Dan Snow's History Hit - Globalisation in 1000 AD

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

Globalisation. It's a word we often associate with the politics, society and economics of our own lifetimes. But Valerie Hansen, an esteemed professor of History at Yale, has argued that globalisation is embedded deep in the past. Whilst traditionally, historians have cited Columbus' 1492 voyage to America as a kick off point, Valerie pulls us way back to the year 1000. In this podcast, she reveals how international trade routes already linked the globe, with evidence such as the frozen textiles found in Greenland made of hairs from North American animals. This was a fascinating discussion, proving once again, how history can tell us so much about the contemporary world.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. On the podcast today we've got Valerie Hanson. She's an American professor. She teaches Chinese and world history at Yale University. She is a brilliant communicator. She's telling me all about the year 1000, the subject of her latest book, when she argues that the seeds of globalisation were being sown, in fact more than being sown, when they were pushing up through the damp soil as lovely little plants i think i can drop this metaphor here it was a great opportunity to talk to valerie about what was going on in europe and asia africa it was a lovely bit of global history so hope you enjoy it we've made lots of global history on history hit tv it's like a digital history channel it's like netflix

for history in fact lots of people signing up using the code POD1, which means you get a month for free. Then you get the following month just one pound, euro or dollar. So please go and check it out. If you want to listen to all these back episodes of the podcast, our ads, if you want to support what we're doing, if you want to join in, if you want to get sent lots of extra content, and if you want to watch hundreds of history documentaries, please go to History Hit TV and check that out. Use the code POD1. one before you listen to this fabulous podcast i just want to let you know about the history initiative at the moment to help struggling heritage sites museums galleries archives stay afloat at this terrible time those institutions often depend on events they depend on school groups they depend on visitors for their revenue and there's none of that going on at the moment

many of them are in pretty desperate times we are trying to raise as much money as possible to give to heritage sites all over the world, wherever people listen to this podcast. We've got a little challenge, of course, we have to have a challenge these days. If you want to go onto your social media and read your favourite historical source, I read out a bit of a 14th century monk's chronicle, but you could do letters, diaries, poems, anything anything you want and then post it and then hashtag it save our heritage and then donate the address where to donate which is history.com slash heritage and then nominate five people you've all done them before for lots of other causes let's do one for the heritage sector as well really appreciate you getting involved in

this i know it's times are tough but anything you can spare will be enormously, enormously useful to this struggling sector right now. So if you want to donate, please go to history.com slash heritage. Thank you. Enjoy Valerie Hanson. Valerie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Oh, my pleasure. Well, the pleasure has been all mine reading your wonderful book. It's the year 1000. Why do you identify the year 1000 AD or in the Christian era? Why do you identify that as a decisive year? Before I started writing this book, I was just struck in different places and talking to

different historians working on different areas of the world, by how often they identify the year 1000 as a turning point. I think the clearest episode is the Vikings touching down in what is now Canada, the site of Lansau Meadows on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland. Because as close as we can tell, they touched down there in the year 1000. That's, I think, the event that starts off this trend of globalization around the world. And you make the point that in Guangzhou, on the east coast of China, it was a huge departure from what had gone before. And it would have felt like quite a globalized place, a place where you could get goods and objects from all over the planet.

The data will allow us to say there was trade all the way to the East African coast. I don't think there's anything in those Chinese ports. I'm sure there's nothing from America, dare I say that. I'm 99% sure there was nothing from America. So the trade between the Americas and Europe, we have some indications of trade of just a few items that the Norse are getting lumber and timber in what's now Canada, starting in the year 1000. And there's some excavated furs that have been found in Greenland that could only come from the Americas, like bison. But I think there's globalization in the sense that people are affected by developments that are happening far from their homes. It's possible that something

could have traveled from the Americas across the Atlantic to Europe and then from Europe all the way to China, because we know that those different legs of the journey, certain objects did travel that far. But we don't know of any object yet that made that whole trip. You're absolutely right. Not from, of course, all over the globe. Getting carried away with myself. But why were they able to access trade goods and raw materials, objects, finished goods from almost right across Eurasia and down into Africa as well. What was it about the year 1000 or that period that suddenly sees this explosion of commerce, of trade, of exploration? The world's population reaches around 250 million.

