The Bengal Famine of 1770 and East India Company Rule

In the winter and spring of 1770, perhaps a third of the population of Bengal — somewhere between five and ten million people — died of hunger and disease. The crop failure that produced the crisis was a natural event. The British response to it was not. The East India Company, which had governed Bengal directly since 1765, continued to collect its revenue from villages whose inhabitants were starving, continued to export rice from the stricken province, and refused to suspend the legal processes that were turning a bad harvest into a civilisational catastrophe. The famine of 1770 was the first great moral crisis of British rule in India, and the way it was handled — or, more accurately, not handled — shaped British attitudes toward India for the rest of the colonial period.

The Causes

The proximate cause of the famine was a severe drought in 1769, following two failed monsoons. The agronomic crisis was genuine and would have produced food shortages under any regime. But the famine was not caused by the drought. It was caused by a political economy that had been radically reorganised in the decade before, and by a company administration that had no idea of what it was doing.

The East India Company’s revenue demand, set at a high rate, in many areas took a substantial share of the rental value of the land. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 was still two decades away; the demand in 1770 was, in effect, what could be extracted. Cultivators had little incentive to invest in improvements and no margin to fall back on in a bad year. As the Madras-born administrator and Company critic Robert Orme put it, in testimony before the directors in 1772, the company “drains the country of its riches” without leaving the peasantry any reserve to draw on when the harvest failed.

The second factor was the company’s commercial policy. The company continued to export rice from Bengal even as the famine was unfolding, and the directors in London continued to demand the customary dividend on the company’s stock. The crisis was not simply a failure of foresight; it was a failure of priorities. As the company factor William Bolts wrote in 1772, in his Considerations on India Affairs, the company had become a “machine of oppression” whose proper business was no longer the welfare of the millions who lived under its rule.

The Course of the Famine

The famine began with the failure of the 1768–69 winter rice crop and intensified with the failure of the 1769 spring crops. The peak of mortality came in the spring and summer of 1770, when the rural population, deprived of both food and the means to buy it, died in enormous numbers in their villages. The rivers and roads of Bengal were clogged with the dying and the dead, and the loss of cultivators and draft animals was so severe that, even after the drought ended, the agricultural system could not be restored to its previous level of productivity.

The acute phase lasted about a year. The demographic damage lasted much longer. The population of Bengal did not recover to its pre-famine level for almost a century, and some districts never recovered at all. The famine is remembered in the Bengali cultural tradition as Chiyattorer Manvantar — the year of the great disaster. The literary and oral record of the period, including the work of the Bengali poet Bharat Chandra, captures the scale of the suffering in a way that no administrative report can.

The Political Response in Britain

The famine produced a major political response in Britain. Critics of the company used the catastrophe to argue for reform, and a series of parliamentary inquiries from 1772 onward examined the company’s conduct. The first Regulation Act of 1773, which established the post of Governor-General of Bengal and limited the company’s dividend, was a direct response to the famine and its accompanying scandal.

The most important figure in the political response was Warren Hastings (1732–1818), who became Governor-General in 1773. Hastings was a complex figure — a man of extraordinary administrative ability, later impeached for high crimes and misdemeanours and acquitted only after a trial lasting from 1788 to 1795. His administration introduced important reforms in revenue collection, judicial administration, and famine relief, and his Memoirs Relative to the State of India (1786) is one of the most significant contemporary British accounts of Indian governance. Hastings was succeeded by Lord Cornwallis, whose Permanent Settlement of 1793, whatever its longer-term effects, was intended in part to make the kind of crisis that produced 1770 less likely in the future.

The famine was also the occasion for Edmund Burke’s first great speech on India, in the impeachment proceedings against Hastings, in which Burke described the famine as the “disgrace” of British rule and laid the foundation for a more critical British attitude toward the East India Company. The famine was, in this respect, a founding event of British humanitarianism in India, even if the humanitarian impulse took decades to translate into effective policy.

The Long Shadow of 1770

The famine hardened the view, prominent in both the Whig and the emerging evangelical traditions, that the company was unfit to govern India, and it provided important support for the establishment of direct crown rule in 1858. The famine also shaped the development of British ideas about famine policy. The early-nineteenth-century laissez-faire response — dominant in the Bengal administration until the 1870s — was gradually modified after the devastating Indian famines of 1876–1878 and 1896–1897, and the Indian Famine Code of 1883 was a direct intellectual descendant of the responses to 1770.

The larger question — whether the company was responsible, in any meaningful sense, for the catastrophe — has divided historians ever since. The early nationalist historians of the twentieth century, building on the work of the contemporary critics, treated the famine as a deliberate or at least negligent crime of British rule. The most influential recent scholarship, beginning with the work of the Cambridge economic historian Peter Robb and carried forward by David Arnold in The New Cambridge History of India: Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (in the relevant sections) and the contributors to Agriculture, Land Revenue and Rural Economy (the Cambridge economic history of India), has been more nuanced. The company was incompetent, and the company’s revenue demand was crushing. But the famine was also, in the most immediate sense, an act of God. The interaction between natural disaster and exploitative political economy produced a catastrophe; the disaster alone would not have.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the 1770 Bengal Famine is a small but instructive case study in the writing of British Indian history. The British contemporaries — Bolts, Verelst, and Orme — wrote the famine as a scandal of company misrule, and the early nationalist historians, building on Burke’s impeachment speeches, treated the catastrophe as a foundational injustice. The Cambridge economic historians of the 1960s and 1970s, working in the tradition of P. J. Marshall and B. R. Tomlinson, complicated the picture by emphasising the climatic and demographic factors. The most recent work, by Yasmin Khan, Prabhu Mohapatra, and the contributors to the New Cambridge History of India, has tried to integrate the political, climatic, and administrative explanations: the company was the cause of the crisis, but the crisis was a product of the interaction between the company’s revenue policy, the climatic disaster, and the underlying vulnerability of the rural population. The death toll itself, which probably lies between five and ten million, is not contested. The interpretation of it is.

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