Globalization? That's *so* 1,500 years ago
ANNETTE ON THE ROAD The "Dark" Ages look strange, and familiar
Non-Boring History is written by Dr. Annette Laing, a historian with a PhD in actual history, with the aid of a team of imaginary Gnomes, but not AI-generated text or images (I will make it very clear if I ever do use AI images, and why I'm doing so, probably in mockery. NO AI text, ever). The photos are mine. The words (except as noted) are mine. If we use AI to learn, then we’ll end up like my British friend in 1980 who tried to pass his English Literature “O” level exam by studying Cliff’s Notes instead of the set books: This did not end well.
This is a crucial thing that true believers in AI get wrong: The process counts in education. We forget most of what we have learned, but how to learn is the lesson that matters most in the long run. Here as a free reader? Join us.
Note from Annette
First off, for Nonnies (paying subscribers) this is a very, very long post with lots of photos, too long for an email, so it will cut off. Be sure to click the headline above (Globalization) and read it on the Non-Boring History site. Do that anyway, because even though the post is shorter to free readers, it’s always the way to go.
Many thanks to all Nonnies who came to our Sip n’ Chat on Saturday. My deepest apologies to my British Nonnies, to whom I accidentally told the wrong time (we had our own lovely chat, so there’s that). I thoroughly enjoyed myself! Always a joy to meet the varied and interesting people who read and support Non-Boring History. Never been? Every event is different, depending on what we do, and who turns out. What unites everyone is a keen curiosity about history, and wanting to learn without tears. Oh, and get-togethers are also an opportunity to show that I do exist, that I’m not generated by AI, and neither is Non-Boring History.
Oh, and before I forget? Despite my promise, I haven’t yet sent out the latest batch of postcards, etc to Nonnies who participate in the GiftMail program and won the latest draw. My apologies. On it asap.
Today’s post takes us on a rare detour to a subject that’s completely out of my comfort zone as a historian of American (and especially early American) and modern British history.
When Hoosen and were last in London, we took in a temporary exhibit at the British Museum. Silk Roads focused on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, during a period long known to English history as the “Dark Ages”, the bit after the Romans left, and before we got Peak Middle Ages. How much did I know about this time and these places? Postcard, please. I can fit everything I know on the back, and still have room for the stamp.
Why did this exhibit appeal to me? Thank you for asking!
I didn’t ask, Laing.
Tough noogies! Telling you anyway! It matters a lot, promise.
The Very Model of a Modern Historian
Back in the late 80s, this Brit entered a PhD program at the University of California, Riverside (just like UC Berkeley, really, only with easy freeway access 😁). I planned to specialize in British history (I know this makes no sense for a Brit to study British history in California, but hey, I’m weird), or maybe 20th century US But I was quickly sold on early American history (then known as colonial America).
Soon I learned of an exciting development in the field: Early American historians had decided to stop pretending that the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Early American history cannot be understood in a bubble. As a Brit who lived in the US, this made sense to me! People didn’t get off wooden ships after a miserable transatlantic voyage and go, “Hand me a hot dog and a baseball cap! I’m American now!”
I dived right in. Over the next twenty years, I found myself studying people who traveled thousands of miles across the Atlantic (not always in one direction). Among them? Enslaved Africans, Church of England missionaries, ordinary English people seeking wealth in land (or even just homeless and starving English people who were offered a free meal on a ship, only to find themselves in the middle of the Atlantic yeah that happened). I also met the people who made unbelievable amounts of money from Atlantic crossings, even if they never left London or Virginia.
All of those who crossed the Atlantic carried baggage, even when they arrived with no goods to declare. That’s because they brought with them ways of thinking as well as doing, like religion, foods, music, and art.
I also got fascinated by 18th century long-distance shopping, which appealed to a twentysomething from a modest background in Scotland and England who was temporarily drawn into California’s 80s booming mall culture. In the 18th century, rich British Americans shopped. Boy, did they shop. And they anticipated online shopping when they ordered luxury goods to be shipped from London, including expensive clothes, china plates, books, and carriages, sourced not only from London, but from around the world, as far as China.