And I think that's a tipping point. And that with that number of people in the globe living in different urban centers, that they start to explore and go outside their home territories. And so we know for the Chinese who are living in Guangzhou that they're living on the end of a massive naval route, a maritime route that extends all the way from Guangzhou through Southeast Asia, around South Asia, through the Persian Gulf up to what is now Iraq, the port of Basra. There was another route going all the way down the East African coast. And the total length of this route was around 8,000 miles. So it's a huge distance of places that are connected via maritime trade. And by the same token, there's also overland routes stretching across Eurasia that allow, for example, Amber is traveling from the Baltic all the way to North China.

Those routes are getting connected around the year 1000. And coincidentally, which is interesting too, is that we see the same thing is happening in the Americas, that roots connecting the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, where the Maya have their biggest city in Chichen Itza. There's a route that goes up to New Mexico, where the Maya are sending chocolate and macaw birds, some live birds, some colored feathers in exchange for turquoise. And we also know that the Maya are trading to the south with Panama and Colombia and getting gold there. So it's just very interesting around the world that we can see these roots taking shape at this time. And you also make a really interesting point, which is that unlike the next phase of

globalization, perhaps we might call it, with the age of exploration, with the explosion of European maritime strength in the 15th and 16th centuries, these contacts would have been on a relatively level playing field in terms of the technology they can deploy. Yes, absolutely. The weapons that people are using are swords and then the bow and arrow. So having metal is an advantage. When the Norse get to North America, they have metal weapons, and the indigenous peoples that they meet don't have metal weapons. And the Norse are very careful, we are told this in the Icelandic sagas, that not to trade these with the indigenous peoples. Having metal weapons gives you an advantage, but not a huge advantage.

And I think that's one of the reasons that the Norse decide to pull out of Canada. They are about 10 years, I mean, as we can see from the archaeological record. And one of the most interesting technological encounters, I think, from the year 1000 is that between the Norse and then the ancestors of the modern Inuit peoples were a group called the Thule, T-H-U-L-E, I think Americans would pronounce it Thule, but anyway, the Thule, who were very skilled at hunting seals in very cold climates under the ice. And their ability to hunt seals year-round allowed them to cross all the way from Alaska across northern North America, so the Arctic provinces of Canada,

what's now Canada today, and get to New Finland and Labrador, and then from there to go to Greenland. And for about 400 years, the Thule and the Norse are living on Greenland. And then the Norse ultimately pull out because they don't adopt the technologies of the successful technologies of the Thule for hunting the seals. And we have records that show fewer and fewer Norse living on the southern edge of Greenland. And then ultimately, the last ones leave around 1410. So that's a very good example of the kinds of technologically more evenly balanced encounters from the year 1000. And, you know, your point there about slaves as well, we now think of the trade and enslaved African people in quite racialized terms, but that wouldn't have been

the case in the year 1000. Right. I mean, I think one of the things that really surprised me was finding out the extent of the slave trade and that the Islamic world is drawing its slaves from Africa, but also from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, and then also from Central Asia, from places that nowadays would be Uzbekistan. And there's a wonderful, horrifying, chilling account by a Christian doctor in Baghdad. It's a guide for slave buyers describing slaves coming from about 20 different places and what their characteristics are and what buyers should be alert for. And much of the information is wrong. I mean, there are some, if I remember this correctly, some of the slaves from the northern climes that women don't menstruate.

