Today, we in the West tend to believe that it wasn’t until the late 1400s and 1500s, when Europeans sailed to the Americas and around the Cape of Good Hope, that the world became interconnected, and that it wasn’t until the 20th century that globalization developed. Globalization, Valerie Hansen argues in her fascinating new book, “The Year 1000,” had begun. And then, in the most significant journey of the era, the Vikings sailed to Canada, connecting these trade routes and creating a round-the-world loop.

The Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula were traveling as far north as the Mississippi River Valley and as far south as Colombia. Slaves were being marched from Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa to Constantinople, Baghdad and Cairo. Traders and pilgrims were sailing across the Indian Ocean, to and from East Africa, Arabia, India and China. In the year 1000, the world was on the move. Introducing players from Europe, the Islamic world, Asia, the Indian Ocean maritime world, the Pacific and the Mayan world who were connecting the major landmasses for the first time, this compelling revisionist argument shows how these encounters set the stage for the globalization that would dominate the world for centuries to come.THE YEAR 1000 When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began By Valerie Hansen

This was the 'big bang' of globalization, which ushered in a new era of exploration and trade, and which paved the way for Europeans to dominate after Columbus reached America.ĭrawing on a wide range of new historical sources and cutting-edge archaeology, Hansen shows, for example, that the Maya began to trade with the native peoples of modern New Mexico from traces of theobromine - the chemical signature of chocolate - and that frozen textiles found in Greenland contain hairs from animals that could only have come from North America. But as celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen shows, it was the year 1000, when for the first time new trade routes linked the entire globe, so an object could in theory circumnavigate the world. When did globalization begin? Most observers have settled on 1492, the year Columbus discovered America.

The year 1000 valerie hansen