The Indian Famines Under British Rule

Between 1770 and 1943, somewhere between 30 and 55 million people — the demographer Tim Dyson’s careful estimate — died in famines in British India. The death toll dwarfs the major famines of nineteenth-century Europe, and the moral argument of this article is straightforward: the Indian famines were not natural disasters. They occurred in a political economy that the British had constructed, and the British administration’s decisions about what to do when harvests failed were the principal cause of the death toll. The British claim that the famines were “acts of God” was a self-serving myth that the British themselves, in the person of the Indian Famine Commission of 1880, partially abandoned; the political-economy argument, in the more rigorous form given it by Romesh Chunder Dutt in The Economic History of India (1906) and by David Arnold in Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (1988), has not been effectively refuted.

The Famines

The major Indian famines under British rule occurred in 1770, 1783, 1792–1793, 1804, 1812, 1815, 1819, 1833, 1837–1838, 1860–1861, 1866, 1868–1870, 1873–1874, 1876–1878, 1896–1897, 1899–1900, 1907–1908, 1918–1919, 1941–1942, and 1943. The death tolls varied widely. The 1770 Bengal Famine killed perhaps ten million people; the 1876–1878 Great Famine killed perhaps 5.5–12 million; the 1896–1897 famine killed perhaps five million; the 1899–1900 famine killed perhaps a million; the 1943 Bengal Famine killed perhaps three million. The cumulative death toll was somewhere between 30 and 55 million people.

The famines occurred in the context of a colonial state that had been built, in significant part, on the extraction of revenue from the Indian peasantry. The Permanent Settlement of 1793, the Ryotwari Settlement of the 1820s, and the Mahalwari Settlement of the 1830s had imposed a system of land revenue that, whatever its long-term effects, was, in the short term, a heavy burden on the rural population. The British revenue demand, as the historian Sumit Sarkar has argued in Modern India: 1885–1947 (1983), was the principal cause of the vulnerability of the Indian rural population to famine.

The Politics of Famine Policy

The British response to the Indian famines was shaped by the political economy of the British state in India. The East India Company, and later the Crown, was primarily concerned with the revenue and the trade. The Company had to be profitable; the Crown had to balance its budget. The cost of famine relief was a direct charge on the Indian exchequer, and the British authorities were reluctant to authorise large-scale relief works. The official policy of the British government in India, from the 1830s to the 1870s, was dominated by the principles of classical political economy — the doctrines of Malthus, Ricardo, and the Mills — which held that government intervention in the grain market would only make things worse. The famines, on this view, were natural disasters that should be allowed to take their course.

The political response in Britain, however, was a more complex affair. The famines of 1837–1838 and 1860–1861 produced significant criticism of the British administration, and the British press played an important role in shaping British public opinion. The most famous case of British criticism was that of William Digby, the British journalist who wrote The Famine Campaign in Southern India (1878) and who was one of the most prominent critics of the British response to the 1876–1878 famine. The famine policy of the British government, on Digby’s account, was a moral scandal, and the British administration was responsible for the death of millions.

The 1876–1878 Famine and the Indian Famine Commission

The Great Famine of 1876–1878 was the most important of the Indian famines, both in its scale and in its consequences. The famine was caused by a severe failure of the south-west monsoon in 1876, compounded by a strong El Niño weather pattern. The death toll, on the most recent estimates, was between 5.5 and 12 million people. The British response was the subject of intense criticism in Britain, and the viceroy, Lord Lytton, was recalled in 1879. The Indian Famine Commission of 1880, appointed by Lytton’s successor, Lord Ripon, produced a comprehensive report that established the framework of British famine policy for the rest of the colonial period.

The Commission’s report, published in 1880, was a landmark in the development of British famine policy. It laid the foundations of the Indian Famine Code of 1883, which established a permanent famine administration, a system of relief works, and a graded scale of relief according to need. The Code was not implemented without difficulty — the 1896–1897 famine would test it severely — but it was the first systematic attempt to provide for famine relief on a continental scale. The Code was revised in 1897, in response to the 1896–1897 famine, and it was further revised in 1901 and 1914. The Indian Famine Code was the principal instrument of British famine policy in India for the last half-century of the Raj, and it was the model that the British used in the later famines in Africa and the Caribbean.

The Famine Code and Its Implementation

The Indian Famine Code of 1883 was a substantial document. The Code provided for a series of measures to be implemented in the event of famine: the suspension of revenue collection, the establishment of relief works, the provision of poorhouses, the distribution of food. The Code was a graded system, with different levels of relief according to the severity of the famine. The Code was implemented by the provincial governments under the supervision of the Government of India, and it was financed from the provincial and central revenues.

The Code was, most directly, a response to the failure of the 1876–1878 famine. The Code’s principal author, the Indian Famine Commission of 1880, was chaired by Richard Strachey, a senior member of the Indian Civil Service, and it included several Indian members. The Commission’s report was influenced by the criticisms of William Digby and the British humanitarian lobby, and it was also influenced by the experience of the 1876–1878 famine itself. The Commission was a serious inquiry into the causes and consequences of famine in India, and it produced a serious policy response.

