Note 471 — Chapter VIII · —Coast Peoples
Reading edition
On the coasts of large fertile areas like China and India, however, maritime activity comes not as an early, but as an eventual development, assumes not a dominant, but an incidental historical importance. The coastlands appearing early on the maritime stage of history, and playing a brilliant part in the drama of the sea, have been habitable, but their tillable fields have been limited either in fertility, as in New England, or in amount, as in Greece, or in both respects, as in Norway. But if blessed with advantageous location for international trade and many or even a few fairly good harbors, such coasts tend to develop wide maritime dominion and colonial expansion.471