From Fjords to World Domination: Europe, Sailing, and Environmental Determinism

 

Environmental Determinism

You’re standing on a rocky European coast. The wind bites. The sea’s a gray snarl. But look around—there’s a boat being built over there. A lighthouse being tended. Fishermen pulling up cod. Now zoom out.

Europe, at first glance, looks like the gods took a hammer to a continent and then tossed the pieces into the North Atlantic. Fjords. Peninsulas. Islands like stepping stones to nowhere. Compared to the big, smooth landmasses like Africa or Asia, Europe’s geography is a fractal mess.

And that, according to some 19th-century thinkers, was precisely the point.

The Theory That Europe Sailed Its Way to Power

In the late 1800s, as Europe was busy colonizing most of the world and patting itself on the back for it, some of its intellectuals started wondering: Why us? Why here? Why now?

Enter Friedrich Ratzel, the German geographer who thought of nations like organisms—they grow, adapt, and compete, and their success is shaped by their environment. He looked at Europe and saw a geography that demanded exploration: no wide deserts, no impassable jungles, just a jigsaw puzzle of coastlines and rivers begging to be sailed.

Then came Ellen Churchill Semple, one of his students, who brought his ideas to the English-speaking world. She was a big fan of the notion that people are products of their physical surroundings. Rugged terrain makes rugged people. Mild climates make thinkers. Harsh places make hardy survivors. It was all very... geographically deterministic.

And if you were wondering where all this was heading—yup, you’re right. It was Ellsworth Huntington who really let the ship run aground. He argued that temperate climates (read: Northern Europe and North America) were inherently better suited to progress, innovation, and civilization. The implication? Europe didn’t conquer the world because it was violent, greedy, or lucky. No, it was just destiny, courtesy of the weather.

How This Justified Empire

See how tidy this was? If geography made Europe advanced, then colonialism wasn’t theft—it was help. "We’re not taking your resources,” they said. “We’re just bringing you civilization... that our rivers and coastlines helped us invent.”

This theory had enormous appeal during the age of empire. It explained inequality without requiring guilt. It turned conquest into a natural process. If some regions were poor or undeveloped, it wasn’t because they’d been looted or enslaved—it was because they lacked the right environment. Case closed.

Or so they thought.

Why It Fell Apart

But the 20th century started pulling back the curtain. Anthropologists, historians, and geographers began noticing... inconvenient facts.

  • The Polynesians had mastered long-distance ocean navigation centuries before the Europeans left port.

  • Zheng He of Ming China sailed massive treasure fleets in the early 1400s—until his government pulled the plug, not the geography.

  • Arab traders dominated Indian Ocean routes with monsoon-based sailing schedules long before da Gama showed up with gunpowder and attitude.

So, maybe geography provided opportunities—but clearly, culture, politics, timing, and decisions mattered just as much.

What’s more, the idea that Europe was "destined" for greatness started looking awfully convenient during decolonization. Postwar scholars called it out for what it was: Eurocentric pseudoscience, often used to mask racism and justify domination.

Today, environmental determinism is studied mainly to understand how we once got things so wrong. Instead, geographers prefer possibilism—the idea that environment shapes what’s possible, but not what’s inevitable.

Because if geography were destiny, then the Vikings should’ve invented Google, the Greeks would’ve colonized Mars, and Iceland would be running the global economy by now.

Want to Dig Deeper?

Here’s your intellectual treasure map:

  • Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogeographie (if you like your ideas in German and Darwinian).

  • Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment (1903) — early English-language classic.

  • Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (1915) — for when you want to see how far down the rabbit hole they went.

  • James Burke, Connections (1978) — not about determinism per se, but a master class in how unexpected things connect across time.

  • Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) — a modern geographical determinism remix, more nuanced, but also controversial.

Comments

  1. David Tyler Rand-McKayJune 10, 2025 at 5:01 PM

    TL:DR; Imagine a continent shaped like a broken dinner plate—cracked into peninsulas, islands, and craggy coasts. That’s Europe. And 19th-century geographers looked at it and said, “Well no wonder they took over the seas... the land made them do it.”

    This idea? It’s called environmental determinism—the theory that geography determines a society’s success. Europe, with all those natural harbors and rivers, was supposedly destined to build ships, explore, and conquer. Not because of choices or power—but because of climate and coastlines.

    It was neat. It was tidy. It was also a great excuse for colonialism.

    But then historians pointed out: Polynesians were amazing navigators. The Chinese launched mega-fleets in the 1400s. Arabs sailed monsoon routes long before Europeans showed up with cannons.

    Turns out, geography opens doors—but people choose which ones to walk through.

    That’s why environmental determinism fell apart. Not because geography doesn’t matter—but because agency does. And sometimes, the map doesn’t show you where you’ll go—it just tells you where you could.

    ReplyDelete
  2. David Tyler Rand-McKayJune 10, 2025 at 5:11 PM

    How did this shape come about? We often think of Europe as a land defined by culture, history, war, and art. But long before any human stood on its shores, Europe was shaped by violence of a different kind.

    Tectonic collisions. The tearing of supercontinents. The slow grind of ice, carving fjords through what would become Norway.

    This continent’s edge is no accident. It is the aftermath of deep time—millions of years of rock folding, seas rising, and glaciers biting into stone like a chisel. The British Isles? Once part of North America. Italy? Shoved northward by the African plate, still crashing into the Alps like a slow-motion car wreck.

    What we call “natural harbors,” “peninsulas,” and “islands” are really memories in stone—shaped not for sailors, but by forces that couldn’t care less for human ambitions.

    And yet... those shapes made sailing possible. Made trade and exploration easier. Made history take the path it did.

    Geography may not determine destiny—but it whispers the first suggestions.

    ReplyDelete

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