Great civilisations: Built on trade, but wary of traders

In Sanskrit, a trader is a vanik. The word comes from the root pan to "bargain". From the same root comes the Panis of the Rig Veda, a people the Vedic poets clearly disliked. In hymn 10.108, the Panis hide cattle in a cave and Indra's dog Sarama is sent to find them. Poets call them stingy; people who do not share. So, the merchant enters Indian memory as the man who holds back what others want.

In Chinese, the merchant is shang. It is also the name of the Shang dynasty, which the Zhou overthrew around 1046 BCE. One old explanation says the defeated Shang people, stripped off land, took to trading to survive. Nobody can prove this. But notice the story people chose to tell. The trader as the loser who has to hustle.

China ranked people in four groups: scholar, farmer, artisan, merchant. Shi, nong, gong, shang. The idea is old, found in the Guanzi. The scholar governs. Farmer grows food. Artisan makes things. The merchant makes nothing. He buys low, sells high and keeps the difference. So, he goes to the bottom. The first Han emperor, Gaozu, took this seriously. Sima Qian tells us he banned merchants from wearing silk and from riding in carriages. He taxed them hard. Made them look poor, even if they were rich. Then the state ran short of money.


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In 81 BCE, the Han court held a famous debate on its salt and iron monopolies. On one side, Confucian scholars saying commerce ruins morals. On the other, finance minister Sang Hongyang, himself the son of a merchant from Luoyang. He won on money. They won on morals. China lived with that split for 2,000 years. By the Ming period, salt merchant families even had special quotas for the civil service exams. The system looked down on the trader and then let his son become a scholar.

Japan copied the ladder. Samurai, farmer, artisan, merchant. By the 1700s, rice brokers in Osaka were lending money to the lords who ranked above them. The samurai had the sword. The merchant had the account book. That is how merchants gained respectability.

India did not have one view. It had several, and they did not agree. The Bhagavad Gita, verse 9.32, declares that the Vaishya is born of papa-yoni (impure wombs, sinful wombs) just like women and Shudras. They can reach the highest goal if they take refuge in Krishna. Brahmins, with merchant patrons, drew on Sanskrit etymology (Nirukta) to find apologetic explanations for this. The hierarchy was clear. The merchant can reach God. The Brahmin just gets there more easily. Equality, with a queue. And this prompted many merchant families to adopt a pure vegetarian lifestyle, to purify themselves and rise up the caste hierarchy, and promote vegetarianism as spiritual diet.

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Manusmriti places the Vaishya among the twice-born, above the Shudra. He wears the sacred thread. He may study the Veda. Sounds generous. But look at his job list in Manu 1.90: look after cattle, give gifts, sponsor rituals, study, trade, lend, farm. Chapter 9 gets very practical. He must know the price of gems and pearls, wages of servants, languages of other lands. Then Manu 8.142 sets interest rates by caste of the borrower. Two percent a month for a Brahmin. Three for a Kshatriya. Four for a Vaishya. Five for a Shudra. Even your loan knows your birth.

Step outside the Brahmin texts and the mood changes completely. In Buddhist stories, the rich merchant, setthi, is a hero. Anathapindika buys the Jetavana grove for the Buddha by covering the ground with gold coins. Nobody calls him greedy. They call him generous. Jain monks lived almost entirely on the gifts of trading families, and those families built the marble temples of Mount Abu and Shatrunjaya. Monks do not farm. Someone has to feed them. Buddhists and Jains said thank you. Brahmin lawgivers and Confucian scholars did not.

That is the real pattern. Where kings and priests wrote the rules, and agriculture was the main source of income, the merchant was pushed down, because his wealth was a kind of power they could not control. Where monks depended on donors, the merchant was praised.