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Until I saw Silk Roads at the British Museum, I had never seriously considered that long-distance trade and exchange of all kinds, from luxuries to the trafficking of people, from new religions to huge scientific ideas, might have been going on for many, many centuries before Atlantic crossings began.
I mean, I knew a little about the Portuguese sailing all over the place in the 15th century (the 1400s) in nifty little long-distance ships called caravels. They visited Africa and India for profitable products, including spices, gold, people, and sugar (ooh, wait until I tell you about the sugar factory the Portuguese set up off the coast of West Central Africa!) But I’d always thought of these Portuguese expeditions as a dress rehearsal for the Atlantic trade, not simply the latest innovation in a long history of long-distance trade that had been going on for thousands of years.
As for the exhibit title, Silk Roads? China, right? Not so fast.
Silk Roads. Plural.
Silk Roads (the exhibition at the British Museum) told us that there wasn’t just “a” Silk Road, bringing silk from China. There were many Silk Roads, a tangle of them, and they carried a huge variety of things all over the Old World.
Yes! Long before the Internet and container ships, long before modern economists and their boring ideas about free trade and tariffs, long before the rest of the world knew the Americas existed, there were the Silk Roads. By popular demand, this long-distance transportation network carried a steady stream of handcrafted knick-knacks around the globe for people with more money than sense, like a booming medieval Etsy.
In turn, these imports and exports inspired local artists everywhere to make cheap knock-offs to satisfy popular demand.
And make no mistake: The Silk Roads didn't just transport artsy-fartsy stuff. They also brought books, and intellectuals with heads stuffed with knowledge and ideas. And people to do profitable crappy work while being paid little—or let’s be honest—nothing.
The British Museum wants us to think about all of this. That’s why Silk Roads stops us in our tracks at the door, greeting us with this message:
Okay, yes, there’s some bloke in the way. Let me just report the silent conversation I had with the text on the wall:
British Museum: What do you imagine when you think of the Silk Road?
Annette: Not much, TBH. Not sure I care. Camels?
British Museum (imagine a hinty, seductive voice): Spices. Camel Caravans Crossing Desert Dunes . . .
Annette: Yeah, fine, but do I get a point for thinking camels? Actually now I’m thinking of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s Road movies with Dorothy Lamour.*
*I swear I’m not that old. I was a young fan of Bing and Bob in the 70s, and you don’t hear that every day.
Ahem. Back to the museum text:
British Museum (using that “anyone? anyone?” voice that teachers use when fishing for answers): A Single Path Linking “East” and “West” [?]
Annette (feeling very uncertain): I guess? I’m thinking China and the Mediterranean, pretty much. Am I right? Or what?
British Museum: The Reality Offers So Much More
Annette: Like what? A free set of steak knives? Seriously though. Does it? Does it really? What a clickbait line, guys. Do I actually care about this? Help me here, British Museum, because I just splashed out US$60 on tickets for me and Hoosen, and I need to know this wasn’t an expensive mistake. Especially because this looks like it’s just one room, and it’s packed.
Annette’s Aside: Crowds
I don't often visit the British Museum. That’s because it gives me a headache. I find the Museum overwhelming in its size, its huge collections, acquired (and sometimes even paid for) from around the world, its vast range of times and places covered, and because it’s more ancient and medieval than I care about.
Also, visiting a temporary exhibition in a London museum early in its run was a really bad idea, I knew that. I knew it would be crowded. Maybe not “Tutankhamun in 1972”-level crowded, when—as I witnessed in person as a tot- half of Britain formed a jaw-dropping queue on the British Museum’s massive forecourt. But on this day, many years later, the crowding was still pretty grim. However, I had no choice: The exhibit was only on until the end of February, 2025, and I am not rich and live far away. It was now or never.
