How the British Empire Starved Millions of Indians

[Peter]

I recently met up with one of the masterminds of the Green Revolution - a man who was mentored by Norman Borlaug himself for decades. He told me that when the Green Revolutionaries first got to India, they found that the Indians were growing all of the wrong crops and crop varieties in all of the wrong places. Oh, those stupid Indians! You have to wonder how an ancient civilization managed to make it to present day without starving into oblivion if it can't feed itself.
As it turns out, once upon a time, India could feed itself. The book Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis tells the story of how the British robbed the Indians of their wealth, wrecked their agricultural system (in order to serve the needs of industrial Britain), and then watched as millions of Indian people starved. The book also covers other countries - mainly China and Brazil, but also African nations, and the Philippines. Each nation has a similar story to tell, but for this diary I am going to focus on India.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, there was a series of abnormally strong El Nino cycles. Famine erupted around the world, in each of the places I named above. Some of the disaster is due to El Nino, but the magnitude of the disaster - the difference between a drought and a famine - is manmade.

This story is very relevant now, sadly. Except now it's the U.S. (on behalf of multinational corporations) who is plundering the developing world.

Famine in Pre-British India

An 1878 study published in the Journal of the Statistical Society found that there were 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared to 17 famines in 2000 years of Indian rule. And that doesn't even count two more major famines, in 1888 and in the late 1890s. How can this be?
Prior to British rule, Indians kept larger village-level grain reserves and they were generally free of grain price speculation.

According to the book, Mogul rulers saw protecting peasants as their obligation, and used 4 methods for relief:

Embargoes on grain exports
Anti-speculative price regulation
Tax relief
Distribution of free food without a forced labor component

A very important component of Mogul famine-prevention was their investment in well construction via generous tax breaks for anyone who built a well. In another example, under Maratha rule, between 1170 and 1820 only three bad seasons hit Maratha lands. The rulers dealt with it by forcing local elites to feed the poor. Furthermore, Indian rulers tied taxation rates to actual harvest. While this may sound similar to our idea of an income tax today (you are only taxed on what you earn), the British drastically changed the system of taxation, to the detriment of the Indian people.

La Vida Locavore:: How the British Empire Starved Millions of Indians - And Why It Is Still Important Today

 

[Peter]

Setting the Stage for Disaster
So what did the British do, leading up to the eve of the first famine in 1877? Step one was an enormous capital drain out of India to England.

Robbing the Indian People Blind
First of all, they forced Indians, and the Indian government in particular, to buy British-made goods.

India, of course, was the greatest captive market in world history, rising from first to third place among consumers of British exports in the quarter century after 1870. "British rulers, writers Marcello de Cecco in his study of the Victorian gold standard system, "deliberately prevented Indians from becoming skilled mechanics, refused contracts to Indian firms which produced materials that could be got from England, and generally hindered the formation of an autonomous industrial structure in India." p. 298
By 1910, India purchased 40% of the UK's finished cotton goods and 60% of its exports of electrical products, railway equipment, books, and pharmaceuticals.

Add to that massive exports FROM India, even during the middle of famines when millions of Indians were starving. The opening of the Suez canal improved the economics of exporting goods from India to the UK, and exports from India increased eightfold between 1840 and 1886. In addition to opium, India exported indigo, cotton wheat, and rice. These crops were grown in monocultures, supplanting acres upon acres of subsistence grains.

Between 1987 and 1900, years that included the worst famines in Indian history, annual grain exports increased from 3 million to 10 million tons: a quantity that, as Romesh Dutt pointed out, was equivalent to the annual nutrition of 25 million people. By the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britian's wheat consumption as well as allowing London grain merchants to speculate during shortages on the Continent. - p. 299
What must be considered in addition to that is the role the Gold Standard played in the bankrupting of India. Britain itself adopted the Gold Standard in 1821 and at that time, the rest of the world used silver or both silver and gold. In 1871, Germany shifted to the Gold Standard and the US soon followed. So did the rest of Europe and Japan. England insisted that India remain on its silver backed currency until 1893, when it began to move to gold. The result of this shift was an immense depreciation of silver. That meant that the British were able to buy low and sell high to the Indians... and the Indians suffered from the reverse situation.

If you had a pound's worth of Indian rupees in 1873, by 1895, they were only worth 64 pence. This devaluation of the rupee cost Indians an extra 105 million pounds between 1874 and 1894. Unfortunately for Indian peasants, who stored their savings in silver ornaments, the Gold Standard store 25% of the value of their savings. During this time, the price of Indian grains remained stable for the British while increasing rapidly for the Indians. The inflation was instrumental in helping the Brits convince Indian peasants to grow export crops.

