Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c5.t1.29

c5.t1.29

For the most part, it seems, each workman was a separate unit and had to find his own raw material and sell the finished product of his labour, thus combining the labourer and the trader in himself. Thus the workman, as in medieval Europe, "was primarily a trader, his success depended as much on his shrewdness in trade as on his skill in industry."² The class of middlemen was therefore not known, except in some towns and cities where inland and foreign trade was carried on an extensive scale.