COMMERCIAL RELATIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST 11
of a people subject to it but it could be foolish to say with Hirder “that history is geography set in motion.” We might hold to the truth in the statement that geographic conditions have condemned India to her lot and yet condemn the hyperbole in it
We may agree, if we like, with Montesquieu when he ascribes the “fixity” of oriental manners, customs and religion to its warm climate. We may believe in Buckle when he holds nature’s overpowering mountains and forests in all their stupefying greatness as are to be found in India responsible for the abnormal workings of imagination and superstition or we may follow the scientific geographer when he asserts that India has been condemned to isolation on account of her geographic location : isolated from China by the Himalaya mountains and from Persia and Afghanistan by the Hindu Kush mountains. She has a long waterfront but the eastern and the western ghats that fringe the coast from within and cut off the call of the ever beaconing sea to maritime activity.
All these allegations perhaps have a modicum of truth in them: but it would be a mistake to make strong arguments out of them. Barriers, no matter how strong, are never insuperable to man. He has tried everywhere to control them and has succeeded in his effort.
Hemmed in from all sides, the early Indians burst asunder all impediments natural or otherwise and launched into the Indian ocean at a very early date. The Indian ocean has much in common with the mediterranean. Mr. Zimnurn argues that “land locked on all sides . . . . . . . . . the mediterranean seems in summer as gentle as an inland lake . . . . . . It is in fact double-natured . . . . . . . a lake when the Gods are kind, and the ocean when they are spiteful.” [1] The Indian ocean which is but the enlarged mediterranean sea with its southern coast removed is neither a ocean nor a lake but is according to Ratzel only half an ocean. The inclosed character of its northern part deprives it of the hydrospheric and atmospheric peculiarities of a true ocean
1 The Great Common Wealth, p. 20.