The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.21

c15.s1.21

The resulting diffusion of power was not, however, mere confusion and chaos. The neat picture propounded by the sources, which opposes the peasant-producer and the warrior-administrator as the two poles of the empire, is broken in the middle by the operation of the cash nexus. But the same phenomenon can also offer us a vantage point for discerning a certain leading principle in the seemingly chaotic free-for-all. This principle would, as we saw, be hard to find in the formal administrative and military structure of the empire; rather, we find it in the movements of trade.