The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c19.s9.371

v1.c19.s9.371

Fragmentary as are the collected scraps of evidence on which the foregoing outlines of social economy have been constructed, more might yet be inferred did space permit. It should, however, be fairly clear from what has been said, that if, during, say, the seventh to the fourth century B.C. it had been the vogue, in India, to write treatises on economic institutions, there might have come down to us the record both of conventions and of theories as orderly and as relatively acceptable to the peoples as anything of the kind in, say, the latter middle ages was to the peoples of Western Europe. But it is a curious fact that often where the historian finds little material to hand wherewith to rebuild, he judges that there never were any buildings. Thus in a leading historical work on economics, revised and enlarged in 1890, the whole subject of the economic ideas of the 'Orient' is dismissed in a single page as being reducible to a few ethical precepts, and as extolling agriculture and decrying arts and commerce; further, that division of labour, though politically free, stiffened into a system of hereditary caste, arresting economic progress, and that the Chinese alone, and only from the seventh century A.D., had any insight into the nature of money and its fiduciary substitutes⁷. But we have been looking behind the ethical precepts of the preacher, and the sectarian scruples of a class, at the life of the peoples of North India, as it survives in the records of their folk-lore, and of the discipline of the brethren in orders who lived in close touch with all classes. And we have seen agriculture diligently and amicably carried on by practically the whole people as a toilsome but most natural and necessary pursuit. We have seen crafts and commerce flourishing, highly organised corporately and locally, under conditions of individual and corporate competition, the leading men thereof the friends and counsellors of kings. We have found 'labour' largely hereditary, yet, therewithal, a mobility and initiative anything but rigid revealed in the exercise of it. And we have discovered a thorough familiarity with money and credit ages before the 'seventh century A.D.'