longsword14
Banned
Could you provide a few examples of famines that occurred without loss of rains ?most prominently the famines that occurred as a result of the policies of the East India Company and the British government.
Could you provide a few examples of famines that occurred without loss of rains ?most prominently the famines that occurred as a result of the policies of the East India Company and the British government.
Could you provide a few examples of famines that occurred without loss of rains ?
Grain quotas that required extraction regardless of production caused shortages. Do you see the difference between that and limited/incapable relief efforts ? Draughts in India existed before the Company, and after. But that was not the question.A drought did occur then. Would you agree that Stalin thus had no role in the Holodomor?
Grain quotas that required extraction regardless of production caused shortages. Do you see the difference between that and limited/incapable relief efforts ? Draughts in India existed before the Company, and after. But that was not the question.
1 - 19th century US is the world's sole superpower, it can kick the British off Canada, annex all Mexico, or even conquer the entire continent, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
And those five crimes and hundreds of capital offenses were?*From a legal perspective, this is dubious, to say the least. There were only five capital crimes in Moghul India. The British tore up that system and replaced it with some of the harshest penal laws on the planet, with hundreds of capital offenses.
I tried googling, but all I got was... articles on execution by elephant.
As far as famines go most people died in the very early period and both in and outside British territories or British infleunced territories and 1943 was an outlier as no famine happened 4 decades prior AFAIK, famines were certainly not getting worse as the British expanded and solidified in the 19th century. The economical hit was also centred in the early period with a recovery period throughout the middle and later period.
On India where the British ended the practice of Sattee ("encouraging" widows to join their husband's funeral pyres).
An Indian protested the English interference with local custom.
Official's response-- "You are of course free to practice local custom. But we are also free to practice our own custom of hanging people who burn perfectly nice ladies to death."
You will never find a "benevolent" coloniser, but as far as things go they were not a let down from India's past.
This Manichean dualism simply isn't useful. Obviously, the British and the Mughals are very different rulers - the discussion about how British colonialism affected economically the subcontinent is actually a quite controversial and interesting topic that shouldn't be labeled as a "misconception".
IMHO the main issue is: A similar country, with a similar level of industrialization, would treat India that much different than the British did? I don't think so.
7. Anglos are the world's master race, just throw a handful of Englishmen in a random temperate region and it somehow becomes richer and more stable.
Talk about hyperbolic titles. I'll read the book more thoroughly but from what I can see at first glance the author's additional focus of bashing capitalism while discussing late 19th century colonial empires strikes me as an inappropriate attempt to strike 2 birds with 1 stone.Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis makes an excellent case for colonial rule severely exacerbating the effects of natural drought and famine. It's a very well-regarded work academically with lots of good reviews.
Thank you, but I notice that you didn't actually answer the question.That's okay. Definitely recommending this as my source:
Talk about hyperbolic titles. I'll read the book more thoroughly but from what I can see at first glance the author's additional focus of bashing capitalism while discussing late 19th century colonial empires strikes me as an inappropriate attempt to strike 2 birds with 1 stone.
In any case my point was the in the 18th century more people died of famines that they did in the entire 1800-1950 period AFAIK and the population was also continuously growing during the latter period, almost doubling. I'll also have to see how he accounts for the similar scale of deaths in Qing China, despite their relation with European powers being quite different in extent.
t's worth pointing out that the forcing ("encouraging," but really coercion) of cash-cropping, by both direct and indirect means, played a key role in these and other famines that accompanied European colonialism. Rarely did a colonial power actually seek to starve people, but the inability to stay abreast of state demands by growing basic foodstuffs at the household level meant that any shortfall would be magnified even before considering the insufficient nature of relief policy and logistics. The years just before Maji Maji, in Tanganyika (German East Africa), were exactly like this, with the introduction of money economics and a cotton quota; Davis discusses it (204) but Juhani Koponen's Development for Exploitation gives all the deep, painful detail. French demands for cotton cultivation in Niger midwifed the famine of 1930-31 with ripples into the late 1930s, which led to the death or dislocation of around a million people (see Alice Conklin's A Mission to Civilize, 223 onward), as one of many famine episodes in the Sahel region. Systems that before had produced a local buffer to such conditions had deteriorated to non-functionality in these and other cases--and there are even more out there than Davis can talk about. Again, it's important to point out that such misery was rarely the goal of colonial policy (unless fighting insurgencies like Maji Maji or the Herero/Nama), but it was an almost certain side effect--and the theories that some administrators embraced, like Lytton did, absolutely made the situation far worse. [edit: and totally agreed on the horror of 1877-78--Davis's is perhaps one of the most visceral academic descriptions of such events, and one we use in environmental history classes here to kick-start discussion.]
Ironically, these reserves remained/remain non-functional well past the end of the colonial era in a lot of states, with new national governments placing a low priority on agricultural self-sufficiency because that doesn't produce reserves of foreign currency at the rate cash cropping does in good years. So the mechanisms Davis describes still haunt us, and remind us that every modern famine has essential man-made components.
execution by elephant is no laughing matter.
True. If any other region was the centre of the world ranging from East Asia to Central Africa, i don’t think they would be any less harsher than the European colonial powers, also exploiting and colonizing for ruthless profit if they could.It is a very human tragedy. I could easily envision the reverse (and it is actually pretty applicable during ages of Muslim expansion).
It really isn't due to the people involved. White people are not more evil or ambitious. They just happened to be on top at the time. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. What people don't think about are the degrees of power. A little power corrupts a little too.
Every faction that has dominated has been accused of crimes. And since they have the power to exploit, sometimes they are actaully guilty of said crimes.
We are as we were made to be. Our free will exists, but not in an absolute sense. There are natural factors conatraining how we act.
True. If any other region was the centre of the world ranging from East Asia to Central Africa, i don’t think they would be any less harsher than the European colonial powers, also exploiting and colonizing for ruthless profit if they could.