Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.Īs millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices".
As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". In 18, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. With that introduction let me pass you over to George Monbiot's reveiw the book Late Victorian Holocausts at Guardian where he points out the amnesia that surrounds the Empire's massacres, especially the famines in India in late 1800s. The apathy and greed of Colonial rulers had a hand (directly or through inaction) in many famines. Hooper, a Colonel in British army who took many photographs of Madras famine. Photograph of a South India family in 1878 by W.W.
Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen's work on endemic deprivation stems from his experiences of the Bengal famine as a child. Severe famines killed many millions in India between 17.
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