Note 524 — Chapter VIII · —Coast Peoples

Owing to the ease and cheapness of water transportation, a seaboard position between two other coasts of contrasted products due to a difference either of zonal location or of economic development or of both combined, insures commercial exchanges and the inevitable activities of the middleman. The position of Carthage near the center of the Mediterranean enabled her to fatten on the trade between the highly developed eastern basin and the retarded western one. Midway between the teeming industrial towns of medieval Flanders, Holland, and western Germany, and the new unexploited districts of retarded Russia, Poland, and Scandinavia, lay the long line of the German Hanseatic towns—Kiel, Lubeck, Wiemar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald, Anclam, Stettin, and Colberg, the civitates maritimæ. For three centuries or more they made themselves the dominant commercial and maritime power of the Baltic by exchanging Flemish fabrics, German hardware, and Spanish wines for the furs and wax of Russian forests, tallow and hides from Polish pastures, and crude metals from Swedish mines.524 So Portugal by its geographical location became a staple place where the tropical products from the East Indies were transferred to the vessels of Dutch merchants, and by them distributed to northern Europe. Later New England, by a parallel location, became the middleman in the exchanges of the tropical products of the West Indies, the tobacco of Virginia, and the wheat of Maryland for the manufactured wares of England and the fish of Newfoundland.