(p. C8) Valerie Hansen’s “The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began” is a gripping account of exploration and ingenuity, sweeping across the economic alliances and great networks of trade that connected disparate regions around the globe. By touching down in different parts of the world at that precise moment, Ms. Hansen reveals the social and economic changes that linked individuals and societies in astonishing ways.
. . .
People navigated along the trading routes from China to the Persian Gulf and East Africa, and from Scandinavia to North America and the Caspian Sea, long before da Gama, Magellan and Columbus. But for most ordinary people life was still circumscribed. Globalization in 1000 may have opened the world to rulers—and busy ports and cities like Quanzhou and Bukhara may have hosted culturally and religiously diverse populations—but there was little sense of a wider, cosmopolitan embrace of a common humanity. “The most important lesson we can learn from our forebears is how best to react to the unfamiliar,” Ms. Hansen writes. “Those who remained open to the unfamiliar did much better than those who rejected anything new.”
For the full review, see:
Karin Altenberg. “Setting The Globe Spinning.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 23, 2020): C8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 22, 2020, and has the title “The Year 1000’ Review: Setting the Globe Spinning.”)
The book under review is:
Hansen, Valerie. The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began. New York: Scribner, 2020.