The world and its peoples

A survey of the physical, climate and vegetational characteristics of the earth
as the environment of mankind. Together with a description of the man regions of the world and of the peoples who inhabit them, and a brief account of the probable development of man’s struggle with his physical environment from earliest times.



• Western civilization

Europe north of the Mediterranean, a poor fringing region until the iron-shod plough came to its aid and the ideas of law and order from imperial rome filtered in, has found scope for craftsmanship and commerce and ultimately for machine for to supplement and replace the work of man’s hands. and with its coal and steam power it has had a marvelous outpouring over north America, Australia, new Zealand and many another region. We note the contrast between English-speaking north America, with its population of immigrants, and Spanish – Portuguese speaking America, colonize earlier by small numbers who intermarried with the peoples they found there. The efforts of the maritime European have welded some of them both in Europe and in the new lands, into strongly self – conscious national group, the temporary success of which has encouraged to ready imitation in places where this scheme is not so appropriate. this union of the soviet socialist republics, with its base in the great northern land of mass Eurasia, is increasingly seen to differ deeply from Europe of the sea. it owes much to ideas brought from maritime Europe, but we must think of its immense plains, of its broad waterways for summer use, its severe winters, the unique fertility of its “black earth’ and the marvelous variety of peoples and languages without sharp, obvious contrasts of skin colour. Whereas Europe of the sea has had a digious expansion of its people and their thoughts over lands across the ocean,the u.s.s.r illustrate just as prodigious an expansion colonizing in inner asia, and even trying to adapt parts of arctic. and all this has been organized under central autocracies of one kind and another, with expansion step by step beyond old borders as the keynote.

TO BE CONTINUE.....