Whether on campaign or in garrison, they were inevitably accompanied by a range of different sorts of camp followers—petty traders, prostitutes, and hired servants—which, with the soldiers, seems to have been the very medium through which a cash economy had originally taken form.35 By Kautilya’s time, a few hundred years later, the state was inserting itself into every aspect of the process: Kautilya suggests paying soldiers apparently generous wages, then secretly replacing hawkers with government agents who could charge them twice the normal rates for supplies.
