Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c5.t3.2

c5.t3.2

It is highly remarkable indeed that, in spite of a comparatively lower stage of trading enterprises and lack of fluid capital for the investment in industrial purposes, the economic life of this period evinces a higher state of co-operative activity and commercial or trading organization. Of course, the associative spirit, lending itself into formation of various associations for mutual assistance, due to a natural growth of civilization, to the instinct of self-preservation, goes back to very early times.¹ Economic groupings of various kinds are already known from Vedic times.² "The existence of trade associations," says Fick,³ "which grew partly for economical reasons better employment of capital, facilities of intercourse, partly for protecting the legal interests of their class, is surely to be traced to an early period of Indian Culture." The Law-books⁴ and the *Kauṭilīya*⁵ present a much more developed stage of this remarkable feature of the economic life of India. The culture-stage of the *Jātakas*, falling as it does midway between the Vedic and the strictly-Buddhist periods, embodies in itself the first beginnings, the formation and the process of development of the Merchant and Craft Guilds which, in later times, reached a high water-mark of organization, efficiency and importance, with their own laws, usages and officers.