We might conclude that precolonial kings were more caring than the British. The authors of these hagiographies praised the relief work because the kings paid them to do that. If this was once in fifty years, we would conclude that famines happened once in fifty years, as Bhatia did. The frequency with which famines occurred in earlier times depended on the frequency with which hagiographies were written. These dissimilar datasets cannot be compared. Whereas the government statistical system recorded the colonial-era famines, the precolonial data came from hagiographies and travelogues. Five errors of a biased argumentįirst, the claim that colonialism caused famines cannot be verified against previous experience because there is no evidence that famines were less frequent or less deadly before. I will offer five grounds to show why their version of history is incorrect and biased. Sullivan and Hickel are salvaging an outdated idea by ignoring the most important research done on the subject. Įconomic historians have examined and discarded every one of these assertions. Bhatia said that ‘in the earlier times a major famine occurred once every 50 years,’ whereas ‘between 18, famine or scarcity prevailed in … twenty out of the total of forty-nine years,’ implying that colonialism made famines ‘more deadly’. Indian nationalists argued a hundred years ago that food export supported by a free trade policy and the British-built railways left the Indian countryside with too little food. In a 2001 book, Mike Davis said Britain’s apathy towards her Indian subjects caused mass deaths in late nineteenth-century Deccan. Sullivan and Hickel are not doing anything new. Many blogs and sites sharing such sentiments have reprinted Sullivan and Hickel’s piece.
Social media posts spread similar messages with religious zeal.
Indians were starving when the famines hit them. Imperial policies, they say, made famines ‘more frequent and more deadly.’ They cite the economic historian Robert Allen to suggest that Indian living standards declined in the nineteenth century, because the British rule ‘drained’ India of money and food. In an Al-Jazeera piece, Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel claim that British rule inflicted ‘tremendous loss of life’ in nineteenth-century India by causing the devastating Deccan famines.
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