The Silk Road was a network of land and sea trade routes linking East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia and the Mediterranean, active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. The name was coined in the late 19th century after the lucrative trade in silk made in China, though many historians now prefer Silk Routes because the network had many branches. The system began to take shape when the Han dynasty expanded into Central Asia around 114 BCE, after the envoy Zhang Qian's missions. Chinese silk was widely sought in Rome by the first century CE, while goods moving west included horses, wine, gold and honey, and goods moving east included tea, dyes and porcelain. Paper and gunpowder also spread along these routes, shaping political history. Travellers rarely covered the whole distance; goods passed through a chain of middlemen, and banditry was a constant risk. Ideas, especially Buddhism, moved along the same paths, and disease spread too, possibly contributing to the Black Death. From 1453 Ottoman control of overland routes pushed Europeans to seek sea routes, which helped launch the Age of Discovery.

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.