sixteenth centuries shifted the foci of the world relations of European
states from enclosed seas to the rim of the Atlantic. Venice and Genoa
gave way to Cadiz and Lagos, just as sixteen centuries before Corinth
and Athens had yielded their ascendency to Rome and Ostia. The keen but
circumscribed trade of the Baltic, which gave wealth and historical
preeminence to Lübeck and the other Hanse Towns of northern Germany from
the twelfth to the seventeenth century, lost its relative importance
when the Atlantic became the maritime field of history. Maritime
leadership passed westward from Lübeck and Stralsund to Amsterdam and
Bristol, as the historical horizon widened. England, prior to this
sudden dislocation, lay on the outskirts of civilized Europe, a terminal
land, not a focus. The peripheral location which retarded her early
development became a source of power when she accumulated sufficient
density of population for colonizing enterprises, and when maritime
discovery opened a way to trans-oceanic lands.[9]

Meanwhile, local geographic advantages in the old basins remain the
same, although they are dwarfed by the development of relatively greater
advantages elsewhere. The broken coastline, limited area and favorable
position of Greece make its people to-day a nation of seamen, and enable
them to absorb by their considerable merchant fleet a great part of the
trade of the eastern Mediterranean,[10] just as they did in the days of
Pericles; but that youthful Aegean world which once constituted so large
a part of the _oikoumene_, has shrunken to a modest province, and its
highways to local paths. The coast cities of northern Germany still
maintain a large commerce in the Baltic, but no longer hold the
pre-eminence of the old Hanse Towns. The glory of the Venetian Adriatic
is gone; but that the sea has still a local significance is proven by
the vast sums spent by Austria and Hungary on their hand-made harbors of
Trieste and Fiume.[11] The analytical geographer, therefore, while