Hoosen and I realized too late that we’d arrived at the Museum during a school break for all England, and the entire British Museum was slammed. “I thought it wouldn't be busy, not on a weekday in November,” I said plaintively to the attendant in the ladies’ loo, hoping for sympathy. “It's always like this now,” she briskly informed me. After twenty-five years of keeping the British Museum loos in pristine condition, she would know.
The permanent exhibits in London’s national museums and galleries are indeed free. But Hoosen and I coughed up cash because I had come to see Silk Roads, which charged admission. I now hoped that paying up would separate us from the riff-raff, come to get free stuff. Sadly, we are the riff-raff, only sixty bucks poorer. (Stay with me though, because this story ends happily).
It wasn’t just the crowds that started my British Museum funk. Once in the Silk Roads exhibit, I was face to face with subjects, names, places, that were all desperately unfamiliar. See, this is why I'm sympathetic to my non-historian readers. We’re all ignorant about lots of things. And the more we know, the more we realize we know bugger all. The people who know least are often the most confident (and the rudest to the rest of us).
But it was going to be hard to learn anything while crowds jostled me. The visit was a frustrating and uncomfortable experience. I was one of many people in the crowd challenged by shortage of seating. I know London museums are perennially waiting in hope for young hip people to show up and validate their hipness, but we old farts actually turn up, and we need help, even while you look through and past us in hopes of a better audience.
Silk Roads was staged in one large high-ceilinged room, with no clear path through a maze of glass cases. Hoosen and I often found ourselves crowded into tight corners to try to peer at objects, and read labels, before being shunted aside by tall blokes with no shame. With no frame of reference, and deeply compromised concentration skills thanks to the crowds and my aching knees, I struggled to concentrate on the story the Museum was trying to tell. Mostly I failed, held up my smartphone, and just prayed my photos would make sense of it all later. I wasn’t optimistic.
But now that I sit here in my comfy study at Non-Boring House in the snowy American Midwest, looking at my photos from London, I see that Silk Roads was one of the most mind-blowing museum exhibitions I’ve seen in years. If only I had seen it at the time. Hint: Don’t blame yourself if you find a museum exhibition confusing. It’s not you. Public history should be geared to the public, the real one. If people want something more thorough, that’s what books are for.
The Silk Roads: Not Your Usual Camels and Deserts
Silk Roads has made me realize that the famous Atlantic trade between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was not the first step to a modern global world. In fact, the 18th century Atlantic trade was basically a johnny-come-lately massive extension of the Silk Roads, one that that finally brought the Americas into the circle of global trade in stuff, people, and ideas that stretched back thousands of years, plus it involved a lot more people, who most often didn’t come willingly.
The Silk Roads were indeed much more than one road, one trail, from point A to Point B. They were about much more than the single luxury product of silk. The Silk Roads are better imagined as an almost-worldwide web made by people crossing continents. The Silk Roads even touched a lonely backwater named England, your first hint that I wasn’t out of my depth as much as I’d feared!
People traveled the Silk Roads for thousands of years. That story is too long to tell in a one-room exhibition, so Silk Roads was deliberately limited to one part of that story: five hundred years. Surely, I thought, Silk Roads would focus on the five hundred years leading to the transatlantic trade that finally linked Europe, Asia, and Africa with the Americas, the Old World with the New?
But no. I was flattering myself that Britain and America would end up as the center of this story.
The period the curators chose was one in which the British Isles were the back of beyond, and America was completely unknown to the rest of the world. Which is not to say that long-distance trade wasn’t happening within the Americas: It absolutely was. When Columbus turned up in the Bahamas, people were happy to trade with him, because they had been trading stuff with strangers for thousands of years. Hey, when someone shows up with pretty/useful/interesting stuff that’s new to us, human beings gather round, wallets at the ready.
Silk Roads focused on the five hundred years that, the curators said, best defined the Silk Roads: AD 500 to AD 1000.
