Popular misconceptions about 19th century History

Could you provide a few examples of famines that occurred without loss of rains ?

I reccomend reading the works of Amartya Sen

In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), a book in which he argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen also argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up.[17]

Sen's interest in famine stemmed from personal experience. As a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people perished. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen later concluded. He presents data that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at the time, but particular groups of people including rural landless labourers and urban service providers like haircutters did not have the means to buy food as its price rose rapidly due to factors that include British military acquisition, panic buying, hoarding, and price gouging, all connected to the war in the region. In Poverty and Famines, Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. In Bengal, for example, food production, while down on the previous year, was higher than in previous non-famine years. Sen points to a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution, which led to starvation. His capabilities approach focuses on positive freedom, a person's actual ability to be or do something, rather than on negative freedom approaches, which are common in economics and simply focuses on non-interference. In the Bengal famine, rural laborers' negative freedom to buy food was not affected. However, they still starved because they were not positively free to do anything, they did not have the functioning of nourishment, nor the capability to escape morbidity.

By the way, your argument regarding drought is the exact same one used by neo-Stalinists to deny the role of Soviet state policy in the 1932-33 famine. A drought did occur then. Would you agree that Stalin thus had no role in the Holodomor?
 

longsword14

Banned
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.
 
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.

During the 1943 Bengal famine, the British government sent little food aid, even though there were surpluses in other Indian provinces and other parts of the Empire. Churchill was insistent on establishing a strategic stockpile for the Mediterranean, and said "the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks." The British government also confiscated boats in the Bengal region, rendering it very difficult to transport the little food that remained or to fish. This all seems to me to be more than "limited relief efforts ".
 
For some reason, I keep seeing threads asking if some random non-white country could get a majority population of European settlers. Something which isn't likely to happen without a deadly disease pandemic or large-scale massacres/genocide, like in the Americas or Australia.
 
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.
And those five crimes and hundreds of capital offenses were?*
Because if the penal laws and capital offenses the British brought was the same Bloody Code that applied in Britain, most of them would
a) be along the lines of "deliberately setting fire to this kind of property is, in this court's opinion, even more arson-y than other arson,
and also a bit rebellious, and thus an even more capital offense than regular arson";
b) be so specific that you could rephrase the act and it would no longer be a capital offense; and
c) many times be commuted, deferred or plain never carried out, for one reason or another.

*I tried googling, but all I got was this and this, and articles on execution by elephant.
 
Here, it is often assumed that Italian and German Unifications are unavoidable events with near 100% success rates.

Though I would argue it often is because of the fact those are cool, momentuous events which had a profound impact on history while the alternatives are essentially lackluster (they stay divided, perhaps create a bland union and that's it).
 
There seems to be a tendency to have it so that the nations that were colonized (during the 19th century, but also admittedly during other time periods) are the ones that always get colonized while the nations that IOTL avoided it always avoid it.

For instance, Thailand and Japan are almost never made into colonies—the former is especially obvious because incompetent management could have easily brought it too far under the sway of a colonial power. Japan is less likely because of the relative unattractiveness of colonizing it but if the OTL series of events relating to its opening and modernizing hadn’t happened it could have easily become a colonial nations’ playground.

On the other side of things, if Emperor Tự Đức had not happened to execute two Catholic missionaries just as France had a large number of troops near Indochina from participation in the Opium Wars Vietnam might have retained independence for longer. At the very least it might have been snatched up later in the New Imperialism era...
 
I tried googling, but all I got was... articles on execution by elephant.

x'D

That's okay. Definitely recommending this as my source:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heaven-Earth-Journey-Through-Sharia/dp/0099523272

Written by a human rights lawyer (yet surprisingly funny, erudite and entertaining in places). It's a good read. One of the things I liked about it was the author didn't seem to have any particular motive, other than to have a look and trace the history/evolution of it up to the present day. He travelled a fair bit for the book and I found it one of the more memorable ones I've read in recent years.

He doesn't only deal with India by any means, but it (the comparison between Mughal and 18th century British law) was one of the more fascinating details related in the book.
 
The scramble for Africa is always unavoidable. 99 per cent of the maps that I see in the map thread have Africa divided between European powers.

People often forget that by the 1870's only 10 per cent was occupied by Europeans and a good chunk of these 10 per cent were 400-years old establishments of the decadent Portuguese Empire. It's clear that Europeans knew that there was very little profit to make in Sub-Saharan Africa (beinng South Africa the notable exception) and the formal scramble was pushed by the latecomer, Germany with its Weltpolitik.

One interesting theory is that French and the British fought for more territory in order to guarantee trade routes to more profitable markets. That said, without German and Italian agressive expansionism overseas, I can see at least the the Sultanate of Zanzibar and Tunisia surviving as informal protectorates - like Latin America or Persia. The Boers would remain more-or-less independent, but under British influence, Portugal would get the Pink Map, Rhodes would carve a personal dominion for himself, probably Leopold as well.
 
