The Year 1000 by V. Hansen

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Here’s our take on Valerie Hansen’s The Year 1000.

Quick facts

• Full title: The Year 1000. When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began
• Author: Valerie Hansen, American historian and professor. Teaches at Yale since 1998.
• First published: 2020
• Publisher: Penguin
• Number of pages without notes: 235

Our review

Valerie Hansen’s The Year 1000 is a pretty fun trip around the globe, against the backdrop of history roughly a millennium ago.

Contrary to popular belief that medieval people hardly left their villages, this book shows that they traveled around and then some. From the icy, windswept plains of Greenland to the shifting sands of the Sahara and Taklamakan deserts, Hansen narrates how the various cultural and religious blocks of the medieval world started to connect into one world-system – unlike anything even the Romans, Egyptians or Alexander the Great could have fathomed.

This breathtaking itinerary can be a bit dazzling. For instance, it transports you from Vikings in Canada to the Song Dynasty in China. Tons of names pass by, spiced up with the many materials traded from Ghana to Baghdad or Indonesia to the Qara-Khanids. A fair amount of historical information is supposed to be prior knowledge, making The Year 1000 rather daunting for the uninitiated.

Finally, the approach of focusing on a single year and viewing it from multiple vantage points – like the Mayans and the Rus’ – is original. But it does shoehorn the narrative somewhat, evidenced by Hansen herself veering off during certain chapters, writing well into the 13th or 14th centuries.

Taken together, it’s a fresh take on the global economy roughly 1000 years ago, sprinkled with anecdotes regarding dramatic conversions, corrupt officials, and cheap ripoffs of quality goods.

Our verdict

Where to buy

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