As Sir William Wederburn pointed out: "Indian peasants in general had three safeguards against famine: (a) domestic hoards of grain; (b) family ornaments; and (c) credit with the village moneylender, who was also the grain dealer. But towards the close of the nineteenth century all were lost by the peasants." - p. 303-304

 

[Peter]

Taxes
Put quite literally, the British taxed the Indian people to death. The reason for much of the taxation was England's military adventures around the developing world. India, instead of the British people, paid the cost of these expensive campaigns. During British rule, India never spent less than 25% of its annual budget on the British army.

The most significant change between Indian rules and British rule was the way in which taxes were assessed. Under the British, taxes were set based on your land's average expected harvest. The colonial budget, mostly financed by taxes on farm land, gave less than 2% to agriculture and education and barely 4% to public works of all kinds. A third went to army and police. By making taxes high and by fixing them to average production without regard for changes in weather, they made sure that a certain number of taxpayers would lose their land every year. A farmer would have his grain impounded upon harvest and then had to borrow money to pay taxes in order to eat from his own harvest.

In one of the top wheat-growing districts that I will discuss later, Narmada, the government reassessed land values in 1887 when the area was at the height of a wheat boom. Land values were sky high, so taxes and rents went up as well. This worked well for a few years, as moneylenders gave the landowners more credit. Then, in 1891-92, the British suddenly switched to wheat from Argentina and elsewhere in India. When the rains stopped in the mid-1890's, Narmada's wheat growers had huge debts, high taxes, and no market for their wheat.

the revenue collectors' inflexible claims on a high "average" harvest "compelled the peasants to cultivate marginal lands, and also forced them to 'mine' their land in a situation where most of them had few investible resources left to improve its productivity. - p.307

La Vida Locavore:: How the British Empire Starved Millions of Indians - And Why It Is Still Important Today

 

[Peter]

Victorian Enclosures
Prior to British rule, Indians augmented their crops with free things they could gather - grass to feed animals and make rope, wood and dung for fuel, leaves and forest debris for fertilizer, clay for plastering houses, and clean water. These were most important to the poorest households, where they were often literally the difference between life and death. The British transferred these resources from the village community to the state.

In 1870, India's forests were enclosed by "armed agents of the state." The Brits needed the forests for shipbuilding, urban construction, railroads, and fuel.

The British also dissolved an important relationship ("ecological interdependence") between nomadic pastoralists and farmers. In the dry western interior of India, large areas of uncultivated grassland separated settled communities of farmers and bands of nomads. After 1857, the British began a "relentless campaign" against nomads, who they labeled "criminal tribes." Although the agroecology of this area was dependent on the symbiosis of peasant and nomad, valley agriculture and hillslope pastoralism, the Brits' voracious appetite for taxe revenue generated irresistible pressure on the peasants to convert "waste" into taxable agriculture. (p. 328-329)

Traditionally, farmers practiced extensive crop rotation and long fallow periods. This required large farms and lots of manure, which was impossible to maintain with more people on the land (living on smaller farms) and fewer cattle. The expert nomad cattlebreeders were "deliberately squeezed out of the economy." (p. 329)

Between 1843-1873, estimated cattle population fell by 5 million. Numbers fell more during the droughts, and by 1896-97, women were pulling ploughs. Fewer cattle meant less manure. The soil converted from pasture could only produce 1/3 as much millet as the soil traditionally used for crops and ultimately became so degraded it was useless for agriculture or even grazing.

Cotton depletes soil nutrients very rapidly and must be rotated with nitrogen fixing legumes. However, crop rotation became impossible due to taxes and debt, forcing people to maximize short term income at the expense of long term soil fertility.

Irrigation
The British also upset traditional Indian water management, by enforcing British common law, which said that the landowner also owns water rights. The result was water scarcity for those who didn't own land.

When the British did finance irrigation projects, they were concentrated in areas important for export crops like cotton, opium, sugar cane, and wheat. By 1921, only 11% of cropped areas were irrigated. Not to mention that the irrigation projects done by the Brits were ecological disasters.

