Geography Reference
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landscape of all the Eurasian population hubs, and therefore its inhabitants, Fairgrieve tells
us, lacked the need to build political structures for the organization of resources, at least on
the scale that the temperate zone Chinese and Europeans did. This last point, of course, may
seem overly deterministic, and perhaps inherently racist in its stark simplicity: a feature
common to the era in which Fairgrieve wrote. Yet as in the case of Mackinder, who worried
about the “yellow peril” that China supposedly represented, Fairgrieve's larger analysis of
India is essentially valid, as well as insightful.
For while obviously constituting its own unique civilization, the Indian Subcontinent,
because of the above reasons, has through much of its history lacked the political unity
of China, even as it has been open to concentrated invasions from its northwest, the least
defined and protected of its frontier regions, where India is dangerously close to both the
Central Asian steppe and the Persian-Afghan plateau, with their more “virile,” temperate
zone civilizations. 3 Motivating these invasions throughout history has been the welcoming
fecundity, reinforced by not too excessive rainfall, that characterizes the plain of the Pun-
jab, watered as it is by the Indus River and its tributaries at exactly the point where the
Persian-Afghan plateau drops to the floor of the subcontinent. Indeed, it is the thundering
invasions and infiltrations from West and Central Asia that have disrupted the quest for
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