In her latest book, Valerie Hansen argues the case for taking a long view of the history of globalization, seeing its origins not in the political and economic restructuring around the turn of the twenty-first century, but rather in the first manifestation of human interconnections on a planetary scale that took shape a thousand years earlier. Hansen makes her case for viewing the year 1000 as the “start of globalization” over a series of chapters, each of which presents the story of different peoples from distant parts of the globe coming into contact for the first time: Vikings and Native Americans, Rus and Turks, Arab sailors and Chinese port officials, and many others. While some of the cases present rather tentative or halting steps toward closing the global loop—and others stretch rather widely from the titular chronology of the book (e.g., the extended discussion of the fourteenth-century West African king Mansa Musa at the heart of chapter 5)—overall, the remarkably wide-ranging material covered comes together to produce a picture of global connectivity beginning to coalesce centuries before the “Old” and “New” worlds were brought together by the Iberian expansions and the carving up of the world envisioned in the imperial claims of European powers.

This is a work of truly world historical scope, crafted by a historian of Asia to tell the story of a millennial shift toward a “globalized world.” True to Hansen's field of specialization, the narrative is nonetheless framed in relation to Song China, as the book both starts and ends at Quanzhou. Hansen opens with a description of the creature comforts that came with living in that city at the height of its global prominence in maritime trade, rhetorically presented in ways that appear to intentionally sound quite contemporary for her readers. Indeed, there is much that rings familiar and quite timely in her relating of distant historical events as we are prompted to consider the multiple and often unpredictable effects of being complexly interconnected by global pathways that afford “fertilization and infection, intellectual enrichment and cultural fragmentation, the spread of new technologies and the extinction of traditional crafts” (p. 4).

At the same time, however, Hansen acknowledges significant differences between the forms of globalization we experience each day and the historical material treated in this book. In her discussions of early examples of long-distance interconnections, Hansen presents a vision of globalization that is preindustrial and structured in relation to a diverse configuration of polities that predate the nation-state. As such, her insightful discussions shed new light, and provide for more nuanced understandings of issues such as extraterritoriality and the power dynamics of early globalizations.

At several points in the book, Hansen directly addresses the darker side of the social effects that can accompany the economic prosperity and cultural cachet that can come with globalization—providing also accounts of historical forms of resentment and the violence of mobs who feel threatened by the charges to local economies and societies that can accompany globalization. This is treated, for example, in her discussions of the “Massacre of the Latins” in Byzantine Constantinople and other instances of urban unrest in Cairo and Guangzhou around that time as “the world's first anti-globalization riots and attacks on the newly wealthy” (p. 4).

Another important element of the long history of globalization that Hansen returns to in several chapters is the role of religion in both supporting interconnections and creating barriers in various contexts. With reference to several examples of “world religions” expanding into new areas, Hansen argues that there was a considerable religious “consolidation” around the year 1000—facilitated in many cases by royal conversions. The new confessional cartography that emerged from this provided for vectors for conflict, as well as for cultural and commercial circulation. The primary example of this comes from material that Hansen commands very well: Buddhism and Islam along the Silk Road.

Hansen's broad interventions into discussions of religious, economic, state-formation, and cultural dimensions of the early history of globalization are illuminating and productive, having great potential to pull readers from diverse backgrounds into critical reconsideration of the complex processes which have contributed to the making of the world that we all live in today. Such a broad-ranging discussion, however, perhaps inevitably leads to the inclusion of statements on particular points of detail that may strike specialists of various subfields as confusing, if not incorrect. For example, as a historian of Southeast Asia, it is not clear to me why the journeys of Austronesian and South Indian mariners that she describes in chapter 7 should be seen as “surprising.” Beyond such broad assertions, there are also several points of detail that specialists in the histories of particular regions or religious traditions might contest.

Such quibbles aside, Hansen's book offers a powerful—and with its very accessible style—potentially popular corrective to teleological historiographies of globalization that treat much of the world as an object of European “discovery” and that frame transregional interconnections in relation to the consolidation of postcolonial economic interests and cultural prestige. Recognizing the current dramatic reconfigurations of economic and military power in our world today, this treatment of globalization by an accomplished historian of Asia who is able to take a truly worldwide and longue durée view is a much-needed intervention into contemporary conversations.