This historical contrast between center and periphery of continents reappears in smaller land masses, such as peninsulas and islands.  The principle holds good regardless of size.  The whole fringe of Arabia, from Antioch to Aden and from Mocha to Mascat, has been the scene of incoming and outgoing activities, has developed live bases of trade, maritime growth, and culture, while the inert, somnolent interior has drowsed away its long eventless existence.  The rugged, inaccessible heart of little Sardinia repeats the story of central Arabia in its aloofness, its impregnability, backwardness, and in the purity of its race.  Its accessible coast, forming a convenient way-station on the maritime crossroads of the western Mediterranean, has received a succession of conquerors and an intermittent influx of every ethnic strain known in the great basin.

[Sidenote:  Periphery of colonization.]

The story of discovery and colonization, from the days of ancient Greek enterprise in the Mediterranean to the recent German expansion along the Gulf of Guinea, shows the appropriation first of the rims of islands and continents, and later that of the interior.  A difference of race and culture between inland and peripheral inhabitants meets us almost everywhere in retarded colonial lands.  In the Philippines, the wild people of Luzon, Mindoro and the Visayas are confined almost entirely to the interior, while civilized or Christianized Malays occupy the whole seaboard, except where the rugged Sierra Madre Mountains, fronting the Pacific in Luzon, harbor a sparse population of primitive Negritos.[254] For centuries Arabs held the coast of East Africa, where their narrow zone of settlement bordered on that of native blacks, with whom they traded.  Even ancient Greece showed a wide difference in type of character and culture between the inland and maritime states.  The Greek landsman was courageous and steadfast, but crude, illiterate, unenterprising, showing sterility of imagination and intellect; while his brother of the seaboard was active, daring, mercurial, imaginative, open to all the influences of a refining civilization.[255] To-day the distribution of the Greeks along the rim of the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor, in contrast to the Turks and Slavs of the interior, is distinctly a peripheral phenomenon.[256]

The rapid inland advance from the coast of oversea colonists is part of that restless activity which is fostered by contact with the sea and supported by the command of abundant resources conferred by maritime superiority.  The Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, as later the English colonization of America, seized the rim of the land, and promptly pushed up the rivers in sea-going boats far into the interior.  But periphery may give to central region something more than conquerors and colonists.  From its active markets and cosmopolitan exchanges there steadily filter into the interior culture and commodities, carried by peaceful merchant and missionary, who, however, are often only the harbingers of the conqueror.  The accessibility of the periphery tends to raise it in culture, wealth, density of population, and often in political importance, far in advance of the center.