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The Year 1000

When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began

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The Year 1000

Written by: Valerie Hansen
Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
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About this listen

 *A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice*

From celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen, a “vivid” and “astonishingly comprehensive account [that] casts world history in a brilliant new light” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and shows how bold explorations and daring trade missions first connected all of the world’s societies at the end of the first millennium.

People often believe that the years immediately prior to AD 1000 were, with just a few exceptions, lacking in any major cultural developments or geopolitical encounters, that the Europeans hadn’t yet reached North America, and that the farthest feat of sea travel was the Vikings’ invasion of Britain. But how, then, to explain the presence of blond-haired people in Maya temple murals at Chichén Itzá, Mexico? Could it be possible that the Vikings had found their way to the Americas during the height of the Maya empire?

Valerie Hansen, an award-winning historian, argues that the year 1000 was the world’s first point of major cultural exchange and exploration. Drawing on nearly thirty years of research, she presents a compelling account of first encounters between disparate societies, which sparked conflict and collaboration eerily reminiscent of our contemporary moment.

For readers of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, The Year 1000 is a “fascinating…highly impressive, deeply researched, lively and imaginative work” (The New York Times Book Review) that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about how the modern world came to be. Ancient World Middle Ages Latin America Imperialism Ancient History Mexico China Viking Africa Imperial Japan Middle East Crusade Iran

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What the critics say

"Sometime around the year 1000, Norsemen (and a few women) crossed from Greenland to what is now Canada. This audiobook marks that achievement as the first time goods and ideas could—at least, theoretically—travel around the world from the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia, introducing the possibility of true globalism. International and intercontinental trade routes stretched for thousands of miles, ready for European explorers to connect to them. . . . the material is fascinating to those with an interest in the distant origins of the modern world."
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Globalization started in 1000 CE when Leif Ericsson’s tiny Scandinavian goup established a short-lived settlement in eastern Canada, and traded a bit with some of the indigenous people there (when they weren’t trying to kill each other). The entire world was connected, if only for a short time.

Hansen wants to use globalization as the principal frame for her historical analysis of the “Global Middle Ages” around 1000, making the point that Europeans in the late 15th century onwards did not initiate globalization, but only plugged into (and sometimes hijacked) existing trade networks and long-distance relationships between peoples. And that the changes that came with globalization, exploiting people and environments, creating new winners and losers, were already well underway before the age of European imperialism.

Hansen starts her story with the Vikings. She takes this in two directions: one about Viking raids and trading expeditions down the European river systems through Russia (where Vikings settled and became the Rus) to the Black Sea and eventually Constantinople. The other into the Americas, where Hansen uses a fringe idea that Viking sailors may have reached the Yucatan (based on reconstructions of fragmentary murals in Chichen Itza showing men on boats with yellow hair) to explore the “Pan American Highways” connecting the Maya, the Chaco Canyon culture, and Mississippian Cahokia.

The story then moves to Africa, and long-distance trade in gold and ivory and especially slaves. Slave trading was big business in the Middle Ages, rivaling in extent the later Trans Atlantic Slave Trade: people who had nothing else of value traded other people. Slaves were sold in the millions from many parts of Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia (slave soldiers) to centers such as Constantinople, Cairo, and especially Abdassid Baghdad.

In Central Asia, Hansen surprisingly does not focus on the well-known Sik Roads, the overland trade networks between China and the Middle East. Instead she explores another theme: the expansion of universal religions that still dominate the world today (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) across Eurasia, and how Central Asia was divided between Islam in the West, and Buddhism in the East. She explains that many religious conversions were done for pragmatic reasons - to establish, or expand, religiously-aligned trading blocs with powerful neighbours. Adopting one of the major religions also gave rulers access to literate clergy, who played a useful role in government administration (ie collecting taxes). The story in Central Asia is confusing, with so many minor and changing players, until the Mongol Empire rose in the 13th century.

The last part of the story traces maritime trade between the Arabian Peninsula, through the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, and then southern China. Before 1000 most of this trade was between India and merchants in the Persian Gulf or East Africa, but eventually focus shifted to China and its industrial-scale manufacturing of high-quality porcelain and other goods, and the Chinese demand for silver, black pepper, ivory, and especially aromatic woods and resins and perfume compounds. China, then, as today, ran a significant trade imbalance with the rest of the world - a situation that the Europeans would attempt to resolve hundreds of years later by trafficking opium.

I learned some interesting things: about arsenic bronze in the Americas; how precious and desirable aromatics were in east Asia (Chinese aristocrats spent fortunes on aromatic woods, and as told in The Tale of Genji, the Japanese emperor in Kyoto spent hours personally designing his perfume); that Buddhists believed the world would end in 1052; and the Chinese believed that there was an Ultimate Drain in the oceans, somewhere far in the east; about wonderful characters like Ingvar the Far Travelled; and an awful lot about wooden boats and navigation.

Climate Change is part of Hansen’s story, but it is not explored or explained in sufficient detail, and some of the few details aren’t consistent. At the start of the book Hansen says that the Medieval Warm Period / Climate Anomaly started in 1000, peaked in 1100, and had ended by 1400. A few pages later, she says that this period ran from 950-1250, and that regardless it is not clear what the impact was in different regions of the world.

Hansen relies on archaeology and on often unreliable and fragmentary sources, including travelogues and geographic works, to build up her pictures of life around the year 1000, and how people (mis)understood the world they lived in. Some of the quotes from these sources are interesting, but just as many are distracting, confusing or unhelpful. There are also details and facts that don’t clearly fit within the narrative framing of the book, so that I often lost the forest for the shrubbery: unfamiliar places and stories about obscure rulers following one after another without a through line connecting them. The story also moves unexpectedly backwards and forwards in time - Hansen often projects hundreds of years backwards from later evidence, assuming questionable cultural continuity to establish how people may have lived or thought. And, while unavoidable in a book about trade networks, there is no way to make taxes interesting.

For the Audible audio book, the narrator’s voice is mostly robotic, reminding me of an early version of Siri - occasionally getting excited with place names like Chichen Itza. Hansen’s insistence on using both American and metric measures is unnecessarily distracting as well.

A story of the world around 1000, and the start of globalization.

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