Cargo cults were spiritual and political movements that emerged among Melanesian peoples after Western colonisation of the region in the early 20th century. Their prophets foretold that ancestors or other powerful beings would soon bring an abundance of goods, the cargo, and urged followers to revive traditions or imitate colonial rituals such as flag-raising and drilling. Anthropologists describe them as rooted in existing Melanesian beliefs and as responses to colonial disruption and inequality. Most research on them took place from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.