In most ways, India could not be more different as a civilization than the ancient Mediterranean—but to a remarkable degree, the same basic pattern repeats itself there as well.
The Bronze Age civilization of the Indus Valley collapsed sometime around 1600 bc; it would be about a thousand years before India saw the emergence of another urban civilization. When it did, that civilization was centered on the fertile plains that surrounded the Ganges farther east. Here too we observe, at first, a checkerboard of different sorts of government, from the famous “Ksatriya republics” with a populace in arms and urban democratic assemblies, to elective monarchies, to centralized empires like Kosala and Magadha.32 Both Gautama (the future Buddha), and Mahavira (the founder of Jainism) were born in one of the republics, though both ultimately found themselves teaching within the great empires, whose rulers often became patrons of wandering ascetics and philosophers.
Both kingdoms and republics produced their own silver and copper coinage, but in some ways the republics were more traditional, since the self-governing “populace in arms” consisted of the traditional Ksatriya or warrior caste, who typically held their lands in common and had them worked by serfs or slaves.33 The kingdoms, on the other hand, were founded on a fundamentally new institution: a trained, professional army, open to young men of a wide variety of backgrounds, their equipment supplied by central authorities (soldiers were obliged to check their arms and armor when they entered cities), and provided with generous salaries.
Whatever their origins, here too, coins and markets sprung up above all to feed the machinery of war. Magadha, which ultimately came out on top, did so largely because it controlled most of the mines. Kautilya’s Arthasastra, a political treatise written by one of the chief ministers for the Mauryan dynasty that succeeded it (321–185 bc), stated the matter precisely: “The treasury is based upon mining, the army upon the treasury; he who has army and treasury may conquer the whole wide earth.”34 The government drew its personnel first of all from a landed class, which provided trained administrators, but even more, full-time soldiers: the salaries of each rank of soldier and administrator were carefully stipulated. These armies could be huge. Greek sources report that Magadha could put to the field a force of 200,000 infantry, 20,000 horses, and about 4,000 elephants—and that Alexander’s men mutinied rather than have to face them. Whether on campaign or in garrison, they were inevitably accompanied by a range of different sorts of camp followers—petty traders, prostitutes, and hired servants—which, with the soldiers, seems to have been the very medium through which a cash economy had originally taken form.35 By Kautilya’s time, a few hundred years later, the state was inserting itself into every aspect of the process: Kautilya suggests paying soldiers apparently generous wages, then secretly replacing hawkers with government agents who could charge them twice the normal rates for supplies, as well as organizing prostitutes under a ministry in which they could be trained as spies, so as to make detailed reports on their clients’ loyalties.
Thus was the market economy, born of war, gradually taken over by the government. Rather than stifle the spread of currency, the process seems to have doubled and even tripled it: the military logic was extended to the entire economy, the government systematically setting up its granaries, workshops, trading houses, warehouses, and jails, staffed by salaried officials, and all selling products on the market so as to collect the pieces of silver paid off to soldiers and officials and put them back into the royal treasuries again.36 The result was a monetarization of daily life unlike anything India was to see for another two thousand years.37
Something similar seems to have happened with slavery, which was quite commonplace at the time of the rise of the great armies—again, unlike almost any other point in Indian history—but was gradually brought under government control.38 By Kautilya’s time, most war captives were not sold in marketplaces but relocated to government villages on newly reclaimed land. They were not allowed to leave, and these government villages were, at least according to the regulations, remarkably dreary places: veritable work camps, with all forms of festive entertainment officially prohibited. Slave hirelings were mostly convicts, rented by the state during their terms.
With their armies, spies, and administration controlling everything, the new Indian kings evinced little interest in the old priestly caste and its Vedic ritual, though many kept up a lively interest in the new philosophical and religious ideas that seem to have been cropping up everywhere at the time. As time went on, however, the war machine began to sputter. It’s not clear exactly why this happened. By the time of emperor Aśoka (273–232 bc), the Mauryan dynasty controlled almost all of present-day India and Pakistan, but the Indian version of the military-coinage-slavery complex was showing definite signs of strain. Perhaps the clearest sign was the debasement of the coinage, which over the course of two centuries or so had gone from almost pure silver to about fifty percent copper.39
Aśoka, famously, began his reign in conquest: in 265 bc, destroying the Kalingas, one of the last remaining Indian republics, in a war in which hundreds of thousands of human beings were, according to his own account, killed or carried off into slavery. Aśoka later claimed to have been so disturbed and haunted by the carnage that he renounced war altogether, embraced Buddhism, and declared that from that time on, his kingdom would be governed by principles of ahimsa, or nonviolence. “Here in my kingdom,” he declared in an edict inscribed on one of the great granite pillars in his capital of Patna, which so dazzled the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, “no living being must be killed and sacrificed.”40 Such a statement obviously can’t be taken literally: Aśoka might have replaced sacrificial ritual with vegetarian feasts, but he didn’t abolish the army, abandon capital punishment, or even outlaw slavery. But his rule marked a revolutionary shift in ethos. Aggressive war was abandoned, and much of the army does seems to have been demobilized, along with the network of spies and state bureaucrats, with the new, proliferating mendicant orders (Buddhists, Jains, and also world-renouncing Hindus) given official state support to preach to the villages on questions of social morality. Aśoka and his successors diverted substantial resources to these religious orders, with the result that, over the next centuries, thousands of stupas and monasteries were built across the subcontinent.41
Aśoka’s reforms are useful to contemplate here because they help reveal just how mistaken some of our basic assumptions are: particularly, that money equals coins, and that more coins in circulation means more commerce and a greater role for private merchants. In reality, the Magadha state promoted markets but had been suspicious of private merchants, seeing them largely as competitors.42 Merchants had been among the earliest and most ardent supporters of the new religions (Jains, owing to their rigorous enforcement of rules against harm to any living creature, were obliged to become, effectively, a mercantile caste). Mercantile interests fully supported Aśoka’s reforms. Yet the result was not an increase in the use of cash in everyday affairs but exactly the opposite.
