While Japan's agriculture reflected the small area of an island environment, and under its influence reached a high development, England's from the beginning of the fifteenth century declined before the competition of English commerce, which gained ascendency owing to the easy accessibility of Great Britain to the markets of Europe. The ravages of the Black Death in the latter half of the fourteenth century produced a scarcity of agricultural laborers and hence a prohibitive increase of wages. To economize labor, the great proprietors resorted to sheep farming and the raising of wool, which, either in the raw state or manufactured into cloth, became the basis of English foreign trade. A distinct deterioration in agriculture followed this reversion to a pastoral basis of economic life, supplemented by a growing commerce which absorbed all the enterprise of the country. The steady contraction of the area under tillage threw out of employment the great mass of agricultural laborers, made them paupers and vagrants.[983] Hence England entered the period of maritime discoveries with a redundant population. This furnished the raw material for her colonies, and made her territorial expansion assume a solid, permanent character, unknown to the flimsy trading stations which mark the mere extension of a field of commerce.
Emigration and colonization from islands.
Even when agriculture, fisheries and commerce have done their utmost, in the various stages of civilization, to increase the food supply, yet insular populations tend to outgrow the means of subsistence procurable from their narrow base. Hence islanders, like peninsula peoples, are prone to emigrate and colonize. This tendency is encouraged by their mobility, born of their nautical skill and maritime location. King Minos of Crete, according to Thucydides and Aristotle, colonized the Cyclades.[984] Greece, from its redundant population, peopled various Aegean and Ionian islands, which in turn threw off spores of settlements to other isles and shores. Corcyra, which was colonized from the Peloponnesus, sent out a daughter colony to Epidamnos on the Illyrian coast. Andros, one of the Cyclades, as early as 654 B.C., colonized Acanthus and Stagirus in Chalcidice.[985] Paros, settled first by Cretans and then by Ionians, at a very early date sent colonies to Thasos and to Parium on the Propontis, while Samos was a perennial fountain emitting streams of settlement to Thrace, Cilicia, Crete, Italy and Sicily. [Map page 251.]
This moving picture of Greek emigration is duplicated in the Malay Archipelago, especially in the smaller eastern islands. Almost every Malay tribe has traditions based upon migrations. The southern Philippines derived the considerable Mohammedan element of their populations from the Samal Laut, who came from Sumatra and the islands of the Strait of Malacca.[986] A Malayan strain can be traced through Polynesia to far-off Easter Isle. Sometimes the emigration is a voluntary exile from home for a short period and a definite purpose. The inhabitants of Bouton, Binungku, and the neighboring islets, all of them located southeast of Celebes, have for the past twenty-five years come in great numbers to the larger islands of Ceram, Buru, Amboina and Banda, where they have laid out and carefully cultivated plantations of maize, tobacco, bananas and coco-palms. Generally only the men come, work two years, save their profits and then return home. These ambitious tillers look like savages, are shy as wild things of the woods, and work naked to the waist.[987]
Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, where every condition of land and sea tends to develop the migratory spirit, form a region of extensive colonization.[988] Settlements of one race are scattered among the island groups of another, making the ethnic boundaries wide penumbras. In some smaller islands of Melanesia the Polynesian colonists have exterminated or expelled the original inhabitants, and are found there now with all their distinctive race characteristics; but in the larger islands, they have been merged in the resident population, and their presence is only to be surmised from the existence of Polynesian customs, such as father-right in New Hebrides and Solomon Island side by side with the prevailing Melanesian mother-right.[989] In small islands, like Tongatabu, Samoa and Fiji, emigration becomes habitual, a gradual spilling over of the redundant population and hence not a formidable inundation. In all this insular region of the Pacific, the impulse to emigration is so persistent, that the resulting inter-insular colonization obliterates sharp distinctions of race; it annuls the segregation of an island environment, and makes everywhere for amalgamation and unification, rather than differentiation.[990]
Modern emigration from islands.
Among highly civilized peoples, where better economic methods bring greater density of population and set at the same time a higher standard of living, emigration from islands is especially marked. Japan has seen a formidable exodus since an end was put to its long period of compression. This has taken the form of widespread emigration to various foreign lands, notably the Hawaiian Islands and the United States, and also of internal colonization in its recently acquired territory in Formosa and Korea.[991] The Maltese have spread from their congested island, and are found to-day as gardeners, sailors and traders along all the Mediterranean coasts.[992] Majorca and the more barren Cyclades[993] tell the same story. The men of Capri go in considerable numbers to South America, but generally return home again. The Icelanders often pull themselves out of the stagnation of their lonely, ungenerous island to become thrifty citizens of western Canada.