Japan ran a futures market in rice a century before Chicago had one in anything
In 1730, Japan's Tokugawa shogunate formally licensed the Dojima Rice Exchange in Osaka to trade standardised contracts for rice to be delivered in the future, settled through ledger entries rather than any actual rice changing hands on the spot. It's widely cited as the world's first organised futures market, predating the Chicago Board of Trade, founded in 1848, by well over a century.