The global millennium

Globalisation is a phenomenon that defines and challenges the modern world. Trade, technology, culture, conflict: today, all span continents and hemispheres. And the roots of this global connectedness stretch back much further than we might imagine.

A new system of global pathways formed in the year 1000, following the arrival of Vikings in what’s now north-eastern Canada. Trade goods, people and ideas moved along these newly discovered routes. Globalisation affected both those who went to new places (traders, explorers, slaves) and those who stayed at home (who experienced religious change, riots, and onerous labour conditions to produce goods for overseas markets).

There’s no single historiographical view of when globalisation began but, rather, two dominant paradigms: one locates the start of globalisation in the late 1970s, the other much earlier, around 1500. The seventies witnessed the full flowering of globalisation, notably in terms of the outsourcing of manufacturing and the ease of travel. And around the turn of the 16th century, Columbus and da Gama (and, a little later, Magellan) tied together the world in a way that hadn’t occurred before.

Yet it was events five centuries earlier that made the changes of 1500 possible – events that are too often neglected in Eurocentric narratives. If you focus your gaze only on the mid-Atlantic, then of course 1492 seems to mark the beginning of Europe’s contact with other parts of the world. But a global view reveals that such contacts started much earlier – in fact, around the year 1000.

The world of a millennium ago was, of course, very different from our own.