In the centuries before the Han conquest in the late second century BCE, Hexi Corridor was part of the growing Inner Eurasian network that spanned the Tarim Basin, northern grasslands, and fringes of the Tibetan Plateau. Its participants formed relatively small communities with multi-resource economies combining agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting, and fishing. The Inner Eurasian pattern of connectivity in the Hexi Corridor as well as in the Tarim Basin and Sogdiana to the west was characterized by cohabitation of groups with sedentary and mobile lifestyles, absence of a centralized territorial state, multi-directional transregional exchanges, and prominent role of the local elites as capital providers in the long-distance trade.
The Han conquest of the Hexi replaced this Inner Eurasian pattern of sociopolitical organization and economic network with a Sinitic-style sedentary society that relied on intensive irrigated agriculture, resided in towns, was organized in a bureaucratic state, and relied on monetized, impersonal forms of exchange (markets) as well as state-managed redistribution for many crucial staple goods and manufactures. The state and the middling producer-consumer groups replaced aristocratic elites as the principal drivers of trans-local exchanges. The Han conquest fundamentally disrupted the long-standing Inner Eurasian pattern of long-distance connections.
However, in the longer run, the Han frontier society in the Hexi Corridor importantly contributed to the growth of cross-Eurasian exchanges. This was partly due to the introduction of new production systems, trade goods, and tools of exchange, but perhaps more importantly, through institutional consolidation stimulated by the Han conquest: the more robust states that maintained travel infrastructures and provided security and trade-enabling services; and urban-based trade diasporas and religious associations that became crucial agents of commercial expansion in Late Antiquity.