Far From Brooklyn

“The Year 1000,” by Valerie Hansen is a heavyhanded, not to say ham-fisted, overview of cultural interaction around the year 1000. The point Hansen has to make in this book is that globalized trade was already well in the works more than a thousand years ago. Point taken.

The first section, on the Norse expeditions to North America, was sufficiently interesting to keep me reading, even despite some clunky writing. I learned half a dozen new things about the Norse expeditions, most importantly that the famous settlement in Newfoundland is almost certainly not the place the Vikings called “Vinland” – that place would have to be further south, possibly as far south as modern New Jersey. Fascinating! Furthermore, I learned that there are depictions of blond, “white” people on an ancient mural in the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, a site that was essentially moribund by the time the rapacious Spaniards showed up in the early 1500s. Who were these blonds? The book makes a credible case that they might have been Greenlanders blown badly off course in their attempt to get to “Vinland” – there is even a boat in the mural with a prow in the style of Norse boats.

A later section of the book digs into the myriad trade routes that cut through and across virtually the entirety of Africa as of the year 1000. I suppose it would be fair to say that I learned a fair amount about the pre-European slave trade in Africa, which Hansen (concatenating a variety of other historians’ work) delves into in depth. Of course I was aware that Arabs had led slaving expeditions in Africa previous to (and simultaneous with) European slaving operations, but I had not been aware of the long period of time that it occurred, nor the frightful volume of humans taken for slaves to Arab countries.

A note: Often, the topic of pre-European slaving in Africa is presented as a kind of excuse for America’s history of bondage – “The Arabs did it before we did it!” That argument also tends to be accompanied by the classic truculent whataboutism: “And Africans were involved in the slave trade all along, too!” I know that both of those statements are true, i.e. yes Arabs were slavers, and yes, Africans themselves captured other Africans and sold them into slavery. Those arguments tend to be made in support of the proposition that European and American slaveholding was just a part of history, and that American slavery was somehow not all that bad, all things considered. Anyway, because those arguments are so objectionable, I have tended to disbelieve the extent of Arab slaving operations, and to some degree the involvement of Africans in the trade. “The Year 1000” has disabused me of the former notion. (The latter I had already been disabused of by reading “Baracoon,” the oral history of one the very last Africans to be kidnapped into American slavery–an oral history recorded by Zora Neale Hurston. It’s an amazing book.)

Anyway, even though I learned this important information in “The Year 1000,” I struggled to get through the African section about the slave trade (and the trade of gold and other goods.) I understand that a historian should or must be dispassionate about the facts as they are uncovered, but to present this searing segment of history in such a bloodless way–at this moment in time in American history, when we are reckoning with 400 years of racism–felt somehow wrong. I don’t know how a historian should present this kind of information, but I know that with each page I felt an aversion to any more recited facts about the volume of slavery, the treatment of slaves by Arabs, the existence of recognizable racial stereotyping of Africans by Arabs, etc etc. I just wanted a sentence or two expressing horror. I’m not sure it’s fair to ask that of a historian but that was what I wanted to read.

That matter-of-factness troubled the entire narrative (or that portion of it that I read) because in many ways it is a portrait of the human activities that led to many of the problems that modern humans are dealing with – the ills of globalization, racism, inequality, etc.

There’s a lot of good and interesting information in this book but I was discomfited by the tone.

Photo Credit: L’anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Films Oiseau de Nuit