The Famine of 1770 in Bengal. This is a chapter from the book, The Unseen World, and Other Essays. It was written by John Fiske and published in 1869.In this chapter, Fiske provides his explanations for the catastrophic famine resulting from British rule in the previous century. The Bengal famine of 1770 was a disaster that between 1769 and 1773 affected the lower Gangetic plain of India. The famine caused the deaths of an estimated 10 million people, approximately one-third of the population at the time.
From the site:
Throughout the entire course of recorded European history, from the remote times of which the Homeric poems preserve the dim tradition down to the present moment, there has occurred no calamity at once so sudden and of such appalling magnitude as the famine which in the spring and summer of 1770 nearly exterminated the ancient civilization of Bengal. It presents that aspect of preternatural vastness which characterizes the continent of Asia and all that concerns it. The Black Death of the fourteenth century was, perhaps, the most fearful visitation which has ever afflicted the Western world. But in the concentrated misery which it occasioned the Bengal famine surpassed it, even as the Himalayas dwarf by comparison the highest peaks of Switzerland. It is, moreover, the key to the history of Bengal during the next forty years; and as such, merits, from an economical point of view, closer attention than it has hitherto received.
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2 comments:
This is an amazing blog. I'm pretty glad to find this. I am a student of history (now doing my graduation). I live in India. I am writing a paper on 1770 Bengal Famine at present and suddenly came across this blog. Thank you sir for the information you have provided. I'll be a regular reader of your blog from now.
It sounds like this text is the latest attempt for Anglo or pro-Anglo scholars to mitigate what was nothing less than a massive fascist genocide. As recent as ten years ago, similar scholarship unequivocally blamed inept Indian administrators. The latest deception is to claim mismanagement though not malevolence by British officials. The reality is, and not particularly controversial, that this land had a more complex and productive economy than anything else previously witnessed by Europeans, and within ten years of British rule, was devastated into abject poverty, never to rise out of poverty again. To discuss this famine and not focus on the militarized and systematic extraction of taxes from a people rapidly descending into poverty and famine is disingenuous classic western self-deception. Even in ancient times, famine was a political economic event....not a matter as simple as weather, crop yields, Bligh, etc.
How does an entity - in this case a monopolistic band of merchants, the East India Company - extract taxes from starving people? If a man cant or wont pay his taxes, you take his virgin daughter and publicly gang rape her before cutting her breasts off. This was the true nature of the British presence in India. Is it rational to think the British were benevolent toward Indians while concurrently amongst the main players in the transatlantic slave trade and genocide of American Indians? India had a complex economy - the goal was to get rich from it, not to clear the land of people.
What needs to also be discussed is the impact this had on British society...the Bengal economy was more complex than the British economy and of 30 million rather than the British 5 million (perhaps 10 times the economic size). Bengal was rapidly taxed into a catastrophic famine in 10 years since the Battle of Plassey. The effect was transformational for England, and it is no coincidence that the early innovations of the industrial revolution occurred soon after Indias loot hit British shores.
Any critical reader of such literature should recognize that these topics are dynamic, dramatically so, and will read different in 10 years. One should ask themselves exactly where the truth lies, and what will be the mainstream scholarship in 100 years. I would argue that it will read that this is amongst the most heinous crimes in human history and that the loot sparked the industrial revolution.
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