In her latest book, Valerie Hansen argues the case for taking a long view of the history of globalization, seeing its origins not in the political and economic restructuring around the turn of the twenty-first century, but rather in the first manifestation of human interconnections on a planetary scale that took shape a thousand years earlier. Hansen makes her case for viewing the year 1000 as the “start of globalization” over a series of chapters, each of which presents the story of different peoples from distant parts of the globe coming into contact for the first time: Vikings and Native Americans, Rus and Turks, Arab sailors and Chinese port officials, and many others. While some of the cases present rather tentative or halting steps toward closing the global loop—and others stretch rather widely from the titular chronology of the book (e.g., the extended discussion of the fourteenth-century West African king...
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