Early Buddhist economic attitudes have long been considered a bit mysterious. On the one hand, monks could not own property as individuals; they were expected to live an austere communistic life with little more than a robe and begging bowl as personal possessions, and they were strictly forbidden to so much as touch anything made of gold or silver. On the other hand, however suspicious of precious metals, Buddhism had always had a liberal attitude toward credit arrangements. It is one of the few of the great world religions that has never formally condemned usury.43 Taken in the context of the times, however, there’s nothing particularly mysterious about any of this. It makes perfect sense for a religious movement that rejected violence and militarism, but that was in no way opposed to commerce.44 As we shall see, while Aśoka’s own empire was not long to endure, soon to be replaced by a succession of ever weaker and mostly smaller states, Buddhism took root. The decline of the great armies eventually led to the near-disappearance of coinage, but also to a verit
able efflorescence of increasingly sophisticated forms of credit.
China
Until about 475 bc, northern China was still nominally an empire, but the emperors had devolved into figureheads and a series of de facto kingdoms had emerged. The period from 475 to 221 bc is referred as the “Warring States period”; at that point, even the pretense of unity was cast aside. Ultimately, the country was reunited by the state of Qin, who established a dynasty that was then immediately overthrown by a series of massive popular insurrections, ushering in the Han dynasty (206 bc-220 ad), founded by a previously obscure rural constable and peasant leader named Liu Bao, who was the first Chinese leader to adopt the Confucian ideology, exam system, and pattern of civil administration that were to continue for almost two thousand years.
Still, the golden age of Chinese philosophy was the period of chaos that preceded unification, and this followed the typical Axial Age pattern: the same fractured political landscape, the same rise of trained, professional armies and the creation of coined money largely in order to pay them.45 We also see the same government policies designed to encourage the development of markets, chattel slavery on a scale not seen before or since in Chinese history, the appearance of itinerant philosophers and religious visionaries, battling intellectual schools, and eventually, attempts by political leaders to transform the new philosophies into religions of state.46
There were also significant differences, starting with the currency system. China never minted gold or silver coins. Merchants used precious metals in the form of bullion, but the coins in actual circulation were basically small change: cast bronze disks, usually with a hole in the middle so that they could be strung together. Such strings of “cash” were produced in extraordinary numbers, and very large amounts had to be assembled for large-scale transactions: when wealthy men wished to make donations to temples, for instance, they had to use oxcarts to carry the money. The most plausible explanation is that, especially after unification, Chinese armies were enormous—some Warring States armies numbered up to a million—but not nearly as professional or well paid as those of kingdoms farther west, and from Qin and Han times on, rulers were careful to ensure that this remained the case, to make sure the army never became an independent power base.47
There was also a notable difference in that the new religious and philosophical movements in China were from their very beginnings also social movements. Elsewhere, they only gradually became so. In ancient Greece, philosophy began with cosmological speculation; philosophers were more likely to be individual sages, perhaps surrounded by a few ardent disciples, as founders of movements.48 Under the Roman empire, schools of philosophy like the Stoics, Epicureans, Neo-Platonists did become movements of a sort: at least in the sense that they had thousands of educated adherents, who “practiced” philosophy not only by reading, writing, and debating, but even more by meditation, diet, and exercise. Still, philosophical movements were basically confined to the civic elite; it was only with the rise of Christianity and other religious movements that philosophy moved beyond it.49 One can observe a similar evolution in India, from individual Brahman world-renouncers, forest sages, and wandering mendicants with theories about the nature of the soul or the composition of the material universe; to philosophical movements of the Buddhists, Jains, Ājīvika, and others mostly long forgotten; to, finally, mass religious movements with thousands of monks, shrines, schools, and networks of lay supporters.
