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. 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.It will also hold up a mirror to the hopes and fears we experience today"-Provided by publisher 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.
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. As people on at least five continents ventured outward, they spread technology, new crops, and religion. Drawing on nearly thirty years of research on medieval China and global history, she presents a compelling account of first encounters between disparate societies. 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. 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.
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