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181
recruits moved into slots vacated by veterans' deaths was a good deal more obvious and immediate
—
speedier and more massive in other words — than was commonly the case in cities.
125 10) A second traditional current of mass migration from the peasant countryside ran in an opposite
direction: towards the frontier of settlement. This may perhaps be termed the Daniel Boone syndrome.
Lands towards the periphery of civilized styles of living were ordinarily made available for settlement by
130 intensified die-off of partially isolated populations resulting from
contacts with disease-experienced city
folk. This phenomenon was masively apparent in the Americas, where contacts with white men regularly
decimated Indian populations. Similar processes prevailed in the deeper past, at the fringes of other
135 civilized communities, from the time that the characteristic diseases of civilization established themselves
in cities, and thereby conferred upon disease-experienced civilized communities an epidemiological
weapon wherewith to mow down isolated, disease-inexperienced communities.
140 11) Innumerable instances of how an unfamiliar infection 140 can play havoc in isolated communities
are known from recent times. When measles was first introduced into Fiji, for instance, twenty-five percent
of the population died of the infection within a few weeks; the English doctor who observed these
145 appalling effects published what became a classical account of this sort of virgin-soil epidemic in 1877. To
give a more recent illustration: when the Alcan highway was opened in 1942, a previously isolated Alaskan
community experienced nine different, serious infections within the first nine months that trucks began to
150 move through their community. Had the sick not been spirited away to modem hospitals as soon as a new
infection appeared among them, it is impossible to believe that this tiny community of some individuals
could have survived the catastrophic exposure to diseases of civilization the Alcan highway meant for
them.
155
12) Obviously, such epidemics opened the way for relatively easy expansion of civilized settlement, if
climate and soils and other natural conditions made it possible for familiar ways of exploiting the
environment to be applied in the newly emptied landscapes. Indeed civilized expansion of this kind
160 resembles the growth patterns of bread mold on an agar jelly, whereby the mold excretes a substance
—
penicillin
—
lethal to rival forms of life. Civilized communities do the same merely by breathing in the
presence of disease-inexperienced human adults.
165
13) Thus while endemic disease in urban centers maintained a flow of migrants from countryside into
town, epidemic disease operating towards the periphery of the civilized region sporadically depopulated
170 frontier zones, which thus became available for pioneer settlement by other migrants from the same rural
hinterland. An inward flow of relatively low skilled ex-peasants towards cities (and armies) thus matched
an outward slow towards unsettled frontiers on the part of the same population. (See Figure 1.)
175 14) This, I think, was the fundamental pattern of human migration in China, India, the Middle East, and
Europe; and its operation had much to do with the fact that in these regions a single style of civilized life
(or closely related variants upon a single style, like the differences between Latin and Orthodox
180 Christendom in medieval times, or between German and French civilization in the nineteenth century)
tended to assert itself and maintain recognizable identity across relatively very large times and spaces. In
parts of the earth where these two basic patterns of migration did not assert their homogenizing force, high
185 urban cultures exerted a less long-lived and less territorially extensive effect. Their rise and fall could be
and apparently was more rapid and may have affected rural life less intimately than was the case in the
temperate zones of the Old World.
15) Two more migration patterns nevertheless also deserve
attention though they affected smaller
numbers of persons, being an affair of elites and ruling classes rather than of the masses. As before, one
such current moved inward toward the centers of urban life and civilization, and a second moved outward
195 toward (and beyond) civilizational frontiers. I wish to consider the latter pattern first, since I believe it
manifested itself before the contrary migration of elites inward toward the center of civilization set in.
16) From the earliest days of the river-valley civilizations of the Near East it is clear that certain
200 important raw materials had to be brought into the emerging cities and court centers from afar.
Mesopotamia and Egypt both lacked timber and metals. Mesopotamia also lacked stone.