Economy & trade

In the centuries following the first cultivation of cereals and pulses, Neolithic communities of the Fertile Crescent transformed several wild ungulates into managed livestock, completing the founding 'package' of Old World farming.

The high Andes became an independent centre of domestication, producing crops and animals adapted to extreme altitude.

Obsidian, the glassy volcanic stone prized for making razor-sharp blades and reflective mirrors, became one of the first commodities moved over very long distances in the ancient world.

Alongside maize, Mesoamerican and broader American farmers domesticated squash and pumpkins (Cucurbita species) and the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), building the complementary crop trio later known as the 'Three Sisters.' Squash is…

Long before script, the farming and trading communities of the Near East kept accounts with small modelled clay tokens — cones, spheres, disks, cylinders and other shapes — each standing for a quantity of a commodity such as grain, oil or…

Building on early milking, Old World farming communities increasingly exploited their herds for a wider range of renewable products from the fourth millennium BCE onward — a set of innovations the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt grouped as…

The Mature Harappan civilisation adopted a remarkably precise and uniform system of weights and measures across its vast territory.

By the late third millennium BCE the Indus Valley conducted flourishing long-distance maritime trade with Mesopotamia, where it is generally identified as the land of 'Meluhha'. Sargon of Akkad (c.

Merchants from the city-state of Assur built one of the earliest documented long-distance commercial networks, linking Mesopotamia with central Anatolia by donkey caravan.

During the Neopalatial period (c. 1700–1450 BCE) Minoan Crete reached the peak of its prosperity and projected its influence across the eastern Mediterranean through seaborne trade.

The Phoenician cities, above all Tyre, developed large-scale production of a colourfast crimson-to-violet dye extracted from the glands of murex sea-snails (Hexaplex trunculus and Bolinus brandaris).

Hatshepsut, one of the few women to rule Egypt as pharaoh, dispatched a major sea-borne trading expedition to the Land of Punt, a region probably on the southern Red Sea coast (near modern Eritrea/Somalia).

A merchant ship that sank off Uluburun, near Kas on the southern coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey), around 1320–1300 BCE preserved the richest assemblage of Late Bronze-Age trade goods ever recovered.

In the kingdom of Lydia in western Anatolia, rulers of the Mermnad dynasty began stamping small lumps of electrum, a naturally occurring gold-silver alloy sourced from the Pactolus River, with official designs around 630 BCE, creating the…

Around 483 BC a rich new vein of silver was discovered in the state-owned mines of Laurion (Laurium) in southern Attica, particularly in the district of Maroneia, yielding an exceptional surplus to the Athenian treasury (a hundred talents…

By the mid-fifth century BCE the silver tetradrachm of Athens, struck from the rich Laurion mines of southern Attica and bearing the helmeted head of Athena on the obverse and her owl with an olive sprig and the letters ATHE on the…

Around 320 BCE, under the newly founded Mauryan Empire of Chandragupta Maurya, the silver punch-marked karshapana became the standardised currency underpinning one of the ancient world's earliest centrally regulated monetary economies.

During the Sangam age, the three crowned Tamil dynasties of the far south—the Cheras, Cholas, and Pandyas—presided over a flourishing maritime economy linking peninsular India to Rome, Arabia, and Southeast Asia.

In 81 BCE, the court of the boy-emperor Zhao of Han, under the regent Huo Guang, convened a formal debate over the state monopolies on salt, iron, and liquor that Emperor Wu had instituted to finance his campaigns against the Xiongnu.

In the 1st century BCE, Greek and Roman navigators—tradition credits the pilot Hippalus—learned to exploit the seasonal reversal of the Indian Ocean monsoon, sailing east on the southwest monsoon in summer and returning west on the…

In the mid-first century CE, Greco-Roman mariners operating from Egypt mastered the seasonal monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean, enabling direct open-water voyages from the Red Sea ports of Berenike and Myos Hormos to the markets of India…

In 166 CE, according to the Hou Hanshu (Book of the Later Han), envoys claiming to represent 'Andun, king of Da Qin' — Da Qin being the Chinese name for the Roman world, and Andun almost certainly Antoninus (the emperor Marcus Aurelius…

The Crisis of the Third Century (235–285 AD) was a near-fatal period of military, political, and economic disintegration in the Roman Empire, conventionally dated from the assassination of Emperor Severus Alexander in 235 to the accession…

Around 270 CE, King Endubis of the Kingdom of Aksum, centred in present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, began striking the first indigenous coinage of any sub-Saharan African state.

