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The last forty years have witnessed numerous publications on the economic history of early India, on themes ranging from landownership, revenue system and rural settlements to urbanization, crafts, money and trade. This heightened interest in the study of early Indian economy has been the result of the shift in focus from political or dynastic Indian history towards an understanding of material culture and economic life. Though there were earlier efforts in this direction the decisive shift came only with the influential writings of D.D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma in the 1950s and 1960s. In their writings they began to explain change with reference to environment, technology and economic life. Ancient or early India came to be visualized not as a static epoch, but in terms of stages in relation to the dominant social and economic patterns prevailing during the various periods. Early India is broadly divided into two phases i.e., the early historical and the early medieval. While the first extends up to and includes the Gupta period, the second covers the succeeding six to seven centuries. Within these two phases a number of other stages have also been worked out. To elaborate, while the Age of the Buddha is seen to have been characterized by peasant production and urbanization, the Mauryan period is perceived to have been marked by state control of the economy. Between the middle of the twentieth century and now, there have been changes in the ways of seeing and explaining the economic history of early India. Perspectives tend to vary depending on the kind of questions historians ask, the range of sources they use and the methods they adopt. Conventionally the Mauryan economy, deriving from the Harappan civilizations, has been characterized in terms of centralized state control over all sectors of the economy. However, recent research, by moving away from traditional treatment of the sources and looking at the regional material cultures brought to light by archaeology, has modified our understanding. Archaeology has revealed the coexistence and interaction of cultures at different levels of technological and social development. Prosperity during the said period was spread largely over Gangetic northern India and its fringes. It is being increasingly recognized that empires by their very nature accommodated varied social formations and differentiated spaces, accounting for the uneven depth of administration across regions. Similarly, the post-8 Historiography, Environment and Economy Mauryan centuries instead of being identified only with urban growth, networks of trade and money economy are also beginning to be understood in terms of different stages of state formation and agrarian expansion in regions outside the Ganga valley.
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