Note 442 — Chapter VIII · —Coast Peoples

The interior is most effectively cut off from the periphery, where a mountain range or a plateau escarpment traces the inner line of the coastland, as in the province of Liguria in northern Italy, Dalmatia, the western or Malabar coast of India, most parts of Africa, and long stretches of the Pacific littoral of the Americas. The highland that backs the Norwegian coast is crossed by only one railroad, that passing through the Trondhjem depression; and this barrier has served to keep Norway's historical connection with Sweden far less intimate than with Denmark. The long inlet of the Adriatic, bringing the sea well into the heart of Southern Europe, has seen nevertheless a relatively small maritime development, owing to the wall of mountains that everywhere shuts out the hinterland of its coasts. The greatness of Venice was intimately connected with the Brenner Pass over the Alps on the one hand, and the trade of the eastern Mediterranean on the other. Despite Austro-Hungary's crucial interest in the northeast corner of the Adriatic as a maritime outlet for this vast inland empire, and its herculean efforts at Trieste and Fiume to create harbors and to connect them by transmontane railroads with the valley of the Danube, the maritime development of this coast is still restricted, and much of Austria's trade goes out northward by German ports.442 Farther south along the Dalmatian and Albanian coasts, the deep and sheltered bays between the half-submerged roots of the Dinaric Alps have developed only local importance, because they lack practicable connection with the interior. This was their history too in early Greek and Roman days, for they found only scant support in the few caravans that crossed by the Roman road to Dyrrachium to exchange the merchandise of the Aegean for the products of the Ionian Isles. Spain has always suffered from the fact that her bare, arid, and unproductive tableland almost everywhere rises steeply from her fertile and densely populated coasts; and therefore that the two have been unable to coöperate either for the production of a large maritime commerce or for national political unity. Here the diverse conditions of the littoral and the wall of the great central terrace of the country have emphasized that tendency to defection that belongs to every periphery, and therefore necessitated a strong centralized government to consolidate the restive maritime provinces with their diverse Galician, Basque, Catalonian, and Andalusian folk into one nation with the Castilians of the plateau.443