theme 7

• The "Third World" – the division of humanity into haves and have-nots – was shaped by fatal interactions between world climate and world economy at the end of the nineteenth century.
• Three waves of drought, famine and disease devastated agriculture throughout the tropics and northern China when the monsoons failed. The total human toll could not have been less than 30 million victims. Fifty million dead might not be unrealistic.
• Researchers have since found the fingerprints of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) – the vast oscillation in air mass and Pacific ocean temperature – all over these catastrophic climate disasters and crop failures.
• Millions of cultivators in India and China had been recently incorporated into webs of world trade as subsistence adversity, caused by various state and imperial policies, had encouraged them to turn to cash-crop cultivation. As a result, peasants and farmers became dramatically more vulnerable after 1850 to natural disasters such as extreme climate events and were at the same time whiplashed by long-distance economic perturbations whose origins were as mysterious as those of the weather.
• The "Third World" (a Cold War term) is the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalities – the famous "development gap" – that were shaped most decisively in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the great non-European peasantries were initially integrated into the world economy.
• Malthusian explanations were not only wrong-headed at the time: they were also contributory causes of the deaths that occurred. Absolute scarcity of food, except perhaps in Ethiopia in 1889, was never the issue.
• Standing between life and death during these droughts were new commodity markets and price speculation, on one side, and the will and capacity of the state to relieve crop failure on the other.
• Although crop failures and water shortages were of epic proportion, often the worst in centuries, there were almost always grain surpluses elsewhere in the nation or empire that could potentially have rescued drought victims.
• The first of these global subsistence crises, from 1876-1879, was a disaster of planetary magnitude. Drought and famine were reported in Asia (India, China, Java, the Philippines and Korea), Brazil, southern Africa, Algeria and Morocco.
• In India, from 1876 onwards, the gathering horror of the drought-famine spread from Madras on southern India's eastern coast through to Mysore on the west coast, then northwards to the Bombay Deccan (the peninsular interior of India south of the Narmada River) and eventually into the North Western Provinces of India's semi-arid interior.
• The crop losses in many districts were catastrophic. Ryots (peasants) in district after district sold their "bullocks, field implements, the thatch of the roofs, the frames of their doors and windows" to survive the terrible first year of the drought.
• By 1878, the villages in the Deccan were rent by desperate internal struggles over the last hoarded supplies of grain. A social chain reaction set in as each class of caste attempted to save themselves at the expense of the groups below them.
• The ensuing malaria epidemic killed further hundreds of thousands of enfeebled peasants and delayed the resumption of normal agriculture.
• The staggering death toll – 5.5 million to 12 million died in India despite modern railways and millions of tons of grain in commercial circulation – was the foreseeable and avoidable result of deliberate policy choices.
• The newly-constructed railways, lauded by the British as institutional safeguards against famine, were used by merchants to ship grain from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters).
• British antipathy to any form of price control invited anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation. As a result, food prices soared out of the reach of outcaste labourers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and poor peasants.
• The taxes that financed the railways had also crushed the ryots. Their inability to purchase subsistence was further compounded by the depreciation of the rupee against the new international Gold Standard (which India had not adopted), which steeply raised the cost of imports.
• In north-western India, even more than in the south, drought was consciously made into famine by the decisions taken in the palaces of the rajas and viceroys, resulting in terrible, wanton mortality.
• The British viceroy Lord Edward Lytton based in Calcutta, far from the drought areas, was unswayed by images of destitute villages and rejected out of hand an appeal from the provinces' executives to postpone that year's revenues.
• The central British government in India under Lytton's leadership adopted a strict laissez-faire approach to famine. Lytton vehemently opposed efforts by the British governor of Madras, the Duke of Buckingham, and some of his district officers to stockpile grain or otherwise intervene to save lives.
• This article studies the causes of China's Great Famine, during which 16.5 to 45 million individuals perished in rural areas
• The existing literature on the causes of the Great Famine has formed a consensus that a fall in aggregate food production in 1959 followed by high government procurement from rural areas were key contributors to the famine
• The authors argue that these factors could not have caused the famine on their own because average rural food availability was too high to generate famine, even after accounting for procurement
• Deliberate British Policy Choices
• The authors analyse the spatial relationship between agricultural productivity and famine severity, and find a surprising positive correlation between mortality rates and productivity across rural areas during the famine
• The central British government in India under Lytton's leadership adopted a strict laissez-faire approach to famine
• The authors provide evidence that an inflexible and progressive government procurement policy (where procurement could not adjust to contemporaneous production and larger shares of expected production were procured from more productive regions) was necessary for generating this pattern and that this policy was a quantitatively important contributor to overall famine mortality
• Inflexible procurement policy


  • Procurement could not adjust to contemporaneous production
• Progressive procurement policy


  • Larger shares of expected production were procured from more productive regions
• Lytton vehemently opposed efforts by the British governor of Madras, the Duke of Buckingham, and some of his district officers to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces
• More productive regions experienced a larger absolute production drop


  But remained more productive relative to less productive regions
• Procurement policy caused more productive regions

  To experience a larger per capita production gap, subjecting them to more over-procurement, which in turn, led to less per capita food retention, less per capita food consumption, and higher mortality rates
• Buckingham was not a free trade fundamentalist and was appalled by the speed with which modern markets accelerated rather than relieved the famine
• A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the inflexible and progressive procurement mechanism explains 32–43% of total famine mortality
• Lytton lectured his officers that high prices, by stimulating imports and limiting consumption, were the "natural saviours of the situation"
• The authors use historical province level procurement data to provide evidence on the causal links of their hypothesis
• Lytton issued strict orders that "there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of the Government with the object of reducing the price of food", and denounced "humanitarian hysterics"
• The authors address potential concerns about measurement error in the Great Leap Forward-era grain production data by constructing a measure of production that does not use GLF-era production data
• The authors proxy for famine severity with survivor birth cohort size as observed in 1990 to address potential concerns that mortality rates are misreported
• "Let the British public foot the bill for its 'cheap sentiment', if it wished to save life at a cost that would bankrupt India."