The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c11.t17.3

c11.t17.3

Evidently we have here the material for a very elementary balancesheet much too naive for an imperial organization¹ based as it was on the triumphs of *dig-vijaya* and military aggression² no less than on the victories of peace. The reporter was a lay-man and naturally failed to notice the "sinews of war" that operated the administrative machinery of *pax sârva-bhaumica* (peace of the world-state).³ It is on such facile statements about "light taxes" and "religious charities", however, that students of comparative politics in the nineteenth century were used to founding their estimate of the Hindu political systems. In the publications on finance, as in the treatises on legislation and jurisprudence it has been the custom, therefore, to summarily dismiss the Oriental monarchies as primitive polities of the "patrimonial" type. Today the states of Old Asia are treated by scholars more or less in the same light as the feudal kingdoms of mediaeval Europe, i. e., as organizations modelled on a private household, the domestic establishment of the ruler.⁴