The Year 1000

When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began

By: Valerie Hansen

Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell

Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

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 30 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 fans of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, The Year 1000 is an 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.

©2020 Valerie Hansen (P)2020 Simon & Schuster Audio

Long on Speculation, Short on Evidence

Failure to prove a negative does not make a positive. The author took bits and pieces of disjointed “evidence” and speculated about what might have happened or could have happened. Choosing one of many possible explanations and incorporating it into a narrative does not ensure accuracy or truth.

Fun listen

The narration could have been better but the contents of the book are fascinating even when the author admits she is speculating.

Not an historian, not history

This poppycock would not pass muster for a first draft dissertation. The author vainly attempts to discuss the development of globalization 1000 years ago. Yes, there are some incredible examples of cross-culture travel and trade, all of which are well documented by real historians. In the first section the author discusses the Nordic travel to to what is now Newfoundland without adding anything new. In the next section she examines civilizations in modern day Mexico. There she finds art that might depict men with blonde hair and concludes that Nordic explorers made it all the way west and south from Canada to Mexico without a. chronicling the epic journey or b. leaving any evidence of their epic journey. As I say, poppycock. First year college students should be able to punch holes in this thin, sad attempt to contribute to the historical record.

Fun listen but not a deep dive into history

Loving stories about people, places, and things, I enjoyed listening to this book. The perspective it proposes and explores - that globalization is not a recent human trend, but a movement that began over a thousand years ago - is interesting. However, I am not sure what function the notion of the year 1000 being a hinge of history serves. Sure, it gives the book an arresting title. However, what was 1000 and whose 1000 was it? Then, as now, different civilizations and tribes have different calendars. Seriously, the events the author discusses happened over five or six centuries both before, during, and after what we think of as 1000, for no particular reason. The point is, humans ventured further afield, encountered each other, and trade and violence ensued. Interesting how that pattern repeats itself for over more than a thousand years. Nonetheless, this unscientific book told some travelers' tales I'd not encountered before, as well as repositioned the familiar ones. I enjoyed the float. Look elsewhere for a deep dive. The narrator has a smooth, engaging voice. However, pronunciation of place names stumped her several times. I really don't hold that against her. None of us can really know what the place names (even if those names were then used) sounded like a thousand years ago.

Is That All There Is? Or, Why the Year 1000?

In The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began (2020), Valerie Hansen is out to prove that “The year 1000 marked the start of globalization. This is when trade routes took shape all around the world that allowed goods, technologies, religions, and people to leave home and go somewhere new.” She also wants to connect how cultures strategized globalization around 1000 with how we are dealing with it today: “living in a world shaped by the events of the year 1000, we are wrestling with exactly the same challenges that people faced for the first time then: should we cooperate with our neighbors, trade with them, allow them to settle in our countries, and grant them freedom of worship when they live in our society? Should we try to keep them out? Should we retaliate against the people who become wealthy through trade? Should we try to make new products that copy technologies we haven't yet mastered? Finally, will globalization make us more aware of who we are, or will it destroy our identity?” But although her book is mostly interesting, it is a little short and thin and doesn’t fully fulfill its “goal … to address those questions.”

Hansen starts with an overview of the world in the year 1000, and then writes chapters on the Norse in North America (“Go West, Young Viking”), central, south, and north American cultures (“The Pan American Highways of 1000”), the Rus in eastern Europe (“European Slaves”), African and Islamic traders and cultures (“The World's Richest Man”), Muslims and Buddhists in Asia (“Central Asia Splits in Two”), and 11th-century China (“The Most Globalized Place on Earth”).

Throughout, she relates interesting details, for example:

On the need for blood to be given to the Mayan gods, for which leaders drew stingray stingers through their penises. (Ouch!)

On the importance of coins found in shipwrecks and burial mounds etc. when no written documentation exists, because coins reveal who was trading with whom and how much they traded with them. (Duh!)

On the Tale of Genji revealing the importance of aromatics from Arabia and Southeast Asia to the Song Empire and to Heian-era Japanese aristocrats like Genji, who made his own scents by combining different elements, was famed for his particular fragrance which could be smelt long after he left a room, and held a fragrance making contest at the birthday party of his princess daughter. (Cool!)

On the 100-meter-long Chinese kilns like dragons rising up mountain sides, the hottest kilns in the world, using up to 1000 workers and making 20,000 or more pieces of ceramics per firing. (Wow!)

Here is an example of Hansen’s straightforward (not wholly stirring) writing and her connecting approach to history:

“Like Wikipedia entries today, the Chinese descriptions of foreign lands followed a set formula, which included the country’s most important products, the local currency system... and a chronological account of the most important events in the history of that place.”

Some of Hansen’s connections between then and now seem a bit forced, like when she says that the conflict between the Venetian, Genoese, and Pisan merchants of Constantinople and the locals of that city were like that between the haves and have nots of today (the 1% and everyone else). Surely much of the conflict in Constantinople back then was because the Latins were not Greek and were not Eastern Orthodox and not just because they had more wealth?

Anyway, it is a short book, and I wished for more depth and detail. I didn’t learn as much from it as I’d hoped I would. She gives etymologies that I’d learned from other history books, like slaves coming from the word Slav, because so many of them were enslaved back then. One was new to me: Blue Tooth connectivity deriving from King Harold Bluetooth because he united Denmark and Norway.

