Globalisation is scarcely new: it dates back to the year 1000 (original) (raw)

issue 11 April 2020

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.

Where have Russia’s Zs gone?

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).

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