ation.[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.

[Sidenote: 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] wher