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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?
"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?
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