The rise of industrial capitalism thus rested on the maintenance of slavery in another part of the world, even though that slavery was no longer depe… - Eric Wolf

The essence of capital is its ability to mobilize social labor by buying labor power and setting it to work. This requires a market in which the capacity of human beings to work can be bought and sold like any other commodity: buyers of labor power offer wages, which sellers accept in return for a commodity, their own labor.

American wheat, sold in Europe at lower prices than the domestic product, brought on a crisis in European peasant agriculture, sending a migrant stream of ruined peasants to seek new sources of livelihood in the burgeoning Americas. Ironically many of them made the journey westward on the same ships that carried to Europe the wheat that proved their undoing.

To understand how caste works concretely, one must, however, look beyond kinship organization and ritual idiom to the political economy of caste.