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The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began
Audiobook8 hours

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

Written by Valerie Hansen

Narrated by Cynthia Farrell

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

*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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 14, 2020
ISBN9781797102986
Author

Valerie Hansen

Valerie Hansen is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, where she teaches Chinese and world history.  An accomplished scholar and author, she traveled to nearly twenty countries to conduct research for The Year 1000. She is also the author of The Silk Road: A New History and The Open Empire.

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Reviews for The Year 1000

Rating: 4.132478641025641 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Good book lots of information their narration was fairly dry
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A well written assessment of trade in most of the inhabited world. This book brings everything together in one place. However, it is not the first book ever written on this subject as it claims to be.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Easy listen and lots of useful information about economic trade in that era, goods I never knew or thought of covered many empires, countries. I liked it. Goes well with her other book on The Silk Road for a complete picture.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very enlightening. Well researched. Many thanks to the extraordinary author.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fascinating and insightful book that is commendable for providing multiple perspectives over various peoples during this time period. Given that, I can’t imagine why, oh why the author (Valerie Hansen) and/or her editor would allow the narrator (Cynthia Farrell) to pronounce Iran as “eye-ran.” This might be the way your average American pronounces it, but it is not correct and culturally insensitive.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Globalization is a reality even if unfashionable these days. It is not synonymous with neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Interesting look around the world at what was happening around the year 1000, especially in regard to trade and contact between regions. The world was a very complicated place! Many hundreds of distinct cultures dealing with their immediate neighboring cultures and also with cultures hundreds and even thousands of miles away. The author also has a book called “The Silk Road” - I may have to check that out.

    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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An okay history that shared a lot about China/SE Asia that I didn’t already know, but didn’t really break too much new ground or share any particularly interesting thoughts/ideas.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A couple of things to know about the title of this book, and how the title relates to historian Valerie Hansen's actual premise and execution here. First, and most importantly, when Hansen says "Globilization," she's not talking about the concept that we think of today, that of, for example, a company setting up organizational shop in one country but building factories in another to take advantage of lower wages. She is really talking about a growing interconnectedness between ever wider areas of the world for the purposes of trade, yes, but also the sharing of ideas and innovations. Second, the year 1000 is really used as a sort of central point in time, one that Hansen frequently circles back to, but not one that she slavishly adheres to. She talks, really, about developments over a range of times within a 2- or 3-century time period, from around 900 to around 1200. Finally, the use of the word "explorers" is misleading, because, at least for a Western reader, it puts to mind people in ships or on expeditions intentionally setting out to explore places they'd never been before to see what they could find out. Only a few of the major players in this narrative fit that mold. More often, Hansen is talking about conquerors, merchants and even historians. So all this makes me wonder whether the book title was Hansen's own idea fully or one that her publisher came up with. Well, at any rate, I say all that not by way of a criticism of the book, but more as a way of aligning the expectations any prospective readers.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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I like the idea of this book, but I'm not convinced by the execution. It aims to show how, around the year 1000 (that being give or take a couple of hundred years, by the wat), the world was far more globalised than might be imagined. There is then a chapter for each of the major peoples or areas of the world and how they interacted with other peoples, how they traded, what they traded etc. 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.