The great Sanskrit treatise on statecraft and political economy, traditionally attributed to Kautilya, the minister said to have helped found the Maurya Empire — a vast, coldly practical manual on how to run a state, fill its treasury, wage war, and keep a king alive through an apparatus of spies and surveillance, lost for centuries and rediscovered in the early twentieth century.
Trust no one. Set spies on your ministers, your generals, your queen, your own sons. Keep a list of poisons. Know the price of every grain in every market, because a full treasury is the root of all power. This is the advice of the Arthashastra, a Sanskrit handbook on running a state, rooted in early imperial India and colder than anything Machiavelli ever wrote. Lost for centuries, it surfaced again in 1905, and readers found a manual of power so unsentimental it seemed to belong to no age at all.