In Japan, people thought the world would end in 1052. In the decades leading up to judgment day, Kyoto was rocked by a series of epidemics. It seemed the end was truly nigh. Of course they were wrong, but they were hardly the only people to predict the end of humanity on a specific date. For many tenth-century Christians, the year of the expected doom was 1000 AD.
Valerie Hansen’s book focuses on this non-apocalyptic but significant year as the beginning of what we would think of as globalisation. Obviously with our European perspective we’re familiar with such major events of the 11th century as the Norman Conquest and the First Crusade. But this book draws us to what was going on in the Americas and Asia as well.
Hansen brings us back to her theme from different angles: looking at the voyages of the Vikings, trade routes across south east Asia, the journeys of the Polynesians in the Pacific (and the end-of-times fears of the Japanese). This means that, unlike John Wills’s 1688, she doesn’t focus exclusively on the events of a single year. Rather, 1000 is a fulcrum around which her text moves, as she reaches into the centuries before and after, depicting how the world was changing at that time.
Her claim is that our interconnected world dates back much further than we think. She suggests that it was in 1000 that Norse explorers ‘closed the global loop’ with their voyages to North America. This is perhaps a bit of a stretch: there was no continuing chain of communication along this route. Nonetheless, knowledge of how far the Norse went (and the archaeological proof that has emerged since the 1960s) reminds us of how much world exploration took place before Columbus and Henry the Navigator.
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