But he also is just describing the huge reach of the slave market at that time. And it shows that one of the most common commodities that pretty much any place could export was slaves. And people often exported their own peoples. Yes, they exported POWs that they captured, but sometimes they exported their own peoples just for the desire for profit, driving the slave trade. So you're seeing people traveling further, you're seeing trade goods coming from ever further. Was there an intellectual element to this? Were there great geographers? Were there great thinkers that were starting to get a handle on just how big this world might be?

that we're starting to get a handle on just how big this world might be. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's

Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Yes, the people who know the most about the most places are without question the Islamic geographers and the person who I think has, when I teach, I told the students that he was probably the smartest person alive in the world in the year 1000. Al-Biruni is a geographer, and he's based in Afghanistan in the court of a ruler named

Mahmoud of Ghazna. But everyone always calls him a polymath because he knows a lot about geography, and he's interested in lots of different places. but he also knows math and he knows geometry and trigonometry. And he's got enough of a sense of the globe. He knows the globe is round. That information is transmitted from the ancients, from Ptolemy. But he knows that the globe is a round sphere, and he knows how much of the world that is known to the Islamic geographers. So that's basically Afro-Eurasia. He knows that that's only about half of the globe. And so he realizes that there's another half of

the globe that people don't know about. And he realizes that it's big enough that it's possible it has continents on it. So that's really remarkable, that geographic understanding. I like the way in your book you talk about these societies that are kind of nestled up next door to a technologically, maybe I hesitate to use the word, but culturally more advanced civilization. And the way that they absorb those religious and governmental and commercial ideas. commercial ideas. And it feels like you're telling the story of a world in which those ideas are kind of permeating outwards far more efficiently and further than ever before. Absolutely. And one of the big changes that we can see in the year 1000 is the conversion of multiple rulers to what we would now call world religions. But at the time, they were faiths that were gaining traction.

They hadn't yet become world religions, but because of the conversions in 1000, they start to gain traction in major ways. I think the best example of a ruler like that is a Rus prince. His capital is in Kiev in modern Ukraine. He succeeds in eliminating his rivals and gaining power and then looks around and sends delegations to his neighbors to see which religion would be the best religion for his kingdom. And he decides on Eastern Orthodoxy after his envoys come back from Constantinople, so modern Istanbul, and describe Hagia Sophia to him. They just see it as a huge technological feat. They said there's just no question that this is the religion that we should adopt.

But he rejects Islam. He rejects Judaism. He rejects Roman Christianity of the Germans. And so there is a lot of information flowing around. And some of the people who are carrying this information are envoys who are traveling from one ruler to another ruler, often to give gifts, but they also bring home information. And so there is a real information flow. It's funny you mentioned these rulers. I mean, it's part of the reason you're able to globalize

a thousand years ago, because it was just a freakish period where there were quite big, stable units. It wasn't like China at the collapse of the Ming Empire in the 17th century, for example. I mean, it feels like from your book, there are fairly big, fairly stable, wealthy units. If you get the right documentation, you could probably pass across them quite easily. Yes, I think that's true. China's not actually that unified because there's a dynasty in the north, the Liao, who controlled modern Beijing and then a huge swath across the grasslands. No, you're absolutely right that it's easier to move through these big places than through smaller countries. There's no border controls per se, right? No one is policing borders. And one of

the things about the Islamic world is that it no longer is unified. The Abbasid caliph is in power, but he's officially still there. But he's under house arrest. He has no real authority. And one of the things that's interesting is that people are still moving throughout the Islamic world, and the Islamic world is even getting bigger. It's extending down into West Africa and moving into Central Asia. But there's great freedom of movement. And people are traveling huge distances to study with teachers. One of the things that really surprised me when I was doing the research was to find out that some of the Islamic teachers they were studying with were female.

You know, I just didn't expect that. Speaking of unexpected things, I was also surprised to learn about the richest man in the world. Tell me about him. He sounded like quite the character. Well, he does sound like quite the character. I do have to be honest and say he's not alive in the year 1000, right? He's alive in the 1300s. And his name is Mansa Musa. Musa is the same name as Moses, translated. He's the king of Mali, the ruler of Mali. So we're in West Africa. And then Mansa is the local word for king. So King Moses. And he goes on the Hajj. He passes through Cairo and he's got, oh, I forget how many