In 301 CE the Roman emperor Diocletian issued the Edictum de Pretiis Rerum Venalium, an empire-wide decree setting legal maximum prices for well over a thousand goods, services, and wages in an attempt to halt runaway inflation.

From their oasis homeland in Sogdiana, centred on Samarkand and Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the Iranian-speaking Sogdians came to dominate overland trade across Eurasia, reaching a peak of wealth and influence from…

By the later 7th century the kingdom of Srivijaya, centred on Palembang in southeastern Sumatra, had emerged as the dominant thalassocracy of maritime Southeast Asia, controlling the Malacca and Sunda Straits that linked the Indian Ocean…

In 780 CE, Chancellor Yang Yan persuaded Emperor Dezong of Tang to adopt the Two-Tax System (liangshui fa), a sweeping fiscal reform enacted to rebuild state finances shattered by the An Lushan Rebellion.

During the Islamic Golden Age, the unification of a vast territory under Arab and Muslim rule enabled an unprecedented diffusion of crops, irrigation technologies, and farming techniques across the Old World, a phenomenon the historian…

Around the year 1000, the trans-Saharan caravan trade in West African gold and Saharan salt reached its height under the dominance of the Ghana Empire (Wagadou), which acted as the indispensable middleman between the goldfields of the…

In 1012, amid a severe drought across the lower Yangtze and Huai River valleys, the Song emperor Zhenzong ordered the procurement and distribution of an early-ripening, drought-resistant rice variety that had originated in the Champa…

In 1023 the Northern Song government established a state Jiaozi Office at Yizhou in Sichuan and took over the issue of jiaozi, creating the world's first official, government-backed paper currency.

Historians traditionally date the origins of the Hanseatic League to 1159, when Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, rebuilt and refounded the Baltic port of Lübeck after seizing the area from Adolf II of Holstein.

Between roughly the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries the Shona capital of Great Zimbabwe became the largest stone-built settlement in sub-Saharan Africa, housing perhaps 18,000 people at its mid-fourteenth-century peak.

In the first half of the fourteenth century the Swahili city-state of Kilwa Kisiwani, on an island off the coast of present-day Tanzania, reached the height of its power.

In 1324 Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage that Arab chroniclers numbered in the tens of thousands, accompanied by hundreds of attendants bearing staffs of gold and camels laden with…

Around 1400 CE the island of Yap in the western Caroline Islands developed one of the world's most distinctive monetary and exchange systems, anchored by rai stones, large carved disks of crystalline calcium carbonate (calcite) valued as…

In August 1444 a fleet of six ships organised by the Lagos tax-collector Lançarote de Freitas returned from raids on the Bay of Arguin (modern Mauritania) and landed roughly 235 captive Africans at Lagos in southern Portugal.

Over roughly a century and a half from about 1500 to 1650, prices across Europe rose on average around sixfold, an unprecedented era of sustained inflation contemporaries struggled to explain.

In 1545 rich silver veins were found at Cerro Rico, the "rich hill" above what became the city of Potosí in present-day Bolivia, traditionally credited to an Indigenous prospector named Diego Huallpa.

In 1565 the Augustinian friar and navigator Andrés de Urdaneta discovered the tornaviaje, the eastward return route from the Philippines to Mexico, by sailing far north to catch the prevailing westerlies.

On 31 December 1600 Queen Elizabeth I chartered the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, granting a monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope.

Between 1600 and 1611 the institutional core of modern finance took shape in northwestern Europe.

On 31 January 1609 the municipal authorities of Amsterdam established the Amsterdamsche Wisselbank, or Bank of Amsterdam, an exchange bank created to bring order to the chaotic monetary conditions of the early Dutch Republic, where…

In 1672 King Charles II granted a royal charter to the Royal African Company, reorganised from the bankrupt Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa and headed by his brother James, Duke of York.

The Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise money for King William III's government, which was struggling to finance the Nine Years' War against Louis XIV's France.

The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, transferred to Great Britain the Asiento de Negros, the monopoly contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's American colonies.

On 9 March 1776 Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the founding text of classical economics.

