Emigration and colonization.
Advance to a completely sedentary life, as we see it among modern civilized nations, prohibits the migration of whole peoples, or even of large groups when maintaining their political organization. On the other hand, however, sedentary life and advanced civilization bring rapid increase of population, improved methods of communication, and an enlarged geographical horizon. These conditions encourage and facilitate emigration and colonization, forms of historical movement which have characterized the great commercial peoples of antiquity and the overcrowded nations of modern times. These forms do not involve a whole people, but only individuals and small groups, though in time the total result may represent a considerable proportion of the original population. The United States in 1890 contained 980,938 immigrants from Canada and Newfoundland,[177] or just one-fifth the total population of the Dominion in that same year. Germany since 1820 has contributed at least five million citizens to non-European lands. Ireland since 1841 has seen nearly four millions of its inhabitants drawn off to other countries,[178] an amount only little less than its present population. It is estimated that since 1851 emigration has carried off from County Clare and Kerry seventy-two per cent. of the average population; and yet those counties are still crowded.[179] Among those who abandon their homes in search of easier conditions of living, certain ages and certain social and industrial classes predominate. A typical emigrant group to America represents largely the lower walks of life, includes an abnormal proportion of men and adults, and about three-fourths of it are unskilled laborers and agriculturists.[180]
Colonization, the most potent instrument of organized expansion, has in recent centuries changed the relative significance of the great colonial nations of Europe. It raised England from a small insular country to the center of a world power. It gave sudden though temporary preëminence to Spain and Portugal, a new lease of life to little Holland, and ominous importance to Russia. Germany, who entered the colonial field only in 1880, found little desirable land left; and yet it was especially Germany who needed an outlet for her redundant population. With all these states, as with ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Yemen, the initial purpose was commerce or in some form the exploitation of the new territory. Colonies were originally trading stations established as safe termini for trade routes.[181] Colonial government, as administered by the mother country, originally had an eye single for the profits of trade: witness the experience of the Thirteen Colonies with Great Britain. Colonial wars have largely meant the rivalry of competing nations seeking the same markets, as the history of the Portuguese and Dutch in the East Indies, and the English and French in America prove. The first Punic War had a like commercial origin—rivalry for the trade of Magna Græcia between Rome and Carthage, the dominant colonial powers of the western Mediterranean. Such wars result in expansion for the victor.
Commerce.
Commerce, which so largely underlies colonization, is itself a form of historical movement. It both causes and stimulates great movements of peoples, yet it differs from these fundamentally in its relation to the land. Commerce traverses the land to reach its destination, but takes account of natural features only as these affect transportation and travel. It has to do with systems of routes and goals, which it aims to reach as quickly as possible. It reduces its cortege to essentials; eliminates women and children. Therefore it surmounts natural barriers which block the advance of other forms of the historical movement. Merchant caravans are constantly crossing the desert, but not so peoples. Traders with loaded yaks or ponies push across the Karakorum Mountains by passes where a migrating horde would starve and freeze. The northern limit of the Mediterranean race in Spain lies sharply defined along the crest of the Pyrenees, whose long unbroken wall forms one of the most pronounced boundaries in Europe;[182] yet traders and smugglers have pushed their way through from time immemorial. Long after Etruscan merchants had crossed northward over the Alps, Roman expansion and colonization made a detour around the mountains westward into Gaul, with the result that the Germans received Roman civilization not straight from the south, but secondhand through their Gallic neighbors west of the Rhine.
Commerce a guide to various movements.
Commerce, though differing from other historical movements, may give to these direction and destination. The trader is frequently the herald of soldier and settler. He becomes their guide, takes them along the trail which he has blazed, and gives them his own definiteness of aim. The earliest Roman conquest of the Alpine tribes was made for the purpose of opening the passes for traders and abolishing the heavy transit duties imposed by the mountaineers.[183] Fur-traders inaugurated French expansion to the far west of Canada, and the Russian advance into Siberia. The ancient amber route across Russia from the Baltic to the Euxine probably guided the Goths in their migration from their northern seats to the fertile lands in southern Russia, where they first appear in history as the Ostrogoths.[184] The caravan trade across the Sahara from the Niger to the Mediterranean coast has itself embodied an historical movement, by bringing out enough negro slaves appreciably to modify the ethnic composition of the population in many parts of North Africa.[185] It was this trade which also suggested to Prince Henry of Portugal in 1415, when campaigning in Morocco, the plan of reaching the Guinea Coast by sea and diverting its gold dust and slaves to the port of Lisbon, a movement which resulted in the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa.[186]