The keen but circumscribed trade of the Baltic, which gave wealth and historical preeminence to Luebeck and the other Hanse Towns of northern Germany from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, lost its relative importance when the Atlantic became the maritime field of history.

Maritime leadership passed westward from Luebeck and Stralsund to Amsterdam and Bristol, as the historical horizon widened.

England, prior to this sudden dislocation, lay on the outskirts of civilized Europe, a terminal land, not a focus.

The peripheral location which retarded her early development became a source of power when she accumulated sufficient density of population for colonizing enterprises, and when maritime discovery opened a way to trans-oceanic lands.[9] Meanwhile, local geographic advantages in the old basins remain the same, although they are dwarfed by the development of relatively greater advantages elsewhere.

The broken coastline, limited area and favorable position of Greece make its people to-day a nation of seamen, and enable them to absorb by their considerable merchant fleet a great part of the trade of the eastern Mediterranean,[10] just as they did in the days of Pericles; but that youthful Aegean world which once constituted so large a part of the _oikoumene_, has shrunken to a modest province, and its highways to local paths.