Her thesis—that people were trading globally well before the 1500s and that many of the trade routes and religious cultural blocks and dynamics of today’s globalized world started by the year 1000 is convincing, but… but then what?

A question: Why the year 1000? Given the varying calendars and methods of counting years in the different cultures back then, why not start with, say, 900? In her chapters Hansen often travels hundreds of years before or after 1000. I think it’s OK when she mentions the 1500s and European exploration/exploitation etc., because she’s explaining that they used preexisting trade routes from hundreds of years earlier while cutting out local middlemen and generally imposing their wills on locals, but sometimes one suspects that you could say globalization started much earlier than 1000. Referring at one point to ceramic competition between Arab and Chinese makers circa the year 726, Hansen herself says, “Globalization operated then just as it does now.”

Another question: Is that all there is? OK, so globalization started say, in the year 1000, much earlier than we usually imagine, but I don’t think Hansen answers the questions she poses in her Prologue about what early globalization has to tell us about contemporary globalization. In her Epilogue, she concludes that the most important lesson we can get from looking at globalization in the year 1000 is how to react to the unfamiliar: do you open to and learn from it or do you close to and attack it? Doing the former is more likely to bring beneficial results for your culture than doing the latter. That conclusion is underwhelming.

The reader Cynthia Farrell speaks clearly but has some dodgy pronunciations: as of products (produx), objects (objex), Kyoto (Ki-oto), Iraq and Iran (Eye-raq and Eye-ran). Even if we don’t mind that kind of thing, her delivery is rather monotonous, rendering Hansen’s prose rather bland. When Hansen starts a sentence with “Interestingly,” or “Curiously,” Farrell doesn't express interest or curiosity.

Eye Opening

After reading this, I felt like I had never taken a history class and that we have belittled all that our ancestors have accomplished. I am not a history buff, I like books that open up the mind and this book does so by giving a very different perspective. This book shows all that was happening in the year 1000. It shows how vibrant the world was, how active trade was. Beyond mind blowing when talking about slavery. Between trade/travel and slavery... I didn't realize how limited my views were. I though Christopher Columbus was this brave adventure but not so much. I had no idea Eastern Europeans were one of the biggest regions for slavery and that is where the word comes from since they traded their people. I had associated slavery with primarily African origins.

My only downside is in the description of the book, it mentions the first time for all these events. I wish it didn't. The book does not portray how all these events were happening for the first time. Rather, there is evidence to support in the book these were not the first happenings during the year 1000. I found that misleading because I was anticipating build up as to how we got there and why the year 1000 was so pivotal to the development of civilization as we know it. I feel it would be more true if the books mission was to show us perspective and that it may be for some, our first time realizing that trade and travel was massive at that time. The year 1000 was not a sleepy little town, rather, a booming time of development and exploration.

It's fine

Hansen does a good job summarizing world history in a way that will transmit a certain number of facts to the as of yet uninformed reader.

She severely oversimplifies almost everything.

She's slippery in her language, though. It starts with her abandonment of historic place names, which she does in the name of keeping things simple. This approach is very problematic because it necessarily snuggles in anachronisms and makes the past less comprehensible, not more. It means that we understand the past in our own terms, with our own biases. Hansen's handling of religion is a good case in point. We are very political and not very religious, in the modern West, and in her telling (always relying heavily on anachronism), Hansen assumes similar motivations in people of the past. Worse, she seems unaware of the fact that this is an assumption of hers when it should be a question.

The crowning abuse of language in her work is with the term globalization itself. Hansen uses the term to mean everything from the formation of a truly global trade network like the Silk Roads to simply banding together with one's neighbors.

In the end, you get a very whiggish history that has nothing to teach us and only serves to highlight some modern agenda or another. To her credit, she doesn't make her agenda into a sermon. Instead, one is left with a sense of pointlessness. "OK, supposing globalization really did start around the year 1000. So?"

Lastly, the writing is repetitious enough to hearken back to undergraduate days of stating a thing, and then, rather than proving it, restating it in two or three ways, following all with a conclusion.

Well Researched

This a very interesting topic and one not covered by many other books. While the book is well organized and researched (with insightful notes and comments) it reads more like a text book than a non-fiction novel. I think the author could have had a more emphatic thesis as to why globalization started in 10th century (as opposed to earlier or later). What was it that coalesced in the year 1000 that changed our world. Many ideas are presented and discussed, but no single underlying thread connects them. Perhaps I ask too much. The performance was also a bit dry, if not robotic, adding to the character of the writing as a text book. My opinion.

informative, descriptive, transportive

I often felt I was on the deck of an ancient ship, strolling through colorful markets, or rummaging through records in a lavish palace while I listened to this book. information rich, occasionally dense. A good audio book for a crash course in ancient culture and a nice trip out of the current era.

Deeply informative and surprising

Dr. Valerie Hansen has achieved a major work of popular history writing. Her facts are surprising, well cited, and original, and the theories connecting the facts are logical and clearly structured. The thesis that globalisation is nothing new is convincingly argued, and it is a very fun and illuminating read.