The continuing significance of Oliver Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race

Despite being a major study that compares India’s caste system to the system of racial stratification in the United States, Oliver C. Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race continues to be largely under-appreciated and under-explored by scholars of both systems. This article re-evaluates Cox’s contributions to social theory by putting him into conversation with Isabel Wilkerson, Bhimrao Ambedkar, and Gunnar Myrdal. Cox, like Ambedkar, concluded that, despite occasional similarities, caste and racial systems were products of two distinct pasts with distinct objectives. Whereas the caste system emerged from a variant of an estate society akin to European feudalism, the modern racial system is an outgrowth of capitalism, according to Cox. However, what Cox failed to consider in his theory of the caste system is the degree to which its expansion and institutionalization over the Indian subcontinent were also modern phenomena.