British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew via The National Interest,
the first books to argue that intelligence should have a central role in war and peace were written not in classical Greece or Rome but in ancient China and the Indian subcontinent: The Art of War (Sunzi bingfa), traditionally ascribed to Confucius’s contemporary, the Chinese general Sun Tzu (c. 544-c.496 BC); and the Arthashastra, a lengthy manual on statecraft attributed to Kautilya (c. 350-c.283 BC), a senior advisor to the founder of the Mauryan dynasty in northern India.
The ancients still guide our thinking, Andrews notes.
In India today, the Arthashastra has a status similar to that of Aristotle’s Politics and Machiavelli’s The Prince in the West. Sun Tzu has been far more revered in Communist China than in any imperial dynasty since the third century AD. Even in the United States, he is more frequently quoted than any pre-twentieth-century Western writer on intelligence.
Source: Spying through the Ages | The National Interest
