In Afro-Eurasia, the ongoing demand for slaves in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), Baghdad, Cairo and other cities resulted in the forced movement of millions of people from Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia hundreds of years before the transatlantic slave trade began. In the Americas, the Maya, based in the Yucatan Peninsula, traded cacao beans and brightly colored feathers – and the occasional live caged macaw– for the turquoise of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, some 2,000 miles, or 3600 kilometers, away. But the changes of 1000 influenced the entire globe. Consider the sea trade between Rome and India, for example, or the overland Silk routes linking Central Asia with China. True, people living in a few regions – Rome, India, China – knew well before 1000 that other societies existed.
Nonetheless, the changes around the year 1000 constituted globalization in the most fundamental sense because what happened in one place profoundly affected the residents of distant regions. Ordinary people could not travel virtually anywhere, walk into a store and buy goods from another country. To be sure, this was not globalization in our current sense of the word. No one has found such an item – yet! – but archaeology could still surprise us. Even in those early encounters, the lure of a new product – red cloth – cast a mesmerizing spell on consumers, just as excited purchasers today clamor for the latest Nike sneakers.įor the first time in history, an object or message could travel all the way around the world. As supplies began to run out, the Norse cut shorter and shorter pieces, some no “wider than a finger’s width.” Still the locals offered full pelts for the scraps.
When the locals exchanged furs for wool cloth the Vikings had dyed red, they tied the lengths of red wool around their heads. Regional networks joined together to tie a loop around the globe.Īs the Icelandic sagas inform us, trading began almost immediately with a premium placed on novel goods. As new pathways opened on continents, merchants, goods, technologies and religions moved around the globe for the first time. The Norse voyages linked existing pathways across North and South America with those across Afro-Eurasia. That is when, as incontrovertible archeological evidence shows, the Vikings left their home region of Scandinavia, crossed the North Atlantic and landed in northeastern Canada.
Globalization started much earlier than you might expect – in AD 1000.
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