Britain graded its empire’s imperial fitness using A1 and C3 eugenic categories.

Evidence

Ambedkar here slips into an essentialist understanding of caste, race and morphology. He is drawing upon a British military categorisation of working class soldiers during the First World War. Then British Prime Minister David Lloyd George lamented: “How can Britain run an A1 empire with a C3 population?” Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (2006) argues that though the obsession with a deteriorating national health and physical fitness echoed fascist narratives, these eugenic categories were used as metaphors across the political spectrum in Britain. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1073

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing how far Ambedkar’s A1/C3 allusion works given that these were class-not-caste categorizations — is the analogy tight?