Taken together, it’s a fresh take on the global economy roughly 1000 years ago, sprinkled with anecdotes regarding dramatic conversions, corrupt officials, and cheap ripoffs of quality goods. But it does shoehorn the narrative somewhat, evidenced by Hansen herself veering off during certain chapters, writing well into the 13th or 14th centuries.

A fair amount of historical information is supposed to be prior knowledge, making The Year 1000 rather daunting for the uninitiated.įinally, the approach of focusing on a single year and viewing it from multiple vantage points – like the Mayans and the Rus’ – is original. Dr Valerie Hansen, professor of Chinese history at Yale University, points to the year 1000 as one early watershed era when the world expanded and became. For the first time, even though we have no evidence of it. Tons of names pass by, spiced up with the many materials traded from Ghana to Baghdad or Indonesia to the Qara-Khanids. Hansen’s theme in the book is that events and circumstances surrounding the year 1000 brought an unprecedented level of trade between regions, and marked the first time where a trade network truly wrapped around the entire planet vis-vis the Norse exploration of North America. Though Hansen (Chinese and World History/Yale Univ. For instance, it transports you from Vikings in Canada to the Song Dynasty in China. THE YEAR 1000 WHEN EXPLORERS CONNECTED THE WORLDAND GLOBALIZATION BEGAN by Valerie Hansen RELEASE DATE: ApIf any reader still believes that the year 1000 marked the Dark Ages, this insightful history will set them right. This breathtaking itinerary can be a bit dazzling. From the icy, windswept plains of Greenland to the shifting sands of the Sahara and Taklamakan deserts, Hansen narrates how the various cultural and religious blocks of the medieval world started to connect into one world-system – unlike anything even the Romans, Egyptians or Alexander the Great could have fathomed. The book’s cover.Ĭontrary to popular belief that medieval people hardly left their villages, this book shows that they traveled around and then some. Valerie Hansen’s The Year 1000 is a pretty fun trip around the globe, against the backdrop of history roughly a millennium ago.

The year 1000 hansen