Importance of size in continental articulations.
Articulations on a vast scale, like the southern peninsulas of Asia, produce quite different cultural and historical effects from small physical sub-divisions, like the fiord promontories and "skerries" of Norway and southern Alaska, or the finger peninsulas of the Peloponnesus. The significant difference lies in the degree of isolation which the two types yield. Large continental dependencies of the Asiatic class resemble small continents in their power to segregate; while overgrown capes like ancient Attica and Argolis or the more bulky Peloponnesus have their exclusiveness tempered by the mediating power of the small marine inlets between them. Small articulations, by making a coast accessible, tend to counteract the excessive isolation of a large articulation. They themselves develop in their people only minor or inner differentiations, which serve to enrich the life of the island or peninsula as a whole, but do not invade its essential unity. The contrast in the history of Hellas and the Peloponnesus was due largely to their separation from one another; yet neither was able to make of its people anything but Greeks. Wales and Cornwall show in English history the same contrast and the same underlying unity.
Historical contrast of large and small peninsulas.
In discussing continental articulations, therefore, it makes a great difference whether we draw our deductions from small projections of the coast, like Wales, the Peloponnesus, Brittany and the Crimea, whose areas range from 7442 to 10,023 square miles (19,082 to 25,700 square kilometers); or the four Mediterranean peninsulas, which range in size from the 58,110 square miles (149,000 square kilometers) of the Apennine Peninsula to the 197,600 square miles (506,-600 square kilometers) of Asia Minor and the 227,700 square miles (584,000 square kilometers) of the Iberian; or the vast continental alcoves of southern Asia, like Farther India with its 650,000 square miles (1,667,000 square kilometers), Hither India with 814,320 square miles (2,088,000 square kilometers) and Arabia with 1,064,700 square miles (2,730,-000 square kilometers).[784] The fact that the large compound peninsula of western Europe which comprises Spain, Portugal, France, Jutland, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Italy and western Germany, and has its base in the stricture between the Adriatic and the Baltic, is about the size of peninsular India, suggests how profound may be the difference in geographic effects between large and small peripheral divisions. The three huge extremities which Asia thrusts forward into the Indian Ocean are geographical entities, which in point of size and individualization rank just below the continents; and in relation to the solid mass of Central Asia, they have exhibited in many respects an aloofness and self-sufficiency, that have resulted in an historical divergence approximating that of the several continents. India, which has more productive territory than Australia and a population not much smaller than that of Europe, becomes to the administrators of its government "the Continent of India," as it is regularly termed in the Statistical Atlas published at Calcutta. Farther India has in the long-drawn pendant of Malacca a sub-peninsula half as large again as Italy. The Deccan has in Ceylon an insular dependency the size of Tasmania. The whole scale is continental. It appears again somewhat diminished, in the largest articulations of Europe, in Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas. This continental scale stamps also the anthropo-geography of such large individualized fields. They are big enough for each to comprise one or even several nations, and isolated enough to keep their historical processes for long periods at a time to a certain extent detached from those of their respective continents.
Peninsular conditions most favorable to historical development.
The most favorable conditions for historical development obtain where the two classes of marginal articulation are combined, and where they occur in groups, as we find them in the Mediterranean and the North Sea-Baltic basin. Here the smaller indentations multiply contact with the sea, and provide the harbors, bays and breakwaters of capes and promontories which make the coast accessible. The larger articulations, by their close grouping, break up the sea into the minor thalassic basins which encourage navigation, and thus insure the exchange of their respective cultural achievements. In other words, such conditions present the pre-eminent advantages of vicinal location around an enclosed sea.
The enormous articulations of southern Asia suffer from their paucity of small indentations, all the more because of their vast size and sub-tropical location. The Grecian type of peninsula, with its broken shoreline, finds here its large-scale homologue only in Farther India, to which the Sunda Islands have played in history the part of a gigantic Cyclades. The European type of articulation is found only about the Yellow-Japan Sea, where the island of Hondo and the peninsulas of Shangtung and Korea reproduce approximately the proportions of Great Britain, Jutland and Italy respectively. Arabia and India, like the angular shoulder of Africa which protrudes into the Indian Ocean, measure an imposing length of coastline, but this length shrinks in comparison with the vast area of the peninsulas. The contour of a peninsula is like the surface of the brain: in both it is convolutions that count. Southern Asia has had lobes enough but too few convolutions. For this reason, the northern Indian Ocean, despite its exceptional location as the eastward extension of the Mediterranean route to the Orient, found its development constantly arrested till the advent of European navigators.