The Year 1000: When Globalization Began

by Valerie Hansen

China enjoyed a large trade surplus, Superintendent Zhao revealed. While exporting the world’s highest quality textiles, ceramics, and metal goods, China imported a narrower range of products—foreign woods, resins, and spices, most from Southeast Asia, some from the Middle East. Superintendent Zhao’s book focused on the maritime trade, so he does not mention the continuing overland imports of horses, so desperately needed by the army, from the northwest.

Because no census data survives, historians don’t agree on the population of the Americas in 1492—estimates range from a low of 10 million to a high of 100 million. Our first more reliable information comes in 1568 from a Spanish census. Only some 2 million Amerindians in the agrarian heartlands of Mexico and Peru survived the massive outbreaks of disease brought by the Europeans.

Da Gama’s pilot Malemo Cana. Malinché. Squanto. These intermediaries are all major figures in recent historical accounts of European expansion, but we don’t always fully grasp their significance. Yes, they helped Europeans learn about and ultimately gain control of their home societies. But more was going on than that. They offered access to the system of pathways and trade networks constructed entirely by the indigenous peoples long before the arrival of the Europeans.

A key difference between England and China was that China had no labor shortage. With a surplus population, China needed machines that used less cotton, not less labor, to produce a bolt of cloth. And such machines do not exist.