Lu Dapeng
"1000 AD", translated by [American] Han Sen and Liu Yunjun, Reader Beijing Daily Publishing House, August 2021 edition, 440 pages, 79.9 yuan
"Globalization" is a well-known word, but there is much debate about what globalization means and when it began, not to mention the general public, even in academia.
A more traditional understanding is that the "Great Discovery" (or "Age of Discovery") marked by Columbus's arrival in the Americas in 1492 and Vasco da Gama's voyage to India in 1497-1499 began the process of globalization. But among historians, there is a question about "When did globalization begin?" "The debate is unlikely to reach a conclusion that satisfies all. For example, did the ancient Greco-Roman trade that connected Egypt with South India mean that there was some form of globalization as early as the first century AD?
In my understanding of globalization, I personally agree with David Abrafia in The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, which I copied here:
The use of the word "globalization" makes the most sense when we see the economic interdependence of some far-flung regions, for example, when potters in central China go to great lengths to meet the specific design requirements of Dutch or Danish customers for their goods. Even so, some trades were more "global" than others: the sheer size and scope of influence of the Roman pepper trade, the Chinese porcelain trade, the sugar trade, or the tea trade was a good example of how the trade relationship was all-encompassing, affecting not only the elite but also the lesser-status people, including artisans and slaves. Thus, we may be able to describe "globalization" as a process of economic integration across vast spaces.
Many of the fascinating debates about globalization are confined to academia, and we lack a popular book that offers a new perspective on globalization. This new book, 1000 A.D.: The Beginning of Globalization, by Valerie Hansen, a professor of history at Yale University, does a good job of this mission. By looking at the world in 1000 AD, the book connects many seemingly unrelated regions and cultures, which is refreshing and encourages us to think outside the box and look at the past with a "global history" perspective that transcends national and cultural boundaries. While reading this book, I gained a lot of unexpected new knowledge and some surprises.
And because this is a popular history book for the general public, I think it's a good idea to say a few words about the concept of "Globol History", which helps people understand what kind of book it is. Readers from the history department are certainly familiar with the following.
Global history is a historiographical concept that emerged in the West around the 1960s, emphasizing a global perspective and the study of cross-cultural interaction. Global history has mainly opposed two ideas. The first is the perspective of the past with the boundaries of the nation-state as the dividing line, such as the study of French history, German history, British history, Italian history, Spanish history, etc., which are lined with mountains and do not belong to each other, separating these research fields. Toynbee opposed the past way of dividing history by the state, and he proposed in "Historical Studies" that civilization is the unit of history, dividing world history into twenty-six civilizations, of which of course there is Chinese civilization. Since global history is to break the shackles of the nation-state framework, it places special emphasis on the networks or civilizational systems formed by the interaction and connection of different civilizations. Global history strives to cross some of the dividing lines of traditional historical research, such as language, culture, ethnicity, etc., so it is particularly fond of talking about trade connections, the spread of artifacts and technologies, environmental changes, population migration, and other macro topics, rather than the traditional political, diplomatic, and military history of imperial generals.
The second is "Eurocentrism". Global history emphasizes looking at history from the perspective of East Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and other regions. For example, Peng Mulan's "The Great Divergence" and John Darwin's "After Tamerlane" negate the traditional theory of European superiority and emphasize the important positioning of China in world history before modern times.
"1000 A.D." is a global history work, it is not a traditional national history or political history, so many writing methods will be different from the general reader's imagination, and have their own very distinctive characteristics.
Han Sen had an identity as a sinologist who wrote the "New History of the Silk Road" and the "God of Change" about the folk religion of the Southern Song Dynasty, so "1000 AD" has a relatively large space to discuss the international trade in China during the Tang and Song dynasties, especially Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo and other places. She called the China of this era "the most global place in the world." This topic may still be fresh to many Western readers, but it may be a cliché for Chinese. Still, there are some elements of Han Sen's connection between China and the world that surprise me. For example, Zhao Rushi, a member of the Song Dynasty clan and an official of the Quanzhou Municipal Shipping Department, actually had knowledge of Sicily, Somalia, and Tanzania, and even described the slave trade that the Arabs captured and sold by the inhabitants of Madagascar: "There are islands in the west, many wild people, like black paint, hair, lured and captured." Reselling and enslaving the Great Eaters was very expensive. "East Africa, Arabia and China are so unexpectedly linked.
Another transoceanic connection that surprised and amused me was the murals of Chichen Itza, a mayan city of Mexico, with blond, light-skinned captives on them. One interpretation is that the captives were dressed in yellow wigs, the color of which matched the color of the sun god that the Maya were to sacrifice. A bolder interpretation is that this may be the Nordics who sailed to the Americas, because the era of the mural coincides with the era of the Nordics crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Canada and the region where the U.S. state of Maine is located today. Another piece of evidence to support this hypothesis is that another mural by Chichen Itza features images of ships whose structure resembles That of Viking ships and that differs from the Mayan canoes.
We have long known that Columbus was definitely not the first European to set foot on American soil, as early as 1000 AD the Vikings landed on the island of Newfoundland and later established settlements in North America. But the nordic claim that the Nordics made their way to Mexico and became human sacrifice victims of the Mayans, while lacking conclusive evidence, is not impossible. If it's true, it's so much fun. This is yet another wonderful example of the rupture of the "dimensional wall" of history.
This book provides an overview of the history of human activities across continents and oceans around 1000 AD, establishing and maintaining trade networks, and provides much of this refreshing historical evidence. Reading this book feels a bit like browsing Wikipedia, hyperlinking from one knowledge point to another, a technique that shows the author's admirable knowledge structure while also slightly jumping and messy.
However, I don't think the argument that globalization began in 1000 is convincing. The year 1000 was the year when the Vikings arrived in Newfoundland and opened up routes from Europe to the Americas, which Hansen believed "closed the global loop." An item or a message that for the first time can travel through the entire world... That year formed a global route network. And so we began the history of globalization."
But we know that the Vikings did not establish permanent settlements on the North American continent, but quickly retreated, leaving only a few remnants, and also retreated after maintaining it in Greenland for a while. They didn't realize that they had "discovered" a new continent. Although the Vikings connected Europe and the Americas, this connection was fragile and short-lived, far from being comparable to the "achievements" of the Spaniards after 1492 to completely conquer and build a vast Spanish-speaking cultural world. Therefore, it is debatable whether the significance of the Vikings' arrival in the Americas is as great as Hansen said.
But I believe that HanSen's original intention was not to "raise the bar" and say that 1,000 years is such a great watershed, it is the beginning of globalization. To make such a categorical assertion in such a light-hearted popular history book is in itself unconvincing. But Han Sen did write a book that could be appreciated by the general public readers as a combination of knowledge and fun, and encouraged everyone to break some outdated ideas and look at the whole world as a whole.
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Yan Zhang