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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   6179 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

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How am I to make sense of the fact that the castes in India have been highly endogamous for the past two thousand years and that the pre-industrial world was Malthusian? Shouldn't that have resulted in the gradual replacement of the lower castes with the upper castes, or did the upper castes not actually receive any material benefit as a result of their higher status?

Gregory Clark has argued that in England, the upper classes did replace the lower classes as a result of their material advantage. But they did not form distinct endogamous castes, so most of the descendants of the upper classes fell into the lower classes and there was some limited mixing between the classes. But India, my understanding is that the Brahmins didn't become Shudras, so why didn't the Shudras go extinct?

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Simply put, India never had the kind of climate & geography imposed population pressure that Northern Europe faced.

Then what limited population growth? Small differences in growth rates quickly result in massive population differences; a fertility rate of 2.2 instead of 2.0 results in 45-fold difference in population size in 40 generations. So I don't buy the argument that the abundance of the land made any difference.

Third, unlike Europe, the upper castes were not landlords. Mercenary soldiers & Brahmins did not have monopoly over the crop-output. This means that a drought/famine does not cause disproportionate population replacement among the lower castes vs the upper castes.

So, you're saying they weren't richer. What made them higher status then? Was there no material benefit to being in an upper caste?

It's possible there was significant replacement within Sudhras themselves, and we would be none-the-wiser.

This is the explanation I've been leaning towards, but are there no estimates for their historical population sizes? It does seem like there are a lot of Brahmins given that they are supposed to be priests. How many priests do you need?

So, you're saying they weren't richer. What made them higher status then? Was there no material benefit to being in an upper caste?

If we consider being a rich landowner the epitome of status in a poorly-industrialised society like India, than the link between upper caste and status becomes a bit fuzzy.

In Punjab Jatt Sikhs tend to dominate. In Tamil Nadu I hear a lot of castes who are considered traditionally as Shudras dominate but this does not make Tamil Nadu the land of caste egalitarianism that some imagine it as. They have the highest rates of caste endogamy in India and have plenty of news worthy cases of discrimination among themselves, just that you cannot plaster Brahmin in the headlines. Different regions have different dominating castes.

From my own experience there seem to be as many rich Brahmin land owners as broke subsistence farmers. My extended family leans towards the latter. To make an analogy to the US, we were trailer trash and we sure felt privileged.

"Why didn't people who did all the farming and labor not get completely replaced by people who do no farming or physical labor?"

Googling a bit there actually were some time periods and regions in which Brahmins farmed or fought. But they typically didn't and were typically a small priestly class. I don't think that the majority of agricultural laborers are necessarily at risk of replacement by a small group of priests.

Why not? If they were richer, why wouldn't they grow until they replaced the entire population?

If the taboo against performing manual agricultural labor by a member of the scholarly class is strong enough, then their less capable children will simply be bad scholars rather than falling into the lower classes of society as they did in England where the class barriers were much weaker.

The question is not "Why didn't they fall into the lower classes?" but "Why did they not outbreed the lower classes?".

Why do you assume that wealth or social status was directly correlated with fertility in every pre-industrial society? That may have been the case in many places, but certainly not in the classical Mediterranean nor in the many cases of market-dominant minorities such as the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Parsis in India, Jews in Europe, or Sogdians in Tang Dynasty China.

Indian religions in particular seem to promote an ascetic path as the most holy way to live, and the individuals who chose such a path with its attendant celibacy seem disproportionately likely to have been from the priestly castes. The practical economic benefits of having additional children are also specific to an agricultural lifestyle in which they can perform manual labor and act as surrogate parents for their younger siblings. If your children are religiously forbidden from engaging in those activities then they are an economic drain rather than an asset, and are diverting the time and resources your servants could be spending expanding your property or sponsoring temples. If you are, furthermore, entrusted with the transmission of sacred texts that must be memorized and recited perfectly, you are likely better off instructing a smaller number of children to make sure they each get it right.

If there are too many scholars and elites, then that's a recipe for internal conflict and the downfall of the state. There should be a fixed ratio of elite to worker in pre-industrial society. Most people have to do agricultural work after all.

But what keeps it fixed? The Malthusian model is not consistent with a caste maintaining both a material advantage and not outgrowing the poorer castes, unless it is losing people to those lower castes, which we know from genetic studies was very rare.

The more elites there are, the less material benefit they get from the finite resource base. See all the second and third sons of Spanish nobility - they couldn't inherit the estate so they had to do other things. Military careers, becoming conquistadors, the church... They didn't replace the peasantry, how could they?

If state X has too many elites, there will be some kind of automatic stabilizer that fixes this. The elites compete more with eachother for the positions they want - internal conflict, decadence and collapse of the state. It gets conquered and the ratios will be fixed. Maybe when the Muslims showed up they killed much of the Hindu elite caste and restored balance. Or they'll find some way to get rid of excess elites in foreign wars or whatever. Maybe disease and inbreeding get rid of most of the excess. We observe that not everyone is an elite, there must be some mechanism that forces this.

Obviously something is preventing them from replacing the lower castes. The question is what.

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