Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/19

2 river-made cities that the railways have to connect. Even the twentieth century cannot escape the conditions imposed by the past.

Only the history of Asia explains the geography of Asia. Empire means organisation, organisation whose basis is the consciousness of a unity that transcends the family. That is to say, empire demands as its preceding condition a strong civic concept. Two types of empire have occurred within the last two thousand years: one the creation of the fisher-peoples of the European coastline, the other of the tribesmen of Central Asia and Arabia. In the one case, the imperialising instinct is to be accounted for by the commercial thirst natural to those whose place has always been on the prehistoric trade-route. It may be true, as suggested by a distinguished scholar, that the salmon-fishery of Norway, with its tightly organised crew, giving birth to the pirate-fisher, the Viking, and he to the Norman, is to be regarded as the father of the Feudal System and immediate ancestor of all modern European Empire. Such considerations can, however, by no means account for the Roman Empire. To this it might be answered that behind Rome lay Greece and Carthage; behind Greece and Carthage, Phoenicia and Crete; and that here we come once more on the element of trade-routes and fisher-peoples. A strong sense of unity precedes aggression, and the sense of unity is made effective through internal definition and self-organisation. Such organisation