The year 1000 marked the first time that many regional trade routes connected and ideas began circling the globe.Globalization started much earlier than you might expect in AD 1000.
That is
when, as incontrovertible archeological evidence shows, the Vikings left their
home region of Scandinavia, crossed the North Atlantic and landed in
northeastern Canada. The Norse voyages linked existing pathways across North
and South America with those across Afro-Eurasia. As new pathways opened on
continents, merchants, goods, technologies and religions moved around the globe
for the first time. Regional networks joined together to tie a loop around the
globe.
As the
Icelandic sagas inform us, trading began almost immediately with a premium
placed on novel goods. When the locals exchanged furs for wool cloth the
Vikings had dyed red, they tied the lengths of red wool around their heads. As
supplies began to run out, the Norse cut shorter and shorter pieces, some no
“wider than a finger’s width.” Still the locals offered full pelts for the
scraps. Even in those early encounters, the lure of a new product – red cloth –
cast a mesmerizing spell on consumers, just as excited purchasers today clamor
for the latest Nike sneakers.
For the
first time in history, an object or message could travel all the way around the
world. No one has found such an item – yet! – but archaeology could still
surprise us.
To be
sure, this was not globalization in our current sense of the word. Ordinary
people could not travel virtually anywhere, walk into a store and buy goods
from another country. Nonetheless, the changes around the year 1000 constituted
globalization in the most fundamental sense because what happened in one place
profoundly affected the residents of distant regions.
True,
people living in a few regions – Rome, India, China – knew well before 1000
that other societies existed. Consider the sea trade between Rome and India,
for example, or the overland Silk routes linking Central Asia with China. But
the changes of 1000 influenced the entire globe.
In the
Americas, the Maya, based in the Yucatan Peninsula, traded cacao beans and
brightly colored feathers – and the occasional live caged macaw– for the
turquoise of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, some 2,000 miles, or 3600 kilometers,
away.
In
Afro-Eurasia, the ongoing demand for slaves in Constantinople (modern
Istanbul), Baghdad, Cairo and other cities resulted in the forced movement of
millions of people from Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia hundreds of
years before the transatlantic slave trade began. So many slaves came from
Eastern Europe that the modern English “slave” isderived from “Slav.”
Besides
the Norse, other key players in the year 1000 included the Chinese, the Indians
and the Arabs. The longest maritime route in regular use connected China with
the Persian Gulf cities of Oman and Basra, the port closest to Baghdad. It
measured 8,000 miles, or 13,000 kilometers, but if boats crossed the Indian
Ocean directly without hugging the shore, the distance was 6,500 miles, or
10,500 kilometers. And if the boats proceeded on to Sofala, in modern
Mozambique, the extra leg totaled 4,700 miles, or 6,500 kilometers. The entire
distance was three times longer than Columbus’s first voyage across the
Atlantic, which measured 4,400 miles, or 7,700 kilometers.
The
route from China to Sofala combined two pilgrimage pathways: one for Muslims
going from China to Mecca, the other for East Africans also performing the
hajj. Most of the traffic traveled between the ports on China’s southeast coast
and the Arabian Peninsula, but some goods, such as high-fired Chinese celadons
– as prized as iPhones in their day – reached ports along the East African
coast.
As the
export trade boomed, Chinese workers shifted to full-scale manufacturing of
products – ceramics, textiles, metal goods – for their overseas customers. As
early as 826 Chinese potters tried to copy Arabic words on export wares, but
made mistakes in the lettering, just as clothing manufacturers print T-shirts
with spelling and grammatical errors today. The first phase of globalization
occurred long before the introduction of either steam or electric power and was
based on sails and wind, carts and horses and other draft animals.
Chinese
consumers at all social levels consumed vast quantities of spices, fragrant
woods and unusual plants. The peoples of Southeast Asia who lived in forests
gave up their traditional livelihoods and completely reoriented their economies
to supply Chinese consumers, rich and poor, with spices and fragrant woods.
These developments meant that globalization was more advanced in Southeast Asia
and China.
As
foreign merchants increasingly benefited at the expense of local businessmen,
the world’s first anti-globalization riots and attacks on the newly wealthy
broke out in cities such as Cairo, Constantinople and Guangzhou.
The most
surprising journeys around the year 1000 took place when speakers of
Malayo-Polynesian languages departed from the Malay peninsula and arrived on
the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa some 4,000 miles away.
Globalization
also profoundly affected those who never left home. Once a ruler converted, and
many did around 1000, many of their subjects adopted the new faith as well.
Following the opening up of the new pathways, rulers learned about the
religions of their neighbors, and a spate of conversions occurred. Today, 92
percent of believers subscribe to one of the four religions – Islam,
Christianity, Hinduism or Buddhism – that gained traction in the year 1000.
These
exchanges of the year 1000 opened some of the routes through which goods and
peoples continued to travel after Columbus traversed the mid-Atlantic. Yet the
world of 1000 differed from that of 1492 in important ways. Unlike in 1492,
when firearms and cannon enabled the Europeans to defeat almost everyone they
met, the travelers who encountered one another in the year 1000 were much
closer technologically.
The
Thule peoples, the ancestors of the modern Inuit, mastered seal-hunting
technologies that allowed them after 1000 to settle a broad band of northern
territory stretching from Alaska all the way to Greenland. The failure of the
Scandinavians to adapt to the northern climes ultimately forced them to
withdraw from Greenland.
Some
parts of the world, such as China and the Middle East, flourished while others,
Europe in particular, lagged behind. In fact, the world of 1000 looks much more
like our world today in which the Chinese, Arabs and Americans are all genuine
rivals to the Europeans.
As
peoples living in different regions established contact with one another around
the year 1000, they set the stage for the next phase of globalization in the
1500s when the Europeans reshaped existing networks to suit their own
interests. But the Europeans did not invent globalization. They changed and
augmented what was already there since 1000. If globalization hadn’t yet begun,
Europeans wouldn’t have been able to penetrate the markets in so many places as
quickly as they did after 1492.
The most
important lesson we can learn from our forebears is how best to react to the
unfamiliar. Some Vikings killed the residents of northeastern Canada as they
slept under canoes without even checking to see if they were dangerous. On
other continents, those who encountered strangers took their time, greeted
strangers patiently and traded their belongings for whatever goods their new
acquaintances offered. Some of the most successful learned new languages and
forged trading relationships across huge distances.
True,
globalization did not benefit everyone who experienced it. But those who
remained open to the unfamiliar did much better than those who rejected
anything new. That was true in the year 1000, and it is just as true today.
*Valerie
Hansen is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, where
she teaches Chinese and world history. This essay is based on the prologue of
her most recent book, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and
Globalization Began, published by Simon + Schuster. She is also the author of
The Silk Road: A New History and The Open Empire.
***YaleGlobal
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