MD

The incorporation of the great subsistence peasantries of South and East Asia was absolutely cataclysmic. The story differed from place to place, but the final death toll was enormous. India is the most dramatic example, in part because it occurred on the watch of British liberalism.

By the 1870s, the British had sponsored a great deal of development in India of canals and railroads designed to move export products from interior agricultural regions to the coast. They’d also pioneered large-scale irrigation to raise cotton, something that became urgent during the US Civil War and its resulting cotton famine.

The British claimed that because of the railroads, it would be impossible to have famines in India anymore. And in the past, India had severe famines, though like China, there was never a famine that wasn’t compensated in a sense by good crops from another part of the country.

So the British said, now that we have railroads, we’ll of course move grain from grain surplus regions to the regions affected by drought or flood. What in fact happened in 1876, when you had two monsoon failures in a row and famines in Western and Southern India, was that the railroads were used to take grain out of the famine regions. Because the domestic grain market had been largely privatized, grain merchants pulled grain out of the famine regions and stocked it in railroad centers to wait for the prices to rise and make a killing off of it.

On the village and town level, centuries of fighting drought had led to local water storage systems, small reservoirs and the like, which were managed through the paternalistic relations of the village, with the local nobility of different kinds responsible for the upkeep. So under the Mughal Dynasty [1526-1857], though famines occurred, there was nothing on the gigantic scale of the nineteenth century.

When the British came, they ignored local water storage entirely. They of course displaced much of the local nobility, and merchants and moneylenders often became the power on the village level, buying grain and export crops cheap to sell dear. When the famines came, they were more apt to try to profiteer in grain than relieve the starving peasantry.

Coupled with this was the fanatical, dogmatic British belief that whatever happened shouldn’t interfere with the operation of the market. The market should work to ultimately relieve the famine. It was the same policy they had applied in Ireland in the 1840s, which had led directly to the starvation and death of about a fifth of the Irish population. At a time when Ireland was exporting things like cattle and horses, people in the west of Ireland were reduced to cannibalism.

It was only reluctantly, and because of radical critics inside the British administration in India, that relief was provided, where you worked in order to be fed. But they chose the most grueling system of all, which was to require people to walk to the relief sites, which were generally railroad construction or canal digging projects requiring heavy labor.

People were compelled to walk twenty-five, thirty, sometimes forty miles from their homes, and people died like flies at the construction sites and along the way. They were already badly malnourished, and the expectation that they could walk this great distance and then undertake heavy labor simply doomed people. It was very similar to systems of coerced or forced labor in African colonies, or what the Germans practiced during World War II, where they literally worked people to death, Jewish people and many others.

And then on top of that you had the fact of India’s role in the British Empire — it was absolutely crucial to the British nineteenth-century economy. Britain ran a trade deficit in other parts of the world, but made up for it in Indian exports.

India also paid for the Indian Army, which allowed the British to send large bodies of troops into Asia, Africa, and eventually, during World War I, to Europe itself, without having to maintain a large army. The British professional army was very small. It was India that provided the crucial edge.

So this was a form of taxation, revenue taken out of the villages, and there was no compensation in the form of investment in local water storage, farm tools, or in education. Contrast this to Thailand, which actually invested fairly impressively in elementary education in the same period — one of the things that allowed it to escape colonialism.

So the combination of all these things — private grain market, a reluctant and eventually destructive system of outdoor relief, and the fact that the villages no longer possessed the same infrastructure or resources — led to a famine that grew out of a drought, which ended up killing somewhere between eight and twelve million people.

And then the same thing was repeated in the late 1890s, on a scale that was as large or larger than the first. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son was one of the American reporters on the scene. He gave very detailed accounts of how British policy, its reliance on markets and its reluctance to relieve people by simply rushing food to the sites where people were starving, again doomed millions of people.

Due to the famines in the 1870s and the 1890s, population growth slowed so much in some regions that it didn’t recover until Independence in 1948, after World War II. India’s always depicted as a teeming country, but these were very large-scale disasters. Regionally they were equivalent in terms of population loss and destruction of productive resources to the era of the Black Death in Medieval Europe, or even to the Mongol invasions.

But they occurred on the watch and through the deliberate policies of the most powerful industrial nation in modernity. Modernization, which Indians paid for with their own taxes, did little or nothing for ordinary Indians. In fact it had the perverse effect of abetting a speculative market in grain, converting an environmental event into a famine that caused mass death.