[Sidenote:  The case of England.]

While Japan’s agriculture reflected the small area of an island environment, and under its influence reached a high development, England’s from the beginning of the fifteenth century declined before the competition of English commerce, which gained ascendency owing to the easy accessibility of Great Britain to the markets of Europe.  The ravages of the Black Death in the latter half of the fourteenth century produced a scarcity of agricultural laborers and hence a prohibitive increase of wages.  To economize labor, the great proprietors resorted to sheep farming and the raising of wool, which, either in the raw state or manufactured into cloth, became the basis of English foreign trade.  A distinct deterioration in agriculture followed this reversion to a pastoral basis of economic life, supplemented by a growing commerce which absorbed all the enterprise of the country.  The steady contraction of the area under tillage threw out of employment the great mass of agricultural laborers, made them paupers and vagrants.[983] Hence England entered the period of maritime discoveries with a redundant population.  This furnished the raw material for her colonies, and made her territorial expansion assume a solid, permanent character, unknown to the flimsy trading stations which mark the mere extension of a field of commerce.

[Sidenote:  Emigration and colonization from islands.]

Even when agriculture, fisheries and commerce have done their utmost, in the various stages of civilization, to increase the food supply, yet insular populations tend to outgrow the means of subsistence procurable from their narrow base.  Hence islanders, like peninsula peoples, are prone to emigrate and colonize.  This tendency is encouraged by their mobility, born of their nautical skill and maritime location.  King Minos of Crete, according to Thucydides and Aristotle, colonized the Cyclades.[984] Greece, from its redundant population, peopled various Aegean and Ionian islands, which in turn threw off spores of settlements to other isles and shores.  Corcyra, which was colonized from the Peloponnesus, sent out a daughter colony to Epidamnos on the Illyrian coast.  Andros, one of the Cyclades, as early as 654 B.C., colonized Acanthus and Stagirus in Chalcidice.[985] Paros, settled first by Cretans and then by Ionians, at a very early date sent colonies to Thasos and to Parium on the Propontis, while Samos was a perennial fountain emitting streams of settlement to Thrace, Cilicia, Crete, Italy and Sicily. [Map page 251.]

This moving picture of Greek emigration is duplicated in the Malay Archipelago, especially in the smaller eastern islands.  Almost every Malay tribe has traditions based upon migrations.  The southern Philippines derived the considerable Mohammedan element of their populations from the Samal Laut, who came from Sumatra and the islands of the Strait of Malacca.[986] A Malayan strain can be traced through Polynesia to