“I would love to travel back to AD 1000, the pinnacle of the great traditional civilisations”
Michael Wood gives his opinion on Valerie Hansen’s The Year 1000 →
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the Globe – and Globalization Began
by Valerie Hansen Viking, 320 pages, £20
If you could hop in a time machine and go back to one period of history, which would it be? It’s a fun game to play. I would travel back to AD 1000, the pinnacle of the great traditional civilisations, and journey across the world. This is the moment when, with a bit of luck and a couple of good phrase books (they had them), you could set out from Dover, across Europe to Byzantium, through Cairo in the brilliant Fatimid caliphate, then out on the Silk Road across central Asia – or down into Cholan India, and take one of the sea routes through Indonesia to the thronging ports of Song China, one of history’s greatest civilisations. There you could relax with beer on the shore of the Yellow Sea, reflecting on what humanity had achieved so far and perhaps wondering what lay ahead.
That’s the journey that frames Valerie Hansen’s The Year 1000, a dazzling sweep across the world a millennium ago. Professor Hansen is the author of a terrific history of China, and a remarkable book about the Silk Road from the late Roman period to the early Middle Ages. Insights from these previous works inform this sparkling narrative, which spans the entire globe with a fabulous cast of characters – Vikings, Mayans, Africans, Chinese and Arabs.
Here, she poses a big question: when did globalisation begin? Adam Smith famously argued that the conquest of the New World was the key: “the greatest event in history”, when the Europeans occupied an entire continent, devastating the population, plundering its resources and linking the world up by sea, paving the way for the European empires.
Hansen, however, argues that the catalyst for globalisation came much earlier, with new technologies, trade routes and ideas.
Paradoxically, as she shows, in AD 1000 it was Song dynasty China that was the global leader. With a quarter (maybe more) of the world’s population, they had rational governance, wonderful artistic achievements and staggering scientific inventions, and were poised to become the first modern state. It didn’t happen; not because of inherent failings of Chinese thought, but because of war. In the end the west would triumph – at least for a while.
Was that a good thing? Well, I’ve spent a lifetime travelling in other cultures, and
With a bit of luck and a couple of good phrase books, you could set out from Dover, across Europe to Byzantium and Cairo
I disagree with those who argue the benefits of western imperialism and colonialism. For me, they were in the main destructive, and their consequences are visible everywhere in our current environmental crisis. As this book shows, it could have been different.
Sometimes what Hansen describes comes out of an older past – I would argue especially for the formative era of the Tang dynasty, the Carolingian Renaissance and the Caliphate. But The Year 1000 offers both big ideas and riveting details: the smell of incense and spices wafting over Persian seaports, Tamil temples and Cantonese bazaars. It’s a whole new way of looking at world history, accessible, readable and just the ticket for history buffs everywhere. If I manage to get to Greece this year, I shall take it with me to read again on the night train through Belgrade and Salonika, thinking of those who came that way a thousand years ago.