Range of movements in Africa.
The Semitic folk of Arabia and the desert Hamites of northern Africa, bred by their hot, dry environment to a nomadic life, have been drawn southward over the Sahara across the Tropic into the grasslands of the Sudan, permeating a wide zone of negro folk with the political control, religion, civilization and blood of the Mediterranean north. Here similar though better conditions of life, a climate hotter though less arid, attracted Hamitic invasion, while the relatively dense native population in a lower stage of economic development presented to the commercial Semites the attraction of lucrative trade. South of the equator the native Bantu Kaffirs, essentially a tropical people, spread beyond their zonal border to the south coast of Africa at 33° S.L., and displaced the yellow Hottentots[199] before the arrival of the Dutch in 1602; while in the early nineteenth century we hear of the Makololo, a division of this same Kaffir stock, leaving their native seats near the southern sources of the Vaal River at 28° S.L. and moving some nine hundred miles northward to the Barotse territory on the upper Zambesi at 15° S.L.[200] This again was a movement of a pastoral people across a tropic to other grasslands, to climatic conditions scarcely different from those which they had left.
Colonization and latitude.
The modern colonial movements which have been genuine race expansions have shown a tendency not only to adhere to their zone, but to follow parallels of latitude or isotherms. The stratification of European peoples in the Americas, excepting Spanish and Portuguese, coincides with heat zones. Internal colonization in the United States reveals the same principle.[201] Russian settlements in Asia stretch across Siberia chiefly between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth parallels; these same lines include the ancient Slav territory in Germany between the Vistula and Weser. The great efflux of home-seekers, as opposed to the smaller contingent of mere conquerors and exploiters, which has poured forth from Europe since the fifteenth century, has found its destinations largely in the temperate parts of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Even the Spanish overlords in Mexico and Peru domiciled themselves chiefly in the highlands, where altitude in part counteracts tropical latitude. European immigration into South America to-day greatly predominates in the temperate portions,—in Argentine, Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil and southern Chile. While Argentine's population includes over one million white foreigners, who comprise twenty per cent. of the total,[202] Venezuela has no genuine white immigration. Its population, which comprises only one per cent. of pure whites, consists chiefly of negroes, mulattoes, and Sambos, hybrids of negro and Indian race. In British Guiana, negroes and East Indian coolies, both importations from other tropical lands, comprise eighty-one per cent. of the population.[203]
The movement of Europeans into the tropical regions of Asia, Australasia, Africa and America, like the American advance into the Philippines, represents commercial and political, not genuine ethnic expansion. Except where it resorts to hybridization, it seeks not new homesteads, but the profits of tropical trade and the markets for European manufactures found in retarded populations. These it secures either by a small but permanently domiciled ruling class, as formerly in Spanish and Portuguese America, or by a body of European officials, clerks, agents and soldiers, sent out for a term of years. Such are the seventy-six thousand Britishers who manage the affairs of commerce and state in British India, and the smaller number of Dutch who perform the same functions in the Dutch East India islands. The basis of this system is exploitation. It represents neither a high economic, ethical, nor social ideal, and therefore lacks the stamp of geographic finality.
Movement to like geographic conditions.
A migrating or expanding people, when free to choose, is prone to seek a new home with like geographic conditions to the old. Hence the stamp once given by an environment tends to perpetuate itself. All people, especially those in the lower stages of culture, are conservative in their fundamental activities. Agriculture is intolerable to pastoral nomads, hunting has little attraction for a genuine fisher folk. Therefore such peoples in expansion seek an environment in which the national aptitudes, slowly evolved in their native seats, find a ready field. Thus arise natural provinces of distribution, whose location, climate, physical features, and size reflect the social and economic adaptation of the inhabitants to a certain type of environment. A shepherd folk, when breaking off from its parent stock like Abraham's family from their Mesopotamian kinsmen, seeks a land rich in open pastures and large enough to support its wasteful nomadic economy. A seafaring people absorb an ever longer strip of seaboard, like the Eskimo of Arctic America, or throw out their settlements from inlet to inlet or island to island, as did Malays and Polynesians in the Pacific, ancient Greeks and Phoenicians in the subtropical Mediterranean, and the Norse in the northern seas. The Dutch, bred to the national profession of diking and draining, appear in their element in the water-logged coast of Sumatra and Guiana,[204] where they cultivate lands reclaimed from the sea; or as colonists in the Vistula lowlands, whither Prussia imported them to do their ancestral task, just as the English employed their Dutch prisoners after the wars with Holland in the seventeenth century to dike and drain the fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Moreover, the commercial talent of the Dutch, trained by their advantageous situation on the North Sea about the Rhine mouths, guided their early traders to similar locations elsewhere, like the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, or planted them on islands either furnishing or commanding extensive trade, such as Ceylon, Mauritius, the East Indies, or the Dutch holdings in the Antilles.