They might have produced short-term bonanzas in wheat and cane, but at huge, unforeseen social costs. Without proper underground drainage, for example, the capillary action of irrigation brought toxic alkali salts ot the surface, leading to such extensive saline efflorescence... that the superindented of the Geological Survey warned in 1877 that once-fertile plains were on the verge of becoming a "howling wilderness." Indeed, fifteen years later it was estimated that somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 square miles of farmland - an immense area - was blighted by salinity "with 'valuable' crops isolated in clumps upon its surface." - p. 333
Where the new irrigation went alongside the old, traditional system, the new system undermined the old. This led to well collapsing or water tables falling and wells becoming brackish and unpotable. Canals also blocked natural drainage, leading to breeding grounds for mosquitoes and high rates of malaria. Also, taxes were so high on irrigated land, making it impossible to use it for anything but cash crops (if you use it at all). Villagers often abandoned irrigated fields for lower-taxed unirrigated fields. Also, peasants who built their own wells were taxed on them. Modern studies of industrial vs. indigenous irrigation in India found that indigenous irrigation systems avoided the problems of salinization and mosquito borne disease. Indigenous systems are more efficient and supply more stable yields over the long term. However, these indigenous irrigation systems were neglected and fell into decay in the years leading up to the famines.

La Vida Locavore:: How the British Empire Starved Millions of Indians - And Why It Is Still Important Today

 

[Peter]

Wheat
Narmada Valley,in Central Provicnes (today part of Madhya Pradesh), had a wheat boom from 1861-1890. Local handicrafts were ruined by cheap imports that flooded central India after the construction of the railroad. Brits aggressively pushed landowners into commercial production of cotton & especially wheat. Farmers were told to save themselves by growing soft wheat preferred in Britain instead of millet and gram. In main export districts, wheat displaced 2/3 of acreage once used for subsistence grains.

However, the high tax demands drained the money from the area, and small landholders defaulted on debt to moneylenders, losing their land to the moneylenders. By 1889, this had happened to more than half of the land in the Central Provinces. Absentee landowners did not reinvest money into irrigation or cattle.

Even more than in the cotton districts, the Narmada wheat boom was built upon precarious climatic and ecological foundations. - p. 319
High demand for wheat in 1880s pushed people into inferior soil (traditionally used for hardy millets) where harvests only succeeded due to unusually good monsoons from 1884-1894. Railroads used up the lumber in the forests, and wheat used up pasture lands that traditionally fed cattle. This made bulls too expensive to keep, leading to a manure shortage (which was made worse by the high price of coal and the subsequent use of manure as fuel) that increased the rate at which the soil was depleted. The government also did not do any irrigation projects in the area. Remember also that just as Narmada's exports boomed, the British changed their preferred source of wheat to Argentina and elsewhere in India. The people of Narmada were left without a market. Just as the people of Berar went naked, the people of Narmada lived on imported millet and rice at the beginning of the 20th century.

Wheat Exports from the Central Provinces (Millions of Rupees)
1871-76 3.4
1876-81 7.2
1881-86 14.9
1886-91 16.6
1891-96 4.3

La Vida Locavore:: How the British Empire Starved Millions of Indians - And Why It Is Still Important Today

 

[Peter]

The Famines
Between 1876 and 1879, an estimated 6.1-10.3 million people died. A second (smaller) famine occurred in 1888-1891. A third famine hit India from 1896-1902, killing an estimated 6.1-19.0 million people.

The descriptions of the famine are simply unspeakable. At this point the stories told in India, China, and Brazil have blurred together in my mind. Stories of mothers swapping their children because neither could bear to eat their own. Stories of wild animals eating weakened, starving people in the streets. Stories of pigeons eating spilled grains from railroad cars guarded by armed guards as starving people looked on. In some places, people literally ate their homes and their beds so that when cold weather came, they had no protection nor any food leftover. In these famines, often epidemic disease (cholera, typhoid, malaria) accompanied starvation.

And all the while, India was producing and exporting plenty of food. In areas that were not affected by shortages and drought, often grain prices went up due to speculation, pricing out the poor so that a famine occurred all the same. During the first famine, 1876-1878, India's wheat exports to the UK increased from 308 (1000s of Quarters) in 1875 to 757 in 1876 to 1409 in 1877. Only in 1878 did exports decrease to 420.

A century earlier, Adam Smith said (during a terrible Bengal famine in 1770), "famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of death." In this frame of mind, the viceroy of India ordered "there is to be no intererence of any kind on the part of the Government with the object of reducing the price of food." (p. 31) Quoting other great minds of the time like Thomas Malthus and ideologies like social Darwinism, the viceroy made the case that aid to the Indian people would practically hurt them more than it helped. He and others frequently parroted talking points we in modern day America have heard too many times, saying that the lazy Indians did not know how to work hard and if they were given aid in times of drought and famine, they would expect a free handout during the good times as well.




The difference between now and then is that then there were tens of millions of people dying as the government made these proclamations.

