economy: Asia and the Pacific 355 Eastern economies retained much that had emerged from the Sumerian cities of the fourth millennium b.c.e ASIA AND THE PACIFIC BY KIRK H BEETZ A lack of written records makes it difficult to characterize the economies of ancient Asia and the Pacific Writing arrived late in Oceania, in many areas not until the arrival of Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries Japan did not begin keeping written records until the 600s c.e In China before the Han Dynasty (202 b.c.e.–220 c.e.) merchants and shopkeepers were considered insignificant people unworthy of including in government records, and the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi tried to have all historical records of China destroyed during his reign (221–210 b.c.e.) in order to have all history begin with him The lot of peasants was of little concern to record keepers so long as they paid their taxes and served their overlords In India records are confused before the Maurya Dynasty (321–185 b.c.e.) because the written language of the earliest civilization, the Harappan (ca 2600–1500 b.c.e.), has yet to be translated, and the records of the succeeding Vedic culture were mostly oral tales; modern historians are still trying to sort out who ruled when and rely mostly on archaeological evidence for information about economic development People throughout eastern Asia, southern Asia, and the Pacific were originally hunter-gatherers; the rain forests of southern Asia offered plenty to eat In Australia the climate was mostly dry, but hunter-gatherers found animals to eat In the plains of northern China and Mongolia finding food became increasingly tough because the land was becoming desert Nonetheless, prior to the introduction of agriculture, people could hunt big animals such as horses and deer; in Siberia people took to following reindeer herds on their migrations These ancient peoples traded with one another, with seashells being traded to inland tribes and stone tools coming from central Asia This trade resulted in the development of a new kind of economy, one in which people could acquire goods beyond their day-to-day needs as well as tools that would enable them to create more sophisticated products for use in their own societies and in further trade The seashells became particularly important for economic development, because some kinds became money that could be exchanged for goods or services In China and India this was the beginning of the cash economies that would eventually make them the economic giants of ancient eastern Asia There was not a big leap from bartering goods to using money Instead, the shift was gradual, and bartering never entirely disappeared, especially in rural areas In China government officials kept track of the use of barter, using its frequency as a sign of the health of the national and local economy: The more bartering, the less healthy the economy Thus, Han Dynasty officials were alarmed when peasants shifted away from using coins to bartering in the first century c.e Bronze cast coin, Maurya Empire (which at its peak stretched from Kabul in Afghanistan to Nellore, near Madras, in southern India), third century b.c.e.; the Maurya Dynasty opened extensive foreign trade routes (© The Trustees of the British Museum) The fi rst significant civilizations of Asia and the Pacific had agricultural economies An agricultural economy is one in which the wealth of the nation depends on the productivity of farming Agriculture began in eastern Asia around 6500 b.c.e In the Yellow River region people began growing millet Those people sometimes grew surpluses that they could trade for goods, thus raising their standard of living through being able to own more goods than could hunter-gatherers In this way, some people gained more wealth than others and contributed to the development of upper and lower classes in society Exactly when the ability to trade surpluses for wealth resulted in a shift to a full cash economy is not as yet known, but archaeological evidence from Chinese Shang Dynasty (1500–1045 b.c.e.) sites indicates that it had developed a strong cash economy It was possible for people to build factories for manufacturing metal goods and pottery, to pay workers with coins, and to sell products for coins Th is development gave the Shang a more efficient economy than one based entirely on barter, which was an advantage in its competition for power with its neighbors SHANG DYNASTY An economy that depends for its wealth on products manufactured in factories is called an industrial economy In Shang China were the beginnings of industry focused on the mass production of household goods and tools, but it nonetheless still depended on agriculture for most of its wealth The center of the early Chinese economy was the Yellow River, where the Shang Dynasty was founded Archaeological evidence is only beginning to reveal what economic life was like before the Shang The people of the Yellow River were farmers To their north were nomadic hunter-gatherers; to the south was the Yangtze River basin, where people grew rice; and farther south were people who lived in vast forests The Yellow River people had begun farming in about 5800 b.c.e., several hundred years after rice was cultivated near the Yangtze Instead of rice, they cultivated cereals such as millet