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"In history, myth often abides. It was long assumed that the centuries immediately prior to AD 1000 were lacking in any major cultural developments or geopolitical encounters, that the Europeans hadn't yet discovered North America, that the farthest anyone had traveled over sea was the Vikings' invasion of Britain. But how, then, to explain the presence of blonde-haired people in Mayan temple murals in Chichen Itza, Mexico? Could it be possible that the Vikings had found their way to the Americas during the height of the Mayan empire? Valerie Hansen, a much-honored 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 on medieval China and global history, she presents a compelling account of first encounters between disparate societies. As people on at least five continents ventured outward, they spread technology, new crops, and religion. These encounters, she shows, made it possible for Christopher Columbus to reach the Americas in 1492, and set the stage for the process of globalization that so dominates the modern era. For readers of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, The Year 1000 is an intellectually daring, provocative account that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about how the modern world came to be. It will also hold up a mirror to the hopes and fears we experience today."--… (more)
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Basically, what Hansen does in this book is give us a tour around the world, circa 1000, to describe what an observant traveler then might have found, and both going back in time to illuminate how things got that way and then moving forward. What she wants to emphasize is that the world then was much more interconnected, that trade routes, for example, were much more far flung and markets more sophisticated, than we might imagine via a Western view through which we think of parts of the world as being "discovered" in the 15th and 16th centuries. (To Hansen's credit, in my view, she spends very little time making this last point, choosing instead to concentrate on her topic and let the reader come to his or her own conclusions on that score. It is only at the very end of the book that Hansen mentions the European explorers at all.)
Unfortunately, at least for my own experience here, Hansen begins with, perhaps, the least convincing chapter of her "globalization" thesis, that of the Vikings' travels to North America. It's not that there's anything to be doubted about the idea of the Vikings having been there. (I have actually been to the excavated remains of their settlement at the very northern tip of Newfoundland! It's very cool, and they even have a nearby recreation of the small buildings with folks showing how the forge would have worked, etc.) It's more the fact that the Vikings didn't stay very long, and didn't have much successful interaction with the indigenous inhabitants. So, OK, the Vikings figured out how to get to North America, but they weren't adaptable enough, never, for example figuring out how to catch seals and other marine life through the ice, as the locals could. Also, evidence shows that they returned from time to time to harvest lumber. But still, how is a brief, non-lasting, interaction really evidence of globalization?
Things get more convincing, however, when Hansen begins discussing the Mayans' far reaching trade routes from their Yucatan Peninsula base north as far as Arizona and south into South America. The Vikings also come back into the picture when Hansen describes the forays of Scandinavian bands into northeastern Europe. They came to trade with the inhabitants, but because they were fiercer and had better weapons, they were soon forcing tribute from the people they interacted with, essentially demanding protection money. The people were known as the Rus, "a word derived from the Finnish name for Sweden, which means 'to row' or 'the men who row.'"
As Hansen explains it, one of the most important elements of the globalization she writes of is the consolidation of much of Eurasia from fragmented localized religions into large blocks of people (or at least rulers and upper class) into the four major religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Hansen says that this occurred not because the missionaries of those religions were so persuasive, but more for political and economic reasons. Alliances and even trade agreements were more easily made between coreligionists, and internal power could be consolidated more effectively as well if religion was eliminated as an excuse for the questioning of legitimacy and authority.
Well, I've already gone on for too long here. I'll just add that Hansen does a good job of illuminating her overall thesis, showing how trade was common and markets widespread, particularly between China, Southeast Asia, Africa (The chapter on the wide ranging trade throughout the continent and then outward is short but quite interesting.), the Middle East and India. She describes quite a few technical innovations, such as improvements in shipbuilding, around 1000 that enhanced these factors. (A trading journey known to have been made by Chinese sailors all the way to Madagascar was twice as long in miles as Columbus' first trip.) Sadly, we see that the international slave trade was a major driver of many of these developments. There are times when Hansen seems to be trying too hard to jam events into her globalization premise, saying that things happened "because of Globalization" that might more convincingly be described as signsof globalization. And some of the individual chapters I found more interesting than others. All in all, though, I'm glad that my reading group chose this book for this month. While I would imagine that among historians there is room for debate about some of Hansen's conclusions, I feel that I certainly learned enough and was engaged enough for most of the time, to find this a valuable reading experience.
And it would work really well if this didn;t feel to be quite so superficial. Dealing with Africa in 30 pages really doesn;t do anything to get under the skin of the place or its global trade implications, so this feels very much like a skim over the surface. It also felt like it jumped about in ech chapter, in both time and space, too much to actually present a coherent thesis.
I also didn;t like the tone, at times it slips into discussing "our story". I like my general non-fiction to be prurely in the impersonal, and this feels to be a rather slipshod means of writing.
Great ambition, let down by the flimsiness and execution.
I liked this book, but not quite as much as “1493” by Charles C Mann, which clearly covers a time 500 years later and focuses more directly on the Western Hemisphere and effects of the the Colombian (ahem) “discovery” of the “New World” on Europe and Asia. Anyway, both books are great, but I think Mann is the better writer.
A spindle whorl is not "A weight to hold wool thread down during spinning".
"Arsenic bronze has certain advantages over bronze made with copper." Arsenical bronze only contains a very small amount of arsenic. The rest is
When she makes two such ghastly mistakes that I recognize, how can I trust anything else she writes?
I got about a third of the way through.