The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen

Reviewed by: The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen Jonathan Good valerie hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began. New York: Scribner, 2020. Pp. x, 300; 16 plates. isbn: 978–1501194108. $30. Valerie Hansen is the co-author of Voyages in World History, one of the most popular world history textbooks on the US college market today, and The Year 1000 grows out of that expertise. Its immediate inspiration was Hansen’s realization that the central Asian Turkic Karakhanids took Kashgar (now in Xinjiang, China) in 1006, a year after the Liao and Song dynasties ratified the treaty of Chanyuan—both of which occurred right around the time that a party of Norse visited the island of Newfoundland. Hansen, a Professor of History at Yale University, wondered if the three events were related—and eventually realized that regional expansion lay behind all of them. The year 1000 thus represents the dawning of the first great age of globalization, a time when preexisting trade networks both strengthened and came into contact with each other, and an object could, theoretically, traverse the entire globe by being passed from one set of human hands to another. This situation prevailed for roughly the next 500 years, before being displaced by a new set of patterns inaugurated by state-sponsored Early Modern European expansion. Hansen opens with the Norse voyage to Vinland c. 1000, recorded in certain Viking sagas and archaeologically confirmed in 1960. In that year, Helge and Anne Ingstad excavated L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and discovered objects of unmistakable Viking provenance, including evidence of iron smelting, technology unknown to the native inhabitants of North America. Native Americans certainly had their own trading networks, however, such as those of the Mayans, the Mississippians, the Ancestral Puebloans of New Mexico, or the Wari of Peru which, when they were not exchanging goods, certainly shared knowledge. Returning to Europe, Hansen details the Vikings’ expansion eastwards and their founding of the Rus, centered on Kiev, and its trade in furs and slaves—occasionally with the Volga Bulgars and Khazar Khanate further east, more often with the Abbasid Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire to the south. The latter of these successfully converted the Rus to Orthodox Christianity, making trade between the two polities much easier, and indeed, Islam and Roman Christianity also made significant conversions around the year 1000, with the concomitant expansion of political alliances and trading networks. One of these extended over the Sahara Desert to Mali (whose goldfields eventually made its Muslim ruler Mansa Musa ‘the world’s richest man’ [p. 113]), another down the east coast of Africa to the Great Zimbabwe. Islam only went so far in Central Asia, however, before it ran into Buddhism, the religion of the Liao Dynasty (of Mongolia and Manchuria), Korea, and Japan, and a major influence on Song Dynasty China—and [End Page 70] the basis for another major trading bloc. The sea lanes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, which connected places as far apart as Madagascar, Chola Kingdom India, Angkor in Indochina, Srivijaya on the island of Sumatra, and the islands of Polynesia allowed for the exchange of all kinds of goods, especially spices and aromatics. But it was China that was ‘the most globalized place on Earth’ (p. 199). Its large population happily consumed all sorts of goods from overseas, while its own products (especially pottery) and superior technology were in heavy demand elsewhere. Hansen never really explains why the first great era of globalization should have arisen around the year 1000. The Medieval Warm Period (leading to the ‘cerealization’ of northern Europe) may have played a role, although she notes that such climatological good fortune was not shared by all regions (thus the collapse of the Classic Maya due to drought). Perhaps it is simply a coincidence that such a nice, round number as ‘1000’ witnessed what was probably bound to happen at some point anyway. A strength of the book is Hansen’s insistence that globalization, then as now, produces definite winners and losers; the creation of what Amy Chua called ‘market-dominant minorities’ (World on Fire: How...

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