The Song dynasty ruled China from 960 to 1279, founded by Emperor Taizu after he took the throne of the Later Zhou and conquered the Ten Kingdoms. It was divided into the Northern Song, with its capital at Bianjing (now Kaifeng), and the Southern Song, which retreated south of the Yangtze after losing the north to the Jin dynasty. The Mongols under Kublai Khan conquered the Southern Song in 1279 after the Battle of Yamen. The era was a golden age of technology and economics. The Song issued true paper money, created the first permanent standing navy in Chinese history, and recorded the earliest surviving chemical formula for gunpowder. Rice cultivation expanded, the population roughly doubled between the 10th and 11th centuries, and woodblock and movable-type printing spread knowledge widely.

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.