Globalisation isn’t just the stuff of airplanes and container ships. It’s not colonisation and circumnavigation alone. It started much sooner. Dr Valerie Hansen, professor of Chinese history at Yale University, points to the year 1000 as one early watershed era when the world expanded and became smaller at once. Trade routes criss-crossed the Americas, Islamic scholars mapped the globe and major religions spread across Asia. In large cities, exotic merchants set up shop, black and white people lived together… and sometimes mobs descended on reviled foreigners.

01:38 A convergence of global events in 1000

06:26 250 million people and an agricultural boom

09:20 Trade and religion made the world smaller

14:02 Slavery introduced the masses to a wider world

15:48 Southeast Asia, world factory

17:13 How to become a Borderline member

18:07 The globe and the average Joe

20:17 Xenophobia back then

25:02 A series of constantly expanding rings

29:50 How that globalisation differed from today's

📚The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began. By Dr Valerie Hansen. Simon & Schuster, 2020. Buy in US. Buy in UK.