5/31/2023 0 Comments The year 1000 valerie hansen![]() ![]() But Asian horsemen in relays could cover 300 miles in a day, Viking ships attained speeds of 17 mph, and navigators’ knowledge of fast-moving oceanic currents – the “gyres” – might make long-haul journeys surprisingly speedy. Of course, most people then still lived within the narrow confines of their farmstead, village or town. But Hansen – a professor at Yale University, and previously the author of histories of China and the Silk Road – gathers a wealth of cutting-edge research into a modestly-sized work studded with mind-expanding gems. ![]() Not every reader will accept that banner message or the generously stretched definition of “globalisation” that it sometimes presumes. ![]() Hence her headline claim that, at this time, “globalisation began”. She maintains that, around the year 1000, new trans-oceanic contacts between peoples ensured that “for the first time an object or a message could have travelled across the entire world”. Her book, however, takes a familiar argument much further. ![]() “They lived in a globalised world, pure and simple,” Valerie Hansen insists. It hardly counts as news, perhaps, that the Chinese elites of a thousand years ago stood at the wealthy heart of an international trading and information system that spanned distant continents. ![]()
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