wealthhaser.blogg.se - The killing danish shush.se

The same would have been true for the ancestors of the modern inhabitants of Malaysia – the Malayo-Polynesians – who crossed the Pacific, and for Chinese navigators sailing the Indian Ocean (though they began to use magnetic compasses around this time). The Vikings crossed the Atlantic in sailboats with oars, and there’s no evidence that they had the benefit of any navigational instruments: they would have used stars and tides to plot their course, and realised that the presence of birds indicates proximity to land. Yet there were no technological breakthroughs sparking this age of exploration. In the agricultural centres of western Europe, in southern China and in the Islamic world, particularly the area around modern Iraq, innovation increased agricultural productivity the same was probably true in the Maya heartland in what’s now Mexico.

Developments in agriculture played a part, fuelling population growth and freeing a portion of the populace from having to work the land. When the global population reached 250 million, around the 10th century, the world reached a tipping point that prompted people to leave their home regions and go to new places. The archaeological site discovered by the Ingstads at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, proves that the Norse crossing of the north Atlantic occurred around the year 1000 – part of a pivotal wave of globalisation.Īround the year 1000, then, people were on the move. The second type of source takes the form of archaeological materials.

Global Vikings: how the impact of the raiders and traders went far beyond Britain.

I believe that they contain useful historical information about the north Atlantic voyages, not least because, in 1960, the Icelandic Sagas enabled the Norwegian researchers Anna Stine and Helge Ingstad to locate the places to which the Vikings had sailed. Many historians are sceptical about the accuracy of those accounts, and some hold them to be entirely fictitious, with no basis in actual historic events. The first takes the form of oral narratives written down in Icelandic in the 13th and 14th centuries – accounts passed down through families from one generation to the next, about ancestors’ accomplishments. Two types of sources provide information about these voyages. In the late 10th century, Vikings crossed the north Atlantic from Scandinavia, sailing to Iceland, on to Greenland and then to North America – to the island that is now Newfoundland, and possibly to what today is Quebec province in Canada and the state of Maine in the US. People then were like us today, and reacted in the same ways: some were frightened by unfamiliar things, while some were curious about new opportunities.Ī reconstructed Norse building at L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site, Newfoundland, where Viking expeditions made a small encampment around AD 1000. The peoples of different regions were much more balanced in their technology and wealth, so in that sense it was much more like our world today than the world of five centuries later.

Before the boom in European economic and political power beginning with the era of the Crusades, around 1100, the continent lagged far behind the Islamic world and China in terms of knowledge, influence and commerce. Also, whereas after 1500 power was concentrated in Europe, which was beginning to explore and exploit other regions, in 1000 there were multiple power centres around the planet. Then, merchants, who made and sold things, were among the wealthiest groups in society, and no stock market yet existed. This world was not capitalist in any sense that we understand today. Mass manufacturing was far more prevalent than we might imagine possible