Such a country illustrates what Chisholm, with Attic nicety of speech, calls "the influence of bread-power on history,"[14] as opposed to Mahan's sea-power.

France, like England, had a long coastline, abundant harbors, and an excellent location for maritime supremacy and colonial expansion; but her larger area and greater amount of fertile soil put off the hour of a redundant population such as England suffered from even in Henry VIII's time.
Moreover, in consequence of steady continental expansion from the twelfth to the eighteenth century and a political unification which made its area more effective for the support of the people, the French of Richelieu's time, except those from certain districts, took to the sea, not by national impulse as did the English and Dutch, but rather under the spur of government initiative.

They therefore achieved far less in maritime trade and colonization.[15] In ancient Palestine, a long stretch of coast, poorly equipped with harbors but accessible to the rich Mediterranean trade, failed to offset the attraction of the gardens and orchards of the Jezreel Valley and the pastures of the Judean hills, or to overcome the land-born predilections and aptitudes of the desert-bred Jews.

Similarly, the river-fringed peninsulas of Virginia and Maryland, opening wide their doors to the incoming sea, were powerless, nevertheless, to draw the settlers away from the riotous productiveness of the wide tidewater plains.

Here again the geographic force of the land outweighed that of the sea and became the dominant factor in directing the activities of the inhabitants.
The two antagonistic geographic forces may be both of the land, one born of a country's topography, the other of its location.