But wait! That can’t be right! That’s Europe’s Dark Ages! Or rather, what we used to call the Dark Ages, as if everything shut down after the Roman Empire left, and didn’t light up again until the late Middle Ages. These days, however, medieval European historians know that a lot was going on during the “Dark Ages”, which they now call the early Middle Ages. Oh, and this is a great reminder that not all history centers on Europe. Cough. China. Cough.
I need that reminder myself, because I’m a historian of early America, and especially the bits that became British. I typically think I’m all that because I have had my hands full for decades trying to persuade everyone (Americans included) that American history matters, and because I was also a minor pioneer in showing that American history stretches across the Atlantic.
It only took one little object in Silk Roads to put me firmly in my place.
A Little Buddha
This little Buddha looks like a souvenir I picked up in the kids’ pocket money area of the British Museum gift shop. But no: This was a starring artifact in the exhibition. This little fella was made more than a thousand years ago in what’s now Pakistan. Archaeologists found it in the remains of a building constructed around AD 800, in Sweden.
Yes, Sweden.
How the heck did a Buddha figurine from Pakistan get to Sweden in the AD 800s or even earlier?? Well, it did. Over two or three hundred years, this little Buddha wandered in pockets and camel packs, from the Swat Valley, Pakistan, an early home of Buddhism, all the way to far-off Sweden. There, to my knowledge, Buddhism never really took off, because if it had, we might have droning chants instead of humming ABBA.
Did the Swedes who acquired this little Buddha understand its original meaning? Maybe they just saw it as a cute, exotic object, possibly with spiritual power. Or maybe it was a dust collector in Ingrid’s hut. Or maybe Bjorn got into Buddhism in his hippie phase. Most importantly, how did this little figurine end up in Sweden by AD 800?
This one object tells us a lot about the power, the reach, of the Silk Roads. Most people 1,500 years ago were not cut off from a wider world. The Silk Roads are a big reason why, for better or for worse, like it or not, we now inhabit a shrinking world. And we always have.
This story isn’t about a one-way influence, or one-sided exchange. The Silk Roads are not all about China exporting silk. The Silk Roads were a network with many branches, and people and goods going in all directions. The Silk Roads were an (almost) worldwide web. They still are. Only now America’s involved big time, and the “roads” are filled with trucks and planes and ships, not camels. That’s what I wrote in February, 2025. Things have got more complicated since then.
Today, let’s see how all this globalization took off. Oh, and we won’t just be talking about trade: The most important luggage was ideas, including ideas about religion, brought in travelers’ heads, books, and objects.
China? Hi! I’m your neighbor, Japan!
Little Japan scored a big coup when it took the initiative to send diplomats to much bigger Tang-era China in AD 630. The early 7th century! Mind-blowing, isn’t it? And this wasn’t a one-off mission: Fifteen groups of diplomats traveled on official business from Japan to China over the next 250 years or so, all set on exchanging stuff and ideas.
Make no mistake: Japan may have broken the ice, but China was the big player in this particular relationship. Little Japan was keen to hook up with its much larger neighbor, and to bring home from the Chinese anything that might prove useful at home.
One of the first histories of Japan, the Nihon Shoki (meaning, um, History of Japan) was written in the 700s AD in Chinese. That’s because Japan’s diplomats and rulers went, “Ooh, writing! Cool. We’ll just borrow that from you, China, cheers! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that.”
From this little history book, we learn that Japan was first officially introduced to Buddhism in AD 552 thanks to knick-knacks made in China, like this small figurine. Sorry it’s a bit dark—so was the exhibition hall.
But this handmade Buddha must have been too expensive for practically every Japanese. So how did Buddhist images spread through Japan? How about as cheap knock-offs given as gifts by Japanese royalty to ordinary people?