As Britain mechanised cotton spinning and weaving, the world's textile trade was upended, and nowhere more dramatically than in India, long the leading producer and exporter of fine cotton cloth.

On 21 November 1806, from occupied Berlin, Napoleon issued a decree declaring the British Isles under blockade and prohibiting all trade and correspondence with Britain across territories under French control.

In 1821 the Bank of England resumed full convertibility of its notes into gold, putting the gold standard into operation in the United Kingdom following the framework set by the Coinage Act of 1816.

Founded in the 1820s on the Merrimack River in Massachusetts by the Boston Associates and named for Francis Cabot Lowell, the planned mill town of Lowell became the showcase of the American Industrial Revolution.

On 1 January 1834 the Zollverein, a customs union led by Prussia, came into force, abolishing internal tariffs among most German states and creating a single market of some twenty-five million people.

In 1851 the discovery of payable gold, first at Ophir in New South Wales and soon afterwards at Ballarat and Bendigo in the newly separated colony of Victoria, set off a transformative gold rush.

In May 1873 the Vienna Stock Exchange crashed, ending a speculative boom across central Europe and igniting what has been called the first truly international financial crisis.

In November 1875, facing bankruptcy, the Egyptian khedive Isma'il Pasha sold his holding of roughly 44 percent of the Suez Canal Company.

Burdened by war debt and the reparations imposed at Versailles, and after the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923 prompted the government to print money to fund passive resistance, Germany experienced one of history's…

Launched on 1 October 1928, Stalin's First Five-Year Plan committed the USSR to rapid, centrally planned industrialisation focused on steel, coal, and electricity, together with the collectivisation of agriculture into state and collective…

After a speculative boom, the New York Stock Exchange collapsed in late October 1929.

The Golden Gate Bridge was an engineering triumph of the Depression era, linking San Francisco to Marin County across a treacherous strait and becoming an enduring symbol of American ambition.

The Mexican oil expropriation was a landmark assertion of economic sovereignty by a developing nation against powerful foreign corporations.

The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, from 1 to 22 July 1944, brought together 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations to design the post-war international monetary order.

The Marshall Plan, formally the European Recovery Program, was the principal U.S. initiative to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. Proposed by Secretary of State George C.

On 30 December 1950 Saudi Arabia and the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) signed a landmark agreement to split oil profits equally, doubling the kingdom's revenue overnight and setting a template that reshaped the Middle East.

On 17 November 1955 Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru poured the first bucket of concrete into the dry riverbed of the Sutlej to build the Bhakra Dam, the centerpiece of the Bhakra Nangal project that became the emblem of newly independent…

In 1955 the Tokyo firm Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, soon to rebrand itself Sony, released the TR-55, Japan's first commercially produced transistor radio and the opening move in Japan's postwar transformation into an electronics superpower.

On 26 April 1956, the SS Ideal X, a converted World War II T-2 oil tanker owned by Malcom McLean's Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company, departed Port Newark, New Jersey, carrying 58 standardised 35-foot truck-trailer containers alongside a load…

In 1956 Shell-D'Arcy struck oil in commercial quantities at Oloibiri in the Niger Delta, the first such discovery in Nigeria and the beginning of a petroleum era that would remake the country's economy, politics, and environment.

On 25 March 1957 Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany signed the Treaty of Rome, establishing the European Economic Community (EEC); a parallel treaty created the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom).

On 14 September 1960 five oil-exporting states created the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Baghdad, beginning a decades-long shift of power over global energy away from Western multinationals.

On 8 August 1967 the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand signed the Bangkok Declaration, creating the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to promote regional cooperation and stability.

On 15 August 1971 President Richard Nixon announced a 'New Economic Policy' that suspended the convertibility of the US dollar into gold, alongside a 90-day wage and price freeze and a temporary import surcharge.

In October 1973, during and after the Yom Kippur War (6–26 October), the Arab members of OPEC, organised as OAPEC, imposed an oil embargo on the United States and other states regarded as supporting Israel, while OPEC sharply raised posted…

On 18 December 1978, the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party convened in Beijing and resolved to shift the focus of the Party and state from class struggle to economic construction, launching…

China launched its first Special Economic Zones in 1980, opening the door to the market reforms that would remake the world's most populous nation.