cartloads of gold with him. But he has so much money that the price of gold goes down when he gets to Cairo because he's brought so much gold with him. He has a huge fortune because he has miners on the edge of his kingdom who are mining gold. And then that gives him this revenue source that makes him so wealthy. According to your book, it's 100 camel loads and about 15 metric tons of gold. That's his pocket change that he travels with. You're right. 100 camel loads, exactly, worth $800 million today. So yeah, he's doing pretty well. He also sounds like an interesting man. Yeah, he sounds like a very interesting man. Again, what strikes me is we write history in the present and we look at the past, of course, through the eyes of someone living in the present and we look at the past of course through the eyes of someone living in the present but it's such an interesting story about a more equal form of globalisation

than the globalisation that I was brought up learning about when I was a student which was this European imposed these giant global European empires in which the stories and the agency of the non-Europeans was just obliterated this is a a story about the King of Mali, about Song China, and it feels in that way a lot more contemporary. That is my view. That is exactly what I think. What is it that two generations ago scholars didn't see that? Is it strange that the world had to become more that way for us to be able to tell that story again?

I mean, I think that's one of the positive things about the historical profession that we grow and evolve. And, you know, you said two generations ago, I started studying Chinese as a first year student in university. That was 1976. And so that was just when I think the whole field of history in the United States was expanding and starting to take East Asia into account. I mean, there were, of course, Chinese historians. There were Chinese historians who were teaching us on the faculty. But we know so much more now about Asia than we did then. And I would say the same thing about Africa and the Americas, that the written record, it's limited in both Africa

and the Americas. In the Americas, you have the Mayan records, but they stop around 900. And then in Africa, you start to actually have records in Arabic around a thousand. It's one of the things I talk about. It's one of the first inscriptions we have in Arabic. And many African historians would caution us about the bias in the Arabic sources, but some of those sources were written by local people like those inscriptions that I mentioned in my Africa chapter. And in the absence of other sources, those sources can tell us something. And then in both places, in the Americas and Africa, we've had an explosion in archaeology, and this is true of Southeast Asia too,

of new archaeological techniques that allow us to know much more than we did in the past. And I mentioned the chocolate trade between New Mexico and the Maya are exporting chocolate to New Mexico. We know about that because of chemical analysis of residues in the bottom of clay pots. So, you know, that's something that 50 years ago, nobody could have done that kind of analysis. I can't let you go without asking, every time you talk about globalization nowadays, you have to talk about the people that have been left behind, you have to talk about Brexit and Trump. When this gigantic era of globalization happens in 1080, were some groups, ideas, wiped out, tossed onto the recycle pile of history? And also, was there a backlash?

Do we see the rise of people in Guangzhou going, actually, you know what, I hate East African furniture. Let's make Song China great again. That's funny. There's definitely a backlash. We've got anti-globalization riots in the form of protests against foreign merchants. The first of those is in Guangzhou in the late 800s. We have a riot in Cairo in 996 directed against Italian merchants. We have the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople in the 1180s. So there's definitely a backlash. The people turning away from foreign goods, that I don't know about. That seems to me less likely. I think that the people who could afford these super high-grade Chinese ceramics, high-fired and shiny and beautiful white, sometimes translucent, sometimes blue-green ceramics that were so easily

cleaned, in a way, I think those were the iPhones of their day. No, I don't know of anybody choosing to not use those who could afford those. That just may be the archaeological record. It allows us to see how far those pots went. They end up halfway down the East African coast. So it's very clear that people wanted these new objects. And it's also clear that some people were left behind and they were very angry about being left behind. And understandably so. Well, that sounds very familiar indeed. Reminds me of the Trump family making all their luxury goods in China whilst slagging off foreign industrial competition. But anyway, let's not talk about that. Thank you very much indeed. Valerie Hansen, your brilliant book is called The Year 1000, When Explorers Connected the Globe and Globalization Began globalization began it's out now good luck with it

thank you very much dan i appreciate it hi everyone it's me dan snow just a quick request it's so annoying and i hate it when other podcasts do this but now i'm doing it i hate myself please please go go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps, basically boosts up the chart, which is good. And then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favor. Thanks.