Royalty the world over give gifts like this, not just to be nice, but to win and retain the public’s support:
Empress Shotoku, who ruled Japan between AD 764-70, was convinced she had won a war thanks to Buddhist gods. So, in gratitude, she ordered one million (yes, one million) little souvenir wooden pagodas to be made and sent, absolutely free, to her subjects. And inside each mini pagoda was a FREE Buddhist mantra, written in Chinese. This mass gift increased the Empress’s subjects’ interest in Buddhism, and also in learning written Japanese, which was all in Chinese characters. Even today, a Japanese person can sort of make out some of the meaning of written Chinese, even though the spoken languages are very different. How cool is that?
China? Meet Korea! Korea? Meet Expensive Goodies!
Korea, as we know it, wasn’t yet a thing in AD 600. The biggest state on the Korean peninsula was Silla. After Silla’s rulers made an alliance with Tang dynasty China, they cheerfully set about conquering all the little neighboring kingdoms, moving Silla toward becoming Korea. So let’s call it Silla Korea, or Korea for short.
Just like Japan’s rulers, Silla Korea’s leaders were happy to borrow objects and ideas, whether made in China, or imported from elsewhere via China. Royal graves in Korea were increasingly stuffed with gold jewelry, because gold had come to mean power, an idea also borrowed from China.
Yet the hippest gold jewelry of all, in Japan as well as Korea, included a C shaped jade ornament that the Chinese did not use in their jewelry. This suggests that Silla Korean and Japanese bigwigs tweaked Chinese luxury imports to suit their tastes, something we see again and again in international trade: Ever eaten Chinese food outside China? Of course you have. Chinese food in the west is barely recognizable to Chinese people. I’m all in favor of that, because dishes full of fatty globules and intestines are just not to my delicate Western tastes. Bring out the deep-fried shrimp in batter and bright red syrup, I say.
To illustrate how rich Koreans were customizing Chinese imports to their taste, we have an over-the-top necklace, found in a Silla royal grave, and made from gold nuggets plus a non-Chinese jade ornament. Meanwhile, Korea was also obtaining luxury knick-knacks from even farther away, via China: A unique dagger sheath with cloisonné decoration, dug up in Korea, may have started out in the Middle East. Take a look at the left and center photos:
The blue glass on the right came from farthest away of all. I was surprised: Frankly, it looks like something from the 1970s that gathers dust in a thrift store [UK charity shop]. But it was an exciting and exotic new product 1,500 years ago. Based on glass-making techniques developed by (surprise!) the Romans, examples of this style were found all around the Eastern Mediterranean. This glass probably traveled to Korea via Egypt. Yes, Egypt!
A Note on Glass
Glass is made from humble old sand. That doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Even today, value is added to hand-blown glass by the skills of craftsmen. We expect to pay more for a Tiffany lamp than a mass-produced Coke bottle. About 1,500 years ago, all glass was a novelty, and novelties sell. Remember this when we talk at NBH about Native peoples in 17th century America and their excitement about glass and ceramic beads.
When Buddhism took root in Silla Korea, burials with fancy objects like glasses and gold necklaces began to fall from fashion among the rich. That’s because Buddhists practiced cremation. But this doesn't mean all posh Koreans shifted overnight to cremation! For rich people in Silla Korea who were still passionate about being buried, a new fashion emerged in the AD 500s: They could be buried with little ceramic people, very much like the ones my granny collected in the 20th century.
Within a hundred years, these little collectibles for dead people were portrayed wearing Chinese clothes. That’s because Silla Korea’s rulers had decided to require everyone at court to wear expensive imported Chinese clothes. Hey, if it's imported and it costs a lot, it must be better, right? So here they are, and . . . Wait, doesn’t the guy on the left look like a Gnome? The Gnomes at Non-Boring House certainly think so.
If you’re a free reader, that’s it for today! I know, I know, I’m just getting warmed up, and it gets pretty cool. But this is a very long post, and I don't want to overtax new and/or casual readers. If you are curious about what comes next, and want to unlock the rest of the post, that’s a big sign that you’re meant to be a proper subscriber to Non-Boring History.