The aid that was given by the British was done in a way that makes life in a Nazi concentration camp look good. To make sure that people would not show up to work and slack off, the British imposed "distance tests" by forcing people to walk at least 10 miles from their homes to reach work camps. At the work camps, they could perform heavy labor and receive food. However, in some cases, the amount of food provided by at the work camps was literally fewer calories per day than was provided to prisoners at Nazi concentration camps.

This is the calamity that set the stage for the modern day "Third World." Today there are an estimated 1 billion people going hungry, more than ever before. We must ask ourselves whether or not we are making human misery worse and then standing helplessly by as we watch people suffer, as the British did a century ago.

La Vida Locavore:: How the British Empire Starved Millions of Indians - And Why It Is Still Important Today


If anyone does not have the time to read all the sub articles, then this part would sum up the entire article. This is the piece de resistance of the article.

 

[Peter]

I hope DFIans realize the true nature of British rule in India. While it is true they built the railways,introduced modern education etc the British had always hated us. They were no different from people like Cortex who annihilated the native populations of Mesoamerica.

Also people who compare Hitler with Churchill should have a look at post #6.

 

[Peter]

The Great Famine of 1876–78 (also the Southern India famine of 1876–78 or the Madras famine of 1877) was a famine in India that began in 1876 and affected south and southwestern India (Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Bombay) for a period of two years. In its second year famine also spread north to some regions of the Central Provinces and the North-Western Provinces, and to a small area in the Punjab.[1] The famine ultimately covered an area of 257,000 square miles (670,000 km2) and caused distress to a population totaling 58,500,000.[1] The death toll from this famine is estimated to be in the range of 5.5 million people.

Preceding events
In part, the Great Famine may have been caused by an intense drought resulting in crop failure in the Deccan Plateau.[2] However, the commodification of grain, and the cultivation of alternate cash crops also may have played a role,[3] as could have the export of grain by the colonial government; during the famine the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat.[4]

The famine occurred at a time when the colonial government was attempting to reduce expenses on welfare. Earlier, in the Bihar famine of 1873–74, severe mortality had been avoided by importing rice from Burma. However, the Government of Bengal and its Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Richard Temple, were criticized for excessive expenditure on charitable relief.[5] Sensitive to any renewed accusations of excess in 1876, Temple, who was now Famine Commissioner for the Government of India,[1] insisted not only on a policy of laissez faire with respect to the trade in grain,[6] but also on stricter standards of qualification for relief and on more meager relief rations.[1] Two kinds of relief were offered: "relief works" for able-bodied men, women, and working children, and gratuitous (or charitable) relief for small children, the elderly, and the indigent.

Great Famine of 1876–78 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Peter]

Famine and relief

The insistence on more rigorous tests for qualification, however, led to strikes by "relief workers" in the Bombay presidency.[1] Furthermore, in January 1877, Temple reduced the wage for a day's hard work in the relief camps in Madras and Bombay[8]—this Temple wage consisted of 1 pound (0.45 kg) of grain plus one anna for a man, and a slightly reduced amount for a woman or working child,[9] for a "long day of hard labour without shade or rest."[10] The rationale behind the reduced wage, which was in keeping with a prevailing belief of the time, was that any excessive payment might create dependency (or "demoralization" in contemporaneous usage) among the famine-afflicted population.[8]

Temple's recommendations were opposed by a number of officials, including William Digby and the physician W. R. Cornish, Sanitary Commissioner for the Madras Presidency.[11] Cornish argued for a minimum of 1.5 pounds (0.68 kg) of grain and, in addition, supplements in the form of vegetables and protein, especially if, the individuals were performing strenuous labor in the relief works.[11] However, Lytton supported Temple, who argued that "everything must be subordinated to the financial consideration of disbursing the smallest sum of money... "[12]

Eventually, in March 1877, the provincial government of Madras, increased the ration halfway towards Cornish's recommendations, to 1.25 pounds (0.57 kg) of grain and 1.5 ounces (43 g) of protein in the form of daal (pulses).[11] Meanwhile, many more people had succumbed to the famine.[13] In other parts of India, such as the United Provinces, where relief was meager, the resulting mortality was high.[13] In the autumn and winter of 1878, an epidemic of malaria killed many more who were already weakened by malnutrition.[13]

By early 1877, Temple proclaimed that he had put "the famine under control". Digby noted that "a famine can scarcely be said to be adequately controlled which leaves one-fourth of the people dead.[12]

All in all, the Government of India spent Rs. 8 1/30 million in relieving 700 million units (1 unit = relief for 1 person for 1 day) in British India and, in addition, another Rs. 7.2 million in relieving 72 million units in the princely states of Mysore and Hyderabad.[13] Revenue (tax) payments to the amount of Rs. 6 million were either not enforced or postponed until the following year, and charitable donations from Great Britain and the colonies totaled Rs. 8.4 million.[13] However, this cost was minuscule per capita; for example, the expenditure incurred in the Bombay Presidency was less than one-fifth of that in the Bihar famine of 1873–74, which affected a smaller area and did not last as long.[10] It has been argued that British policy destroyed the ancient systems of agriculture favoring the cultivation of cash crops for the world markets to the expense of the needs of the local population. In desperation many sold their children for food and resort to cannibalism.

