Tellurocracy

Tellurocracy (from the Latin word tellūs "land" and the Greek word κράτος "power") is a type of civilization or state system that is clearly associated with the development of land territories and consistent penetration into inland territories. Tellurocratic states have a certain territory and the state-forming ethnic majority living on it, around which further expansion takes place. The opposite of tellurocracy is thalassocracy (maritime empires), although in real life the pure type of a particular state is rarely observed. Usually there is a combination of tellurocratic characteristics with thalassocratic. In political geography, geopolitics and geo-economics, the term is used to explain the power of a country through its control over land. For example, the Sultanate of Muscat was purely thassalocratic, but the Imamate of Oman was purely tellurocratic. In addition, it could be said that most or all landlocked states are tellurocracies.

However, tellurocracies are generally not purely tellurocratic. In particular, most large tellurocracies have coastlines and not just inland territories, unlike thassalocracies, which historically would generally only have coastlines, and not inland territories. For example, the Mongols attempted to conquer Japan on multiple occasions. As well, the Russian Empire conquered Russian America (now Alaska) after it reached a point where it could no longer expand eastward by land. Likewise, the United States acquired Alaska and incorporated many islands and the Panama Canal Zone after it could no longer expand westward. It is also worth noting that the largely tellurocratic, continental Australia, founded as a group of thalassocratic colonies, now holds its own island territories outside of its mainland, such as Christmas Island.

Many empires of antiquity are noted for being more tellurocratic than their rivals, such as the early Roman Republic in opposition to its rival Carthaginian Empire, which later as the Roman and Byzantine Empires ironically became a rather thalassocratic, yet still quite tellurocratic rival to the quite purely tellurocratic Parthian and Sasanian Empires.

...
Wikipedia