There’s a passage in Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population that suggests a certain amount of geographic determinism, given that he wrote the essay in 1798:
The fertile province of Flanders, which has been so often the seat of the most destructive wars, after a respite of a few years, has appeared always as fruitful and as populous as ever.
I suppose he’s referring to the Eighty Years’ War, but I naturally think of the World War I poem, In Flanders Fields, written in 1915:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.