The Great Drought of the 1870s was the first out of three famines that occurred in India during Queen Victoria's rule.

As the famine was taking place, Lord Lytton, the Vice Roy of India was engaged in a fabulous celebration with over 60 000 guests to be wined and fed for the coronation of Queen Victoria as the Empress of India. Of course, the participants of this banquet were not the common Indians but the Princes and Satraps who collaborated with the British Empire. Lytton set a relief plan in which no one could be fed within ten miles of their residence. Then Lytton implemented camps of hard labor for those who get a jar of food.

Great Famine of 1876–78 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Peter]

Famine in Mysore State[edit]
Two years before the famine of 1876, heavy rain destroyed ragi crops in Kolar and Bangalore, and scant rainfall the following year resulted in drying up of lakes, affecting food stock. As a result of the famine, the population of the state decreased by 874,000 (in comparison with the 1871 census).

Sir Richard Temple was sent by the British India Government as Special Famine Commissioner to oversee the relief works of the Mysore government. In order to deal with the famine, the government of Mysore, started relief kitchens. A large number of people came into Bangalore, when relief was available. These people had to work on the Bangalore-Mysore railway line in exchange for food and grains. The Mysore government imported large quantities of grain from the neighbouring British ruled Madras Presidency. Grazing in forests was allowed temporarily, and new tanks were constructed and old tanks repaired. The Dewan of Mysore State C Rangacharlu, in his Dasara speech estimated the cost to the state at 160 lakhs, with the state incurring a debt of 80 lakhs.

Aftermath[edit]
The mortality in the famine was in the range of 5.5 million people.[15] The excessive mortality and the renewed questions of "relief and protection" that were asked in its wake, led directly to the constituting of the Famine Commission of 1880 and to the eventual adoption of the Provisional Famine Code in British India.[13] After the famine, a large number of agricultural laborers and handloom weavers in South India emigrated to British tropical colonies to work as indentured laborers in plantations.[16] The excessive mortality in the famine also neutralized the natural population growth in the Bombay and Madras presidencies during the decade between the first and second censuses of British India in 1871 and 1881 respectively.[17] The famine lives on in the Tamil and other literary traditions.[18] A large number of Kummi folk songs describing this famine have been documented.[19]

The Great Famine was to have a lasting political impact on events in India. Among the British administrators in India who were unsettled by the official reactions to the famine and, in particular by the stifling of the official debate about the best form of famine relief, were William Wedderburn and A. O. Hume.[20] Less than a decade later, they would found the Indian National Congress and, in turn, influence a generation of Indian nationalists. Among them were Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt for whom the Great Famine would become a cornerstone of the economic critique of the British Raj

Great Famine of 1876–78 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Peter]

 

[Peter]

:weep:

 

[Peter]

 

[Peter]

 

[jouni]

The west must be evil in nature. That is the only conclusion you can draw from here.

 

[Peter]

The west must be evil in nature. That is the only conclusion you can draw from here.

No the British were evil. Only a fool/troll would view the entire west and British as one.

 

[Peter]

The great Queen Bitchtoria nay Victoria and the Famine.

 

[Peter]

 

[Peter]

India was the making of the British empire. Its diligent subjects earned Britain its fortune, and many say that India's separation was perhaps the primary cause of Briatin's fall from grace.

Prior to the Sepoy rebellion, India was the "property" of the East India "Company" (not many companies have their own flags and armies), but after that it formally came under control of the British state.

So, India was a tidy earner. That is, until there was a famine.

Britain duly appointed a famine commissioner, whose primary response was to reduce the grain wages to the workers substantially. His rationale was that it would make people work harder.

In 1879, the commissioner declared that the famine was under control. Others pointed out, however, that ""a famine can scarcely be said to be adequately controlled which leaves one-fourth of the people dead". This decision was later reversed.

The famine ultimately killed somewhere in the region of 5 to 8 million people, and lingered long in the memories of Indian revolutionaries.

Here are our administrators in action, in a contemporary engraving in the Illustrated London News.

https://punchaday.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/the-great-indian-famine-of-1877-79/

 

[Peter]