The World of #Urnabhih 21 The First Globalisation. Were the Mauryans the first globalisers? Robert Kaplan, an international strategic thinker in his 2002 book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos says, “The empire established by Chandragupta, with the help of Kautilya, guaranteed security over an extraordinarily large area in which trade flourished. It was an area, because of the slowness of land and sea travel, (which) was …equivalent to today’s entire world.” This issue is dealt with in the book To Uphold the World’ by Bruce Rich , an international policy and environment commentator and I discuss some of it below. The India of the time was one of the first examples of a large region undergoing large scale rapid technological, social and political change. Urban populations were growing and international trade routes proliferated. Economic expansion and integration within the sub-continent ( and up to Afghanistan) were accompanied by greater specialization in occupations, the rise of the precursors of merchant banking and new forms of financial management, detailed and explained in the Arthashastra. The originality of Chanakya in this regard continues to be discovered. The Arthashastra, for example, describes the world’s first custom’s tariff, one that a contemporary Indian analyst argues was, 2300 years in advance, fully in conformity with the customs valuation principles of current international trade as codified in the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT)! The Mauryan Empire was a multicultural mix of Persian, Greek, Scythian, Gurkha, Cambodian and Bactrians among others. As I have noted in a previous post, the wars of the Mauryans had reverberations in all of Eurasia. To put it in international perspective, between 800 and 200 bce there was a unique period of worldwide psychological and spiritual transformation, something dubbed as the Axial Age by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. It was literally the axis or hinge of history, marking the coming of age of much of the world’s population in the world’s major civilizations; China, India, Greece and the Near East. Although many peoples and cultures initially lay outside the Axial cultures( the relatively uncivilized people of northern Europe for example), Axial religions and ethics over the next millennia came ot be the core values of nearly all the peoples on the planet. If the Axial period was the ethical coming of age of humanity, the Mauryans were one of its greatest manifestations.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 14:19:06 +0000
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