The celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen discusses her book 'The Year 1000 (When Explorers Connected the World-and Globalization Began with Dr. Yuan Chen, Postdoctoral Associate at Duke's Franklin Humanities Institute and Global Asia Initiative

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began (Scribner, publication date April 14, 2020) explains how a new system of global pathways formed in the year 1000 following the Vikings’ arrival in northeastern Canada. In 1000, for the first time in world history an object or a message could travel all the way around the world. Trade goods, people, and ideas moved along these newly discovered routes. Globalization affected both those who went to new places (traders, explorers, slaves) as well as those who stayed home (religious change, riots, onerous labor conditions to produce goods for overseas markets). Europeans didn’t invent globalization. They changed and augmented what had been there since 1000. If globalization hadn’t yet begun in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, Europeans wouldn’t have been able to penetrate the markets in so many places as quickly as they did after 1492.

Valerie Hansen teaches Chinese and world history at Yale, where she is professor of history. In the course of writing The Year 1000, she traveled to some twenty different countries and was a visiting scholar at Xiamen University in China, University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and the Collège de France in Paris.

Her other books include The Silk Road: A New History, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1279, and Voyages in World History (co-authored with Kenneth R. Curtis).