The State in Ancient India: A Study in the Structure and Practical Working of Political Institutions in North India in Ancient Times c5.20

c5.20

While agriculture was the principal occupation, industry and commerce would be pursued by numbers of persons in every locality. Industry has always shown a tendency to organise itself in guilds. The guild, as a modern writer remarks, is indeed a structure which, at one period or another, has existed over practically the whole of the civilised world. In medieval Europe, industry was carried on under a system of enterprise at once public and private, associative and individual. The unit of production was the workshop of the individual master craftsman; but the craftsman held his position as a master only by virtue of full membership in his Craft-Guild. He was not free to adopt any methods of production, or any scale of production he might choose; he was subjected to an elaborate regulation of both the quality and the quantity of his products, of the price he should charge to the consumer, and of his relations to his journeymen and his apprentices. He worked within a clearly defined code of rules which had the object at once of safeguarding the independence, equality, and prosperity of the craftsmen, of keeping broad the highway of promotion from apprentice to journeyman, and from journeyman to master; and also of prescribing the integrity and well-being of the craft by guarding the consumer against exploitation and shoddy goods.”¹ Conditions in ancient India were, of course, different in many important respects from those in medieval Europe. But the basic principle is the same. Throughout the greater part of ancient Indian history, guilds in some form or other are met with and have an important bearing on the state.