Phoenicia, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Dalmatia, the republics of Amalfi, Venice, and Genoa, the county of Barcelona, and Portugal abundantly prove. At the same time it profits by its seaboard location to utilize the more varied fields of maritime enterprise before it, in lieu of the more or less forbidden territory behind it. The height and width of the landward barrier, the number and practicability of the passways across it, and especially the value of the hinterland's products in relation to their bulk, determine the amount of intercourse between that hinterland and its mountain or desert barred littoral.
Mountain-barred hinterlands.
The interior is most effectively cut off from the periphery, where a mountain range or a plateau escarpment traces the inner line of the coastland, as in the province of Liguria in northern Italy, Dalmatia, the western or Malabar coast of India, most parts of Africa, and long stretches of the Pacific littoral of the Americas. The highland that backs the Norwegian coast is crossed by only one railroad, that passing through the Trondhjem depression; and this barrier has served to keep Norway's historical connection with Sweden far less intimate than with Denmark. The long inlet of the Adriatic, bringing the sea well into the heart of Southern Europe, has seen nevertheless a relatively small maritime development, owing to the wall of mountains that everywhere shuts out the hinterland of its coasts. The greatness of Venice was intimately connected with the Brenner Pass over the Alps on the one hand, and the trade of the eastern Mediterranean on the other. Despite Austro-Hungary's crucial interest in the northeast corner of the Adriatic as a maritime outlet for this vast inland empire, and its herculean efforts at Trieste and Fiume to create harbors and to connect them by transmontane railroads with the valley of the Danube, the maritime development of this coast is still restricted, and much of Austria's trade goes out northward by German ports.[442] Farther south along the Dalmatian and Albanian coasts, the deep and sheltered bays between the half-submerged roots of the Dinaric Alps have developed only local importance, because they lack practicable connection with the interior. This was their history too in early Greek and Roman days, for they found only scant support in the few caravans that crossed by the Roman road to Dyrrachium to exchange the merchandise of the Aegean for the products of the Ionian Isles. Spain has always suffered from the fact that her bare, arid, and unproductive tableland almost everywhere rises steeply from her fertile and densely populated coasts; and therefore that the two have been unable to coöperate either for the production of a large maritime commerce or for national political unity. Here the diverse conditions of the littoral and the wall of the great central terrace of the country have emphasized that tendency to defection that belongs to every periphery, and therefore necessitated a strong centralized government to consolidate the restive maritime provinces with their diverse Galician, Basque, Catalonian, and Andalusian folk into one nation with the Castilians of the plateau.[443]
Accessible hinterlands.