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1. "permanent" help is not what's required during an famine due to crop failures, and not what anyone was demanding 2. focusing on the "assistance" without men

by abeppu 2y ago

1. "permanent" help is not what's required during an famine due to crop failures, and not what anyone was demanding 2. focusing on the "assistance" without mentioning the circumstances which create the crisis is missing a big part of the picture. In the case of British policy in India, some important components leading up to that famine were: a. favoring a bunch of non-food cash crops, including opium production for export to China, tea for export to Britain, and materials for industry like jute and cotton. All of this diverted land away from food production which only set up for the famine to be a larger and more deadly crisis. b. of the food that was produced, as in the Irish context, the British exported a lot of it. And didn't stop exporting it when there was a local famine. c. in some areas imposing extremely high taxes, and in others switching farmers to owe taxes to be a percentage of land rents rather than as a percentage of their production -- i.e. if your crops failed you became insolvent and were pushed off the land, _preventing you from working_. The narrative that colonizers shouldn't "assist" the victims of a famine when the colonizers were the ones driving down food production and exporting grain is so mind-bogglingly backwards. This is only a step away from an arsonist setting fire to your house and preventing the fire department from responding because that would only teach you to become dependent on the state bailing you out of every crisis.

lurk2 2y ago
Blaming the British for the famines in India is like blaming Democrats for the forest fires in California; it only has an air of respectability about it because Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years.
- ivell 2y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church... "Mukerjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which huge supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion." On the topic of brahmins, they were the elite, but mostly not the rulers. All castes discriminated against castes lower to them, even within scheduled castes. Blaming just brahmins for all ills of the society is an uninformed position.
- leosanchez 2y ago
  > Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years Doing what? Starving people to death? Do you have any sources or made it up?
  - lurk2 2y ago
    > Doing what? Blaming the British for their misfortunes. You'll find the articles yourself if you read about this subject. They're also fond of claiming that they were deindustrialized by the British, that British industrial development was predicated upon a theft of wealth from India (the figures here range from the bizarre to the impossible), and that the British created the caste system.
    - leosanchez 2y ago
      So british has nothing to do with the famine ? The rest is irrelevant for this thread.
      - lurk2 2y ago
        > So british has nothing to do with the famine ? You could feasibly make the argument that they exacerbated the Bengal famine. I don't think the scholarship supporting this argument is very good, but you could make the argument. As for the famines that occurred throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, no. There is no compelling reason to think that those famines occurred as a result of British mismanagement; they were the result of natural disasters. Amartya Sen makes the argument that famines stopped occurring after India was granted independence, which alongside Churchill's general disdain for Indians is one of the more compelling reasons to think the British had anything to do with the 1943 famine, but this also coincides with the introduction of modern farming technologies (mechanization, chemical fertilizers, etc.), which complicates things.
        graemep 2y ago
        There was also a high level of extreme poverty in India for many decades after independence. Maybe not large scale famines, but people being constantly very badly malnourished.

by abeppu 2y ago

lurk2 2y ago

Blaming the British for the famines in India is like blaming Democrats for the forest fires in California; it only has an air of respectability about it because Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years.

ivell 2y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church... "Mukerjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which huge supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion." On the topic of brahmins, they were the elite, but mostly not the rulers. All castes discriminated against castes lower to them, even within scheduled castes. Blaming just brahmins for all ills of the society is an uninformed position.
leosanchez 2y ago
> Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years Doing what? Starving people to death? Do you have any sources or made it up?
- lurk2 2y ago
  > Doing what? Blaming the British for their misfortunes. You'll find the articles yourself if you read about this subject. They're also fond of claiming that they were deindustrialized by the British, that British industrial development was predicated upon a theft of wealth from India (the figures here range from the bizarre to the impossible), and that the British created the caste system.
  - leosanchez 2y ago
    So british has nothing to do with the famine ? The rest is irrelevant for this thread.
    - lurk2 2y ago
      > So british has nothing to do with the famine ? You could feasibly make the argument that they exacerbated the Bengal famine. I don't think the scholarship supporting this argument is very good, but you could make the argument. As for the famines that occurred throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, no. There is no compelling reason to think that those famines occurred as a result of British mismanagement; they were the result of natural disasters. Amartya Sen makes the argument that famines stopped occurring after India was granted independence, which alongside Churchill's general disdain for Indians is one of the more compelling reasons to think the British had anything to do with the 1943 famine, but this also coincides with the introduction of modern farming technologies (mechanization, chemical fertilizers, etc.), which complicates things.
      - graemep 2y ago
        There was also a high level of extreme poverty in India for many decades after independence. Maybe not large scale famines, but people being constantly very badly malnourished.