Just as the development of a people and state is marked by advance from small to ever larger areas, so is that of a civilization.  It may originate in a small district; but more mobile than humanity itself, it does not remain confined to one spot, but passes on from individual to individual and from people to people.  Greece served only as a garden in which the flowers of Oriental and Egyptian civilization were temporarily transplanted.  As soon as they were modified and adapted to their new conditions, their seed spread over all Europe.  The narrow area of ancient Greece, which caused the early dissemination of its people over the Mediterranean basin, and thereby weakened the political force of the country at home, was an important factor in the wide distribution of its culture.  Commerce, colonization and war are vehicles of civilization, where favorable geographic conditions open the way for trade in the wake of the victorious army.  The imposition of Roman dominion meant everywhere the gift of Roman civilization.  The Crusaders brought back from Syria more than their scars and their trophies.  Every European factory in China, every Hudson Bay Company post in the wilds of northern Canada, every Arab settlement in savage Africa is surrounded by a sphere of trade; and this in turn is enclosed in a wider sphere of influence through which its civilization, though much diluted, has filtered.  The higher the civilization, the wider the area which it masters.  The manifold activities of a civilized people demand a large sphere of influence, and include, furthermore, improved means of communication which enable it to control such a sphere.

Even a relatively low civilization may spread over a vast area if carried by a highly mobile people.  Mohammedanism, which embodies a cultural system as well as a religion, found its vehicles of dispersal in the pastoral nomads occupying the arid land of northern Africa and western Asia, and thus spread from the Senegal River to Chinese Turkestan.  It was carried by the maritime Arabs of Oman and Yemen to Malacca and Sumatra, where it was communicated to the seafaring Malays.  These island folk, who approximate the most highly civilized peoples in their nautical efficiency, distributed the meager elements of Mohammedan civilization over the Malay Archipelago. [See map of the Religions of the Eastern Hemisphere, in chapter XIV.]

[Sidenote:  Cultural advantages of large political area.]

The larger the area which a civilized nation occupies, the more numerous are its points of contact with other peoples, and the less likely is there to be a premature crystallization of its civilization from isolation.  Extension of area on a large scale means eventually extension of the seaboard and access to those multiform international relations which the ocean highway confers.  The world wide expansion of the British Empire has given it at every outward step wider oceanic contact and eventually a cosmopolitan civilization.  The same thing is true of the other great colonial empires of history, whether Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or French; and even of the great continental empires, like Russia and the United States.  The Russian advance across Siberia, like the American advance across the Rockies, meant access to the Pacific, and a modification of its civilization on those remote shores.