Valerie Hansen - The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—And Globalization Began

More Praise for The Year 1000

Takes readers on a worldwide adventure Spotlighting the encounters of Norse, Maya, African, Chinese, and Arabic peoplesand morethe book shows how their coming together in war and peace, and commerce and culture, profoundly shaped the world to come. A lively read filled with surprises, The Year 1000 speaks to our globalized present in ways well worth heeding.

Joanne B. Freeman, author of Affairs of Honor and The Field of Blood

The world has been connected longer than the schoolbooks tell you, a whole millennium longer at least: connections of gold and spices, dragons and slaves and faith. Valerie Hansen teases out the unfamiliar links between Chinese markets, Baghdad fortunes, strange blonds on the walls of Mayan temples, and Vikings on Russian rivers in a careful but accessible and truly global history.

Michael Pye, author of The Edge of the World

An epic journey with seafarers, traders and pilgrims, women and men, across the globe some one thousand years ago. A bold and entertaining story, and ultimately, a celebration of differenceand readinessfor the unfamiliar.

Arezou Azad, senior research fellow at the University of Oxford and Humboldt Fellow at the Freie University of Berlin

Remarkable Valerie Hansen leads us across African empires and Mesoamerican exchanges, along the Silk Road to Europe, and aboard ship with the multiethnic mariners of the Indian Ocean and the Vikings who followed the Volga to Byzantium. More than a history of global trade, this is a story of human encounters brought to life by vignettes and voices from every corner of a connected medieval planet.

Nile Green, author of Sufism: A Global History

Drawing on cutting-edge archaeological research from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, Hansen offers a highly readable account of the forging of global connections long before Columbus. Her suggestion that the quickening and thickening of communication has always brought challenges as well as opportunities is particularly valuable at a time when we struggle with the implications of modern globalization.

Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, editors, The Global Middle Ages

[A] unique fusion of firsthand, on-site investigations around the world and intensive research in far-flung libraries, archives, and museums. Whats more, all of this energetic, scholarly activity is combined with a compelling argument for a new hypothesis concerning the origins of globalization, a topic that could hardly be more pertinent to our own age.

Victor H. Mair, editor of The Columbia History of Chinese Literature

Hansens story of the movement of peoples, products, religions, and ideas around the year 1000 makes it clear that globalization is nothing new, and that the civilizations open to the challenges of the unfamiliar were the ones that flourished. No one has told this story better.

Stuart B. Schwartz, author of All Can Be Saved

Timely proof that globalization has a point of origin and a long history. Then and now, it has been about exchange, competition, and exploitation. Hansen offers in three hundred vivid pages the kind of deep texture that makes an age come alive.

Paul Freedman, author of Out of the East

Rich and fascinating Ranging by sea and land across six continents, Hansen seeks out exciting and unexpected connections, showing that globalization is by no means new to our own time.

David Abulafia, author of The Discovery of Mankind and The Great Sea

An exhilarating ride through the varieties of human society at the moment when the world reconnected Examines the arc of world cultures at a salient moment in human history, when men and women crossed westward across the stormy Atlantic and met their counterparts on the American continent. The result is a fascinating story of the human capacity for connection, communication, trade, and adaptation.

William N. Goetzmann, author of Money Changes Everything

An absorbing read that makes a distant world feel near.

Francesca Trivellato, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History at Princetons Institute for Advanced Study
and author of The Familiarity of Strangers

Also by Valerie Hansen

The Silk Road:

A New History with Documents

The Open Empire:

A History of China to 1800

Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China:

How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 6001400

Changing Gods in Medieval China, 11271276

Voyages in World History (with Kenneth R. Curtis)

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Copyright 2020 by Valerie Hansen

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Maps by David Lindroth Inc.

Jacket design by Jonathan Bush

Jacket artwork: Al-Idrisi World Map Photo, Ms. Pococke 375, Fols. 3V-4R Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; Boat: Reconstruction of 10th-Century Viking Boat (Color Litho), Italian School (19th Century)/Private Collection/De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hansen, Valerie, 1958 author.

Title: The year 1000 : when globalization began / Valerie Hansen.

Other titles: One Thousand

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045048 (print) | LCCN 2019045049 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501194108 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501194115 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501194122 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: One thousand, A.D.

Classification: LCC D123 .H37 2020 (print) | LCC D123 (ebook) | DDC 909/.1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045048

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045049

ISBN 978-1-5011-9410-89821-4449-4

ISBN 978-1-5011-9412-2 (ebook)

For Jim,

who went everywhere

and read everything

T o reach the broadest possible audience, Ive followed a few guidelines. Keep foreign names and words to a minimum. Use the most familiar spellings and drop most diacritics. Refer to modern countries and regions and avoid bogging down the reader with place names no longer in use. Convert historic measurements and units into both English and metric measures. Write endnotes that provide sufficient information to locate the sources.

T he street is packed with customers buying pearl necklaces from Sri Lanka, ornaments carved from African ivory, perfumes preserved with stabilizers from Tibet and Somalia, vials crafted from Baltic amber, and furniture made from every imaginable aromatic wood. The smell of foreign incense permeates the air. A shop around the corner sells expensive and high-tech products alongside versions modified for local consumers. Depending on the holiday, Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist worshippers join the throngs. Later, when you drop by a friends place, she offers you a cool drink with an unusual fragrance. The family shows off their latest acquisitions: a fine table made of Javanese sandalwood displaying an intricately carved rhinoceros horn. Many of the knickknacks look imported, testifying to your friends cosmopolitan taste.