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.

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.

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."

Damn, that indian just got owned by his colonial master. I guess colonial rule wasn't so bad after all. I mean maybe if british officials were responsible for brutally killing far more innocent women, his response would seem like some kind of cynical/hypocritical propaganda justifying colonial rule as a necessary civilizing mission over barbaric savages. Fortunately the British would never do something so evil. After all, they came to India primarily to defend women's rights.

You will never find a "benevolent" coloniser, but as far as things go they were not a let down from India's past.

This is one of the strangest "defences" that regularly gets trotted out to defend british colonialism. You are trying to defend one of the most prosperous,modernized, developed, industrialized, and powerful states in the entire world at the time by saying it was no worse than premodern regimes that didn't even use the printing press. Imagine if we used that defence to defend modern Britain: "well it's not any worse than britain in the 1600's".

Furthermore, it's not even correct. Putting aside individual atrocities, one of the most damaging effects of British colonization of India was in stagnating or even reversing natural indigenous processes of state strengthening that were occuring in post-mughal south asian states. Roberto Foa describes this in his excellent Phd dissertation Ancient Polities, Modern States, particularly chapters 3 and 5. State capacity is incredibly important for public goods provisioning and other factors in development and quality of life. By stopping the accumulation of bureaucratic and fiscal capacity that “challenger regime” states like Mysore, the Marathas, Travancore, and the Sikhs were acquiring, Britain played an enormous role in south asia's present poverty and suffering. One obvious example would be the Permanent Settlement. Instead of bypassing or removing intermediaries in order to form direct relationships with the agricultural producers as regimes across south asia were doing, the EIC instead formalized a parasitic, regressive, landlord rentier class that sought to maintain its own power in the face of progressive reforms. The IEC even tried to implement this in the Madras Presidency but couldn't because Tipu Sultan had already removed the intermediaries. They had to use the ryotwari system instead. In general, the bigger a role played by the colonial administration in developing a south asian region, the worse off it is.

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.

If you're talking about only colonial countries, then I agree with you. If you're including indigenous Indian states then I do not agree with you for the reasons outlined above.
 
That it's possible to turn Africa into a majority white continent, or that it would have been a good policy for European countries to try, either economically, morally, or both.

That the Ottoman Empire was beyond lucky in the 19th century so doing any better than OTL is borderline ASB. Same goes for Austria-Hungary.

That Thailand, Ethiopia, China, Korea, Egypt, or [insert non-Western country here] could have easily copied Japan. Or speaking of pulling a Meiji, that Japan literally went from the middle ages to the industrial era overnight, with no attention paid to the groundwork the Meiji Reformation was established upon.

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.

Tropical area too, actually, according to some threads here.
 
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.
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.
 
That's okay. Definitely recommending this as my source:
Thank you, but I notice that you didn't actually answer the question.
It should be about five words, really.

It's very easy to point finger at 18th century British law as ridiculously harsh (and petty) - the British themselves did it -
but if one does not elaborating further and giving details comparing it to any other penalty code, is as meaningful and
accurate as "In Switzerland it's the law that you have to own a gun and they hardly have any crime at all".
(On the other hand, the idea that all the executions implied by the Bloody Code were carried out is mostly
a misconception about 18th century history.)

Also, execution by elephant is no laughing matter.
 
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.

Not hyperbolic at all. A holocaust is a massive slaughter and destruction. This is precisely what Davis details in the book. Sure it also evokes Nazi connotations but that helps communicate the horror that occured for the suffering populations. I think it would be pretty hard to praise capitalism when you're detailing horrifying amounts of death due to capitalism and capitalist ideology.

I'd be really curious to know your source for those numbers. Putting that aside, I'm not sure what the argument is. That less deaths in the 19th and 20th c proves that the British didn't commit atrocities in their handling of colonial famine?

I would also add this quote from Askhistorians user khosikulu

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.

I wonder if this is a bit like the defenestration scene in Braveheart. Rationally, it's terrible. Yet audiences (including myself) laughed. Why? Probably for the same reason people find Itchy and Scratchy cartoon from the Simpsons funny. Something of the absurd about it is kind of funny.

Either that or I need to see a psychiatrist. XD lol
 
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.
 
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.

Arguably, you have to be bastards to maintain it. If you are less harsh you shorten the distance between conquered and the conquerers. Look at the Vikings. They came, they saw, they conquered, sometimes brutally. Then they married local girls, had children, and pretty soon the grandkids were French/Irish/Russian whatever. Simularly, the Brits who came to India in the early years married local girls. But those "white" Indians didn't inherit because the Brits that followed created distance.
 
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