Independence. Alasdair Gray

      3: National Geology

      SEA SHORES AND MOUNTAIN RANGES are the world’s only lasting barriers, but human need or greed, desperation or curiosity have never been contained by these. Roughly half a million years ago thinking people left east Africa and spread all over the Earth. Unlike other animals we could adapt to lands and climates in every latitude without changing our bodies much. Instead we changed our minds, habits, tools, diets, clothes, houses and whole ways of life. Social adaptation did not wholly replace Darwinian adaptation. People grew fatter and paler in the north, leaner and darker in the south. Un-migratory Chinese evolved extra inches of gut to get more nourishment from the rice crop grown on east Asiatic plains watered by three rivers, which explains why China is still the largest, most peopled and most ancient nation. Another self-centred nation was made possible by successive layers of limestone, chalk and clay forming a saucer of land with Paris now in the middle. The Baltic Sea explains why such close neighbours as Norway, Sweden and Denmark have different governments though similar languages. Differences of landscape still separate Portugal from Spain, Austria from Germany, Belgium from Holland, Scotland from England. Unlike sea shores and mountain ranges, big rivers have usually united the nations in wide valleys where they flow. They united China, Egypt, the Indus valley and other rich lands where the earliest civilizations grew. The river as political frontier was created in the 19th century when law-givers in Berlin and Paris compelled children on their side of the Rhine to speak, read and write in German or French, where previously they had used a hybrid of both.

      Centuries before the birth of Christ the geology of Greece contained a great many small nations all sharing the same language, because it had many offshore islands and a coastline (like Scotland) about twenty times the length of much bigger land masses it was so sub-divided by mountain ranges, isthmuses and peninsulae. Greece became home of many small city-states with a variety of political systems: monarchic, aristocratic, democratic and tyrannical. The Macedonian king Alexander welded these into a short-lived Euro-Asiatic Empire, which broke apart after his death. All the pieces were colonized soon after by the super city-state of Rome. Simple geology cannot explain Rome’s Imperial success, though its position in the middle of Italy helped, because that was also near the centre of the Mediterranean and halfway between Europe and Africa. Only social history can explain how Rome’s small kingdom got rid of its king, became a republic which made all Italy its citizens (though only those with homes in Rome could vote) then became an empire ruled by the commander of its armies.

      A map of the British archipelago explains why Romans coming here divided it (like Gaul) into three parts, calling them Albion, Caledonia and Hibernia. Albion was the southern and biggest part of the mainland: woody and marshy except on the chalk downs, yet offering few natural barriers to the march of Roman legions. The tribes of Albion combined to repel the legions and were defeated. South Britain got planted over by Roman camps joined to each other by well-built roads, and to Londinium, Britain’s first major city. The Roman Empire had a warfare economy. Like modern Britain and the USA it used armed forces to steal the natural resources of other lands. The Roman economy needed new supplies of slaves as much as our own needs oil. Augustus, the Empire’s first commander in chief, fixed its limits by using the natural boundaries of the biggest nations Rome had conquered. For centuries only frontier wars were needed to keep Roman slave markets prospering. Lands around the Mediterranean were thus kept fairly peaceful. The poet Virgil celebrated this in his Latin epic Aeneid, which said his empire had brought history to a good end, as the Roman peace (Pax Romana) would last forever.

      Many educated Romans mourned the end of their Republic where citizens like themselves had chosen the political chiefs. They said so in writings none tried to ban, because the emperors and their bureaucrats knew such ideas were as irrelevant as birdsong. The historian Tacitus put his criticism into the mouth of a Caledonian chief who had led Pictish tribes to exterminate a Roman legion. It was then common before battle for commanders to make speeches telling their troops what they would gain by victory, lose by defeat. Tacitus invented for Calgacus (the Pictish chief’s Latinized name) a pre-battle speech that nobody he knew had ever heard or could have understood if they had, but the speech is not misleading. Calgacus is quoted as saying what all natives defending their homes from the Pax Romana knew: “They make a desert, call it peace, then enslave us.”

      The Romans decided that colonizing Hibernia was not worth the expense, maybe because too few of them wanted to settle in a damp island yielding poor crops. Colonizing Caledonia seemed practical at first, for it had some fertile plains that continued those of Albion. The geological difference above the northern border was not at once obvious. They extended forts and roads into Caledonia but met such difficulties that they decided it was cheaper to wall the whole place off. The tribes that repelled the legions were not braver than folk in other lands Rome had conquered, but they had more natural barriers on their side. These barriers, this geology, explain why England and Scotland at last became radically different nations. British historians have written as if the Romans had civilized their ancestors by giving them written laws, metal currency, good roads and stone buildings. This is because historians are as much excited by notions of warfare and conquest as subscribers to the History Today magazine I read in my doctor’s waiting room.

      Rome began pulling its legions out of Albion in 388 AD, leaving the South Britons helpless against marauding invaders, starting with Picts and Scots from beyond Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps unwisely those Britons invited help from North German pagans who had not lost their fighting skills under Roman imperialism.