The Indian caste system is often described as a religious hierarchy, but historians trace much of its economic rigidity to colonial land-revenue policies the British introduced after 1765 — which locked land rights into tax records for the first time

The most consequential document in the history of Indian caste may well have been a tax receipt. The Company was chasing revenue, not sociologyThe East India Company did not sail into Bengal with a research agenda. Once it secured the right to collect land revenue in Bengal during the 1760s, that revenue became the entire business model, and collecting it meant deciding, on paper, exactly who owned the land it came from. Economists Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer compared Indian districts by the revenue system the British had assigned them, publishing the results in the American Economic Review. Caste returns to the census in 2027India’s next census will count caste for every community, the first time that has happened since 1931.