[Sidenote:  Estimates of area in small maritime states.]

Maritime peoples of small geographic base have a characteristic method of expansion which reflects their low valuation of area.  Their limited amount of arable soil necessitates reliance upon foreign sources of supply, which are secured by commerce.  Hence they found trading stations or towns among alien peoples on distant coasts, selecting points like capes or inshore islets which can be easily defended and which at the same time command inland or maritime routes of trade.  The prime geographic consideration is location, natural and vicinal.  The area of the trading settlement is kept as small as possible to answer its immediate purpose, because it can be more easily defended.[319] Such were the colonies of the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean, of the Medieval Arabs and the Portuguese on the east coast of Africa and in India.  This method reached its ultimate expression in point of small area, seclusion, and local autonomy, perhaps, in the Hanse factories in Norway and Russia.[320] But all these widespread nuclei of expansion remained barren of permanent national result, because they were designed for a commercial end, and ignored the larger national mission and surer economic base found in acquisition of territory.  Hence they were short-lived, succumbing to attack or abandoned on the failure of local resources, which were ruthlessly exploited.

[Sidenote:  Limitations of small territorial conceptions.]

That precocious development characteristic of small naturally defined areas shows its inherent weakness in the tendency to accept the enclosed area as a nature-made standard of national territory.  The earlier a state fixes its frontier without allowance for growth, the earlier comes the cessation of its development.  Therefore the geographical nurseries of civilization were infected with germs of decay.  Such was the history of Egypt, of Yemen, of Greece, Crete, and Phoenicia.  These are the regions which, as Carl Ritter says, have given the whole fruit of their existence to the world for its future use, have conferred upon the world the trust which they once held, afterward to recede, as it were, from view.[321] They were great in the past, and now they belong to those immortal dead whose greatness has been incorporated in the world’s life—­“the choir invisible” of the nations.

[Sidenote:  Evolution of territorial policies.]

The advance from a small, self-dependent community to interdependent relations with other peoples, then to ethnic expansion or union of groups to form a state or empire is a great turning point in any history.  Thereby the clan or tribe discards the old paralyzing seclusion of the primitive society and the narrow habitat, and joins that march of ethnic, political and cultural progress which has covered larger and larger areas, and by increase of common purpose has cemented together ever greater aggregates.