The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World- and Globalization Began

Today’s post is on The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World- and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen. It is 308 pages long and is published by Scribner. The cover is picture of a map and a Viking ship in the center. The intended reader is someone who is interested in world history. There is no foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- 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. 

Review- Fascinating piece about the world at the Millennium of 1000, by an expert in the field. Hansen does a fantastic job of showing how the world has been a global market for a very long time. She starts us in the New World with the Vikings traveling from Greenland to Northern Canada and how far south they actually went and ends the book in China showing that China has always been a global place. The writing is engaging, informative without being overwhelming, and very well done. Hanson does a good job of breaking very complicated political situations down and distilling them to the important people, places and facts. She helps the reader see the world from a very close place of the people who lived in it. As she has access to firsthand documentation so this is very easy for her to do. I had a very nice time reading this book, I enjoy history and I know very little about the world at that particular time, so I was quite excited to read this and I was not disappointed. If you enjoy reading about history, want to understand how the world has always been a global market of some kind, or are just interested in reading something more positive than what's going on in the world lately I would give this book a look. 

I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.