10 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Royal purchases were fixed by a Royal valuer who would “also assess the merchants for the duty of a twentieth, presumably ad valorem, on each consignment of native merchandise, and of a tenth ad valorem plus a sample, on each consignment imported from overseas Finally, he would have to assess merchants for their specific commutation of the “rajaksaya” viz. one article per month sold to the king at a certain discount”’
Later on however prices came to be fixed: for Manu says that the king on every 5th or 9th day fixed the rates for the purchase and sale of marketable commodities.
The introduction of money in India whether it was borrowed or invented at home is a matter of great controversy : but whatever may be said on this, it is true that the use of money in India was early known for “the whole of the Buddhist literature testifies to the fact that the ancient systems of simple barter as well as of reckoning value of cows, or rice measures had for the most part been replaced by the use of metal currency, carrying well understood and generally accepted exchange value”. Currency counted of coins but was not regulated by Royal authority. There was gold coinage for the most part and “all marketable commodities and services had a value expressible in terms of cash”. Banking was not very highly developed—there was no taboo on loaning of money and according to Gautama interest was sought in six different ways. [1]
With such high type of economic development it is but natural that there should be commercial expansion of colonization by the Early Hindoos. Historians however have been very reluctant to accept the fact : they have either judging the present by the present rule upon the entire Hindoo population as incapable people or have exerted their utmost ingenuity to discount any evidence that antagonises with their preconceived bias. Isolation of India has been a trump card with them and they use it as often as they can. Environmental conditions do delimit the activity
1 The information on the early Economic Organization of India has been borrowed from the article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Researches for 1901, p. 859 by Caroline Foley Rhys Davids M. A.