6 - Within reach, beyond grasp

Summary

… where the vital substance fermenting as it were into life by the heat of the sun, breaks forth precipitately from its matrix, and spreads with a kind of fury over the whole land.

—John Bruckner, A Philosophical Survey of the Animal Creation (1768)

When civilized nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)

Mastery of the winds brought all oceanic coastlines and their hinterlands between Arctic and Antarctic ice within the European reach, but as history makes clear, not all were within the power of the Europeans to grasp, to occupy in numbers and displace the indigenous populations. Almost all the lands beyond the boundaries of Europe that are Neo-European today are those that most nearly meet the criteria cited at the end of the last chapter: similarity to Europe in such fundamentals as climate, and remoteness from the Old World. These are the Neo-Europes, the most visible residues of the age when Europe exclusively ruled the waves. Their history is the burden of the rest of this book, but first we must deal, if only briefly, with the lands that do not meet these criteria and that today are not Neo-European, though many were European colonies for long periods.