The Year 1000: When Globalization Began

by Valerie Hansen

One of the largest settlements was located at the Cahokia site in the town of East St. Louis, Illinois. The settlement at Cahokia expanded so dramatically in 1050 that the lead archeologist writing about the site, Timothy R. Pauketat, refers to the changes of that year as the Big Bang. After the Big Bang, some 20,000 lived in the city or nearby suburbs, making Cahokia the largest urban complex in the continental U.S. before 1492 and half the size of contemporary Chichén Itzá.

Like Vladimir, the Danish king Harald Bluetooth (910–985) was raised as a non-Christian. In the 960s he united Denmark and gained temporary control of Norway. Recognizing the power of Christian monotheism as a unifying force for his new kingdom, he made the decision to convert. (Intel and Ericsson engineers chose to call their new technology “Bluetooth” because it brought computers and mobile phones together just as Harald had unified Denmark and Norway.)

Piailug began his lessons by drawing a circle on the ground to represent the night horizon and using stones to indicate where fifteen different stars rose and set. Having memorized the sequences of stars on voyages he had taken to the Caroline Islands, the Philippines, and Guam, Piailug was also able to recite the order of stars for journeys that he himself had never taken to North and South America, Tahiti, Samoa, and Japan. Piailug knew the courses of more than 150 stars and how their location on the circle changed each season. Piailug received international acclaim in 1976 when he successfully sailed the 2,600-mile (4,200 km) journey from Hawaii to Tahiti on a reconstructed double canoe built to celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial. It was the first time he had done the journey, and he used no navigational instruments.

Borobudur is the largest Buddhist monument anywhere in the world. Dating to around 800 and constructed entirely of stone, the nine-level monument rises over 100 feet (31.5 m) tall.

The ceramics industry absorbed the largest share of the labor force. Entrepreneurs built dragon kilns that stretched over 300 feet (100 m) up the sides of hills. Producing between 10,000 and 30,000 vessels in a single firing, such kilns employed hundreds, if not thousands, of laborers. Attaining the highest temperatures anywhere in the world, these kilns produced shiny, easy-to-clean ceramics treasured in Africa, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. We don’t think of these kilns as industrial simply because they didn’t use steam or electric power (they burned wood or charcoal), but these enterprises were just as large and complex as the first factories of the Industrial Revolution. Fully 7.5 percent of Fujian’s population of five million—some 375,000 people—were involved in making export ceramics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.