The Latin American debt crisis erupted in 1982, plunging the region into a "lost decade" of economic stagnation.

Japan's speculative asset bubble reached its zenith on 29 December 1989, when the Nikkei 225 stock index closed at an all-time high of 38,916, capping a decade in which the world marvelled at the country's seemingly unstoppable economic…

Facing a severe balance-of-payments crisis in mid-1991, with foreign reserves sufficient for barely three weeks of imports and gold airlifted abroad to secure emergency loans, India launched sweeping economic reforms. Prime Minister P. V.

Mercosur, the Southern Common Market, was founded on 26 March 1991 when Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay signed the Treaty of Asunción, creating South America's most ambitious economic integration project.

Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour in January and February 1992 rescued China's market reforms from the political freeze that had gripped the country after the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989.

On 1 January 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) entered into force, creating a trilateral free-trade bloc among Canada, Mexico and the United States with a combined population of more than 360 million.

Brazil's Real Plan finally conquered runaway hyperinflation in 1994, ending a nightmare in which prices had at times risen more than 2,000 percent a year and shopkeepers re-tagged goods daily.

On 16 July 1995 Amazon.com opened to the public as an online bookstore, founded a year earlier by Jeff Bezos, who had left a Wall Street firm to capitalise on the rapid growth of internet use.

The World Trade Organization came into being on 1 January 1995, established by the Marrakesh Agreement signed in April 1994 at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round, the eighth and most ambitious round of multilateral trade negotiations…

On 2 July 1997 Thailand, depleted of the foreign reserves needed to defend its currency peg, was forced to float the baht, triggering a regional financial crisis that spread rapidly across East and Southeast Asia.

On 1 January 1999 the euro was launched as the single currency of an initial group of European Union member states, beginning life as an electronic and accounting currency used for bank transfers, financial markets and exchange-rate…

On 10 March 2000 the technology-heavy NASDAQ Composite index peaked at 5,048, the climax of a speculative boom in internet and technology stocks that had seen the index rise roughly sixfold since 1995.

On 11 December 2001 the People's Republic of China became the 143rd member of the World Trade Organization, completing a 15-year accession process that required extensive commitments to lower tariffs, open markets and reform domestic…

On 27 October 2002 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former metalworker and union leader, won Brazil's presidency with about 61 percent of the runoff vote, and was inaugurated on 1 January 2003 as the country's first working-class president.

In 2007 Kenya's largest mobile operator Safaricom, in partnership with Vodafone, launched M-Pesa, a mobile-phone-based money transfer service whose name combines 'M' for mobile with 'pesa', Swahili for money.

On 15 September 2008 Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest US investment bank, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with more than $600 billion in assets—the largest bankruptcy in American history.

On 10 July 2008 Apple opened the App Store with around 500 applications, providing a single, curated platform where outside developers could distribute software directly to iPhone users and share in the revenue.

In 2010 China overtook Japan to become the world's second-largest economy by nominal gross domestic product, a position Japan had held since 1968.

In late 2009 Greece revealed that its budget deficits were far larger than previously reported, and by April 2010 credit-rating agencies had downgraded Greek bonds to junk status, freezing the country out of private capital markets and…

Speaking at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, on 7 September 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping proposed building a 'Silk Road Economic Belt' linking China across Central Asia to Europe.

On 6 April 2014 Nigeria announced the results of a long-overdue 'rebasing' of its gross domestic product, updating the base year for its national accounts from 1990 for the first time in decades.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, first proposed by Xi Jinping in 2013, formally opened for business on 16 January 2016 after its founding agreement entered into force in late 2015.

From around 2016, Venezuela — holder of the world's largest proven oil reserves — descended into one of the deepest peacetime economic collapses in modern history.

On 6 July 2018 the United States imposed 25% tariffs on 34 billion US dollars of Chinese imports, the first phase of a broader package, and China retaliated immediately with equivalent duties on American goods such as soybeans, pork and…

Between 2021 and 2023 the world experienced its sharpest burst of inflation in roughly four decades.

On 2 April 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14257 imposing a 10 percent baseline tariff on nearly all US imports plus steep additional 'reciprocal' rates on dozens of trading partners, a measure he branded 'Liberation…

The generative-AI boom became a dominant force in global markets in the mid-2020s, concentrating trillions of dollars of value in a handful of technology firms.