The labor/land ratio and India's caste system

Arbeitspapier

This paper proposes that India's caste system and involuntary labor were joint responses by a nonworking landowning class to a low labor/land ratio in which the rules of the caste system supported the institution of involuntary labor. The hypothesis is tested in two ways: longitudinally, with data from ancient religious texts, and cross-sectionally, with twentieth-century statistics on regional population/land ratios linked to anthropological measures of caste-system rigidity. Both the longitudinal and cross-sectional evidence suggest that the labor/land ratio affected the caste system's development, persistence, and rigidity over time and across regions of India.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 6612

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Coercive Labor Markets ; Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs: General ; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
• Subject: labor-to-land ratio ; population ; involuntary labor ; immobility ; value of life ; marginal product of labor ; market wage ; Soziale Schicht ; Sklaverei ; Arbeitskräfte ; Boden ; Faktorintensität ; Eigentümerstruktur ; Arbeitsproduktivität ; Sozialgeschichte ; Indien

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Duleep, Harriet
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2012

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/62558
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET