for exploitation to the great maritime merchant peoples of the world.
Egypt, embedded in an endless stretch of desert like a jewel in its
matrix, was powerless to shake off the influence of its continental
environment. Its location was predominantly central; its culture bore
the stamp of isolation and finally of arrested development. Australia,
the classic ground of retardation, where only shades of savagery can be
distinguished, offered the natives of its northern coast some faint
stimuli in the visits of Malay seamen from the nearby Sunda Islands; but
its central tribes, shielded by geographic segregation from external
influences, have retained the most primitive customs and beliefs.[253]

Expanding Europe has long been wrestling with Africa, but it can not get
a grip, owing to the form of its antagonist; it finds no limb by which
the giant can be tripped and thrown. Asia presents a wide border of
marginal lands, some of them like Arabia and India being almost
continental in their proportions. Since Europe began her career of
maritime and colonial expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, she has seized upon these peripheral projections as if they
were the handles on a pilot wheel, and by them she has steered the
course of Asia ever since. These semi-detached outlyers of the continent
have enabled her to stretch a girdle of European influences around the
central core. Such influences, through the avenues of commerce, railway
concessions, missionary propaganda, or political dominion, have
permeated the accessible periphery and are slowly spreading thence into
the interior. China and Persia have felt these influences not less than
India and Tongking; Japan, which has most effectually preserved its
political autonomy, has profited by them most.

This historical contrast between center and periphery of continents
reappears in smaller land masses, such as peninsulas and islands. The