In China, while many of the founders of the “hundred schools” of philosophy that blossomed under the Warring States were wandering sages who spent their days moving from city to city trying to catch the ears of princes, others were leaders of social movements from the very start. Some of these movements didn’t even have leaders, like the School of the Tillers, an anarchist movement of peasant intellectuals who set out to create egalitarian communities in the cracks and fissures between states.50 The Mohists, egalitarian rationalists whose social base seems to have been urban artisans, not only were philosophically opposed to war and militarism, but organized battalions of military engineers who would actively discourage conflicts by volunteering to fight in any war against the side of the aggressor. Even the Confucians, for all the importance they attached to courtly ritual, were in their early days mainly known for their efforts in popular education.51
Materialism I:
The Pursuit of Profit
What is one to make of all this? The popular education campaigns of the period perhaps provide a clue. The Axial Age was the first time in human history when familiarity with the written word was no longer limited to priests, administrators, and merchants, but had become necessary to full participation in civic life. In Athens, it was taken for granted that only a country bumpkin would be entirely illiterate.
Without mass literacy, neither the emergence of mass intellectual movements, nor the spread of Axial Age ideas would have been possible. By the end of the period, these ideas had produced a world where even the leaders of barbarian armies descending on the Roman empire felt obliged to take a position on the question of the Mystery of the Trinity, and where Chinese monks could spend time debating the relative merits of the eighteen schools of Classical Indian Buddhism.
No doubt the growth of markets played a role too, not only helping to free people from the proverbial shackles of status or community, but encouraging a certain habit of rational calculation, of measuring inputs and outputs, means and ends, all of which must inevitably have found some echoes in the new spirit of rational inquiry that begins to appear in all the same times and places. Even the word “rational” is telling: it derives, of course, from “ratio”—how many of X go into Y—a sort of mathematical calculation previously used mainly by architects and engineers, but which, with the rise of markets, everyone who didn’t want to get cheated at the marketplace had to learn how to do. Still, we must be careful here. After all, money in itself was nothing new. Sumerian farmers and tradesmen were already perfectly capable of making such calculations in 3500 bc; but none, as far as we know, were so impressed that they concluded, like Pythagoras, that mathematical ratios were the key to understanding the nature of the universe and the movement of celestial bodies, and that all things were ultimately composed of numbers—and they certainly hadn’t formed secret societies based on sharing this understanding, debating and purging and excommunicating one another.52
To understand what had changed, we have to look, again, at the particular kind of markets that were emerging at the beginning of the Axial Age: impersonal markets, born of war, in which it was possible to treat even neighbors as if they were strangers.
Within human economies, motives are assumed to be complex. When a lord gives a gift to a retainer, there is no reason to doubt that it is inspired by a genuine desire to benefit that retainer, even if it is also a strategic move designed to ensure loyalty, and an act of magnificence meant to remind everyone else that he is great and the retainer small. There is no sense of contradiction here. Similarly, gifts between equals are usually fraught with many layers of love, envy, pride, spite, communal solidarity, or any of a dozen other things. Speculating on such matters is a major form of daily entertainment. What’s missing, though, is any sense that the most selfish (“self-interested”) motive is necessarily the real one: those speculating on hidden motives are just as likely to assume that someone is secretly trying to help a friend or harm an enemy as to acquire some advantage for him- or herself.53 Neither is any of this likely to have changed much in the rise of early credit markets, where the value of an IOU was as much dependent on assessments of its issuer’s character as on his disposable income, and motives of love, envy, pride, etc. could never be completely set aside.
Cash transactions between strangers were different, and all the more so when trading is set against a background of war and emerges from disposing of loot and provisioning soldiers; when one often had best not ask where the objects traded came from, and where no one is much interested in forming ongoing personal
relationships anyway. Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y, of calculating proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like “profit” and “advantage”—and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretense that they ever cared about anything else. It was this, in turn, that allowed human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation, and hence something that could be examined using the same means that one used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies.54 If the underlying assumption very much resembles those of contemporary economists, it’s no coincidence—but with the difference that, in an age when money, markets, states, and military affairs were all intrinsically connected, money was needed to pay armies to capture slaves to mine gold to produce money; when “cutthroat competition” often did involve the literal cutting of throats, it never occurred to anyone to imagine that selfish ends could be pursued by peaceful means. Certainly, this picture of humanity does begin to appear, with startling consistency, across Eurasia, wherever we also see coinage and philosophy appear.
China provides an unusually transparent case in point. Already in Confucius’s time, Chinese thinkers were speaking of the pursuit of profit as the driving force in human life. The actual term used was li, a word first used to refer to the increase of grain one harvests from a field over and above what one originally planted (the pictogram represents a sheaf of wheat next to a knife).55 From there it came to mean commercial profit, and thence, a general term for “benefit” or “payback.” The following story, which purports to tell the reaction of a merchant’s son named Lü Buwei on learning that an exiled prince was living nearby, illustrates the progression nicely: