ABSTRACT
The content of geography is very large and is not clearly defined at its margins. Geographers study the distribution of various phenomena and the relationships between. They work on scales ranging in size from a farm, a village or part of a city, to the whole of the earth’s surface. This book has been compiled and presented according to a tradition that was particularly strong in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early in the present century in Germany and France as well as Britain and the United States. The theme is based on the idea of comparing regions in the context of a universal or global geography. Some geographers chose to identify regions of the world distinguished by climatic features and to compare differences in the human response to regions with similar environmental conditions in different parts of the world. Others focused on cultural regions, contrasting features of the human geography in various parts of the world. The emphasis in the present book is on regional differences in political, economic and social conditions and on the influence of demographic, cultural, natural resource and technological factors on these differences. For this purpose the world has been divided into a number of ‘major regions’.
