Researched
Trade & Division of Labor
Specializing and exchanging yields more than everyone producing alone; trade networks link villages, cities and later continents.
Open in the interactive tree →Obsidian from Anatolia turns up hundreds of kilometers from its source more than 9,000 years ago. With surplus food came craftspeople, merchants and administrators. The Silk Road and the incense routes later tied Eurasia and Arabia together; Adam Smith (1776) described division of labor as a source of wealth.
Prerequisites
- Spoken Languageat least ~135,000 years ago?
- Granaries & Grain Storage~9300 BCStored grain surplus freed people from farming
- Settlement & Cities~9000 BC
Unlocks
- Writing~3200 BCEarliest writing is trade accounting: clay tokens and tablets record traded goods
- Weights & Standard Measures~2500 BC
- Money~600 BC
- Philosophy~585 BC
- Newspapers & the Public Sphere1605
- Economics1776
- Platform Economy1995-2009