The Science of Wealth

摘要

Kautilya's Arthashastra, the oldest extant Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, law, and economy (fourth century B.C.E - second century C.E.), was discovered by modern scholars only in 1905, and the first English translation appeared in 1915. Hitherto introductions to the Arthashastra have focused either on Kautilya's Machiavellian politics, or on controversies around the unity of its authorship and its date of composition. More recently, the treatise has been eulogized in popular literature as a panacea for complex problems confronting the global economy. However, it has not received serious attention from economists. The book under review, by a distinguished historian, breaks the stereotypical scholarship on the Arthashastra and invites the attention of economists.