The Code was, however, far from perfect. The 1896–1897 famine tested the Code severely, and the 1899–1900 famine revealed its limitations. The Code was revised in 1897, in response to the 1896–1897 famine, and it was further revised in 1901. The 1943 Bengal Famine revealed the limitations of the Code in a new way: the Code had been designed for a different kind of famine, in which the failure of the monsoon was the principal cause, and the wartime conditions of 1943 were not the conditions for which the Code was designed. The Code was, in significant part, an exercise in moral accounting, and the moral accounting did not work.

The 1943 Bengal Famine

The 1943 Bengal Famine was the last major famine of British India, and it killed perhaps three million people in the province of Bengal. The famine was caused by a complex combination of factors: the Japanese occupation of Burma, which had been a major source of Burmese rice imports to India; the loss of rice imports from South-East Asia; the wartime disruption of the Indian economy and of the coastal shipping that normally moved rice from Burma to Bengal; the policy of the British authorities in Bengal, who requisitioned boats and food stocks for the war effort; the decision of the British Indian government to continue the export of rice from Bengal even as the famine was developing; and a series of natural disasters, including a cyclone that hit the Bengal coast in October 1942 and a smallpox epidemic that ravaged the population in the months that followed.

The British response to the 1943 famine was inadequate. The Famine Inquiry Commission of 1944–1945, which was established by the British Indian government, was a major investigation, and its report attributed the famine primarily to administrative failure. The 1943 Bengal Famine acquired a particular symbolic importance in the historiography of British India, and it has been the focus of historical and political debate ever since. The role of Winston Churchill, who was said to have blamed the Indians for the famine — in his exchange with the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, in which Churchill asked “why Gandhi hadn’t died yet” — has been the subject of intense historical controversy. The recent work of Madhusree Mukerjee in Churchill’s Secret War (2010) has presented the most thorough account of the Churchill role; the more recent work of Alex von Tunzelmann, Tim Dyson, and the contributors to The Famine of 1943 and the Bengal Economy (the volume edited by the late Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri) have produced a more nuanced picture. The most careful contemporary estimate of the Churchill government’s responsibility is Dyson’s: that the wartime British policy, particularly the export of rice from Bengal, increased the death toll by something like 1.5 to 2 million people. The estimate, even at the lower end, is the most damning verdict on a British colonial policy of the twentieth century.

The Causal Structure of Indian Famines

The Indian famines were the consequence of a complex interaction between climatic events and political-economic structures. The principal climatic factor was the failure of the south-west monsoon, which depended on the El Niño weather pattern. The principal political-economic factors were the British revenue demand, the export of grain from India, the inadequate relief arrangements, and the underlying vulnerability of the rural population.

The political economy of British rule in India was the principal cause of the scale of the Indian famines. The British revenue demand, the export of grain, and the inadequate relief arrangements all contributed to the vulnerability of the rural population. The natural disaster was the trigger; the political economy was the ammunition. The death tolls were the consequence of the interaction between climatic events and the political economy of British rule. The British claim, in the period of laissez-faire, that the famines were the consequence of natural disasters, was a self-serving myth. The British claim, in the post-1880 period, that the Indian Famine Code had solved the problem, was a more comfortable myth. The 1943 Bengal Famine was the final disproof of both.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Indian famines has been substantially revised since the 1990s. The older nationalist tradition, of which the work of Romesh Chunder Dutt in the Economic History of India (1906) is the most distinguished representative, treated the famines as a direct consequence of British colonial exploitation — of the revenue demand, of the destruction of Indian textile industries, of the export of grain to Britain. The more recent work, of which David Arnold’s Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (1988) and The New Cambridge History of India (in the relevant volumes), the work of the climate historian Vinita Damodaran, the work of Tim Dyson, and the contributions to Agriculture, Food Production and Food Policy (in the Cambridge Economic History of India) are representative, has been more cautious. The famines were, on this more recent view, the consequence of a complex interaction between climatic events and political-economic structures. The British revenue demand, the export of grain, the inadequate relief arrangements, and the underlying vulnerability of the rural population all played a role. The death tolls, which range from a minimum of perhaps 30 million to a maximum of perhaps 55 million across the colonial period, are not contested. The interpretation of them is.

The “Williams thesis” of Indian economic exploitation — most clearly articulated in the work of Romesh Chunder Dutt and carried forward by the more recent work of Utsa Patnaik — has been the subject of substantial revisionist work. Patnaik’s 2008 estimate that the British extracted perhaps $45 trillion (in 1998 prices) from India over the colonial period is much higher than most earlier estimates and is the subject of considerable methodological debate. The work of Branko Milanovic in Global Inequality (2016) has placed the Indian famines in the broader context of global inequality, and has argued that the British administration in India was a major contributor to the emergence of the global South as a distinct economic region. The work of the Indian economic historian Angus Maddison, in particular his Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD (2007), has produced a more nuanced picture of the relative position of the Indian economy over the long run, and the relationship between British rule and Indian economic performance. The most recent generation of historians, of whom the work of David Arnold, the climate historian Dinah Diwan, and the demographer Tim Dyson are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a more integrated picture in which the climatic, the political-economic, and the humanitarian dimensions of the famines are all given their proper weight.

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