Mcalin Famine

The famines in India between 1895 and 1900 were undoubtedly the result of British imperial policy and not the result of environmental inevitability. This essay will start by evaluating the arguments of historians who have argued the latter, like McAlpin, arguing that the environmental disasters which she mentions in her argument, were not the cause of the famines but rather factors that contributed to the food shortages. Following on from this will be a discussion on how the famines, or at least the food shortages, had their origins in man-made environmental disasters, that were the consequence of imperial policies, like pressure on agriculture and deforestation; the arguments of historians like R.P Dutt and Damodaran will be used as support.

She argues that the failing monsoons in India were the first step in the chains of famine between 1885 and 1900. Likewise, she argues that the first step in the chain of the Great Famine in Ireland was the potato blight disease. Whilst these environmental issues were certainly some of the key contributors to the food shortages, it is simplistic that McAlpin relates these directly to the cause of famine. India relied heavily on the monsoons to bring the adequate amount of rain to grow their food crops, but the failing of the monsoons in India is something that has happened repeatedly throughout history and was therefore not completely unexpected, and there have been cases where this has been managed before, and not lead to a famine. Regardless of what caused the shortage, McAlpin does not address the fact that the situation could have been better managed by the colonialists to prevent the shortage from transitioning into a famine. She discusses a cycle of how starvation reduces labour and how reduced labour leads to more starvation. Although this is a valid point, she fails to address the fact that the Indians did have ways of overcoming or at least coping better with scarcity, through careful farming techniques and social and cultural systems of security and insurance, but these were destroyed by colonialism in the late 18th century. If the British did not destroy these original coping mechanisms,

For example, Damodaran’s comparison between the 1770 famine in Bengal and the 1897 famine in Chotanagpur highlights that before the famine in 1897, tribal regions in India like Chotanagpur, which were flourished with forests, did not experience the famines of 1866-67 or 1873-74. This was because their distress was soon alleviated by their dependency on the abundant forest produce to avert any major crisis. They used jungle products as their main means of resistance to famine. However, by 1895 the extraction of vital natural resources, such as timber and game, from the rural areas had climaxed, as the materials were used to build railways. Modernisation and ecological transformation had caught up with the outlying areas of Bengal, resulting in a permanent destabilisation of tribal society, now susceptible to famine. Even McAlpin agrees with this point in her study as she argues that the depletion of the countrysides stores to meet the needs of a bureaucracy, alone or in combination with a natural catastrophe, can make an area ripe for famine. The study shows that before the colonialists built these railways, there were districts in India that could survive a food shortage and prevent a