Thanks for response. IIRC from past study of the Empire, the 1890s Bengal Famine was worse than in Mughal times because the British officials did not take actions to force merchants to open storehouses. Nor did they cap prices. Both measures that had been used in earlier famines by the Mughals. So laissez faire ideology restricting actions I'll go back to my sources if you wish for further details.@Finbarr the Fair
I didn't really think you had either and I found your comments insightful and fairminded. However I do think that most people don't really understand how novel this situation was for the Government of the day and how unprecedented most of the measures they took were. It wasn't a question of the will to act not being there but the bureaucratic and logistical mechanisms not being present. No experience, no precedent, no lessons learned to fall back on. They buggered up quite a lot but they also learned quite a lot. So I suspect Cornwall or Cumbria might not have fared that much better. Kent or Hertfordshire might have galvanised greater activity but, in many ways, the problem was with directing aid efficiently rather than not recognising that it had to be directed. Don't know much about the 1890s Bengal famine but presumably again it was a learning experience? Alleviation or prevention of famine was reasonably decent in Edwardian and later British India up until 1943 (when the Government had a few other minor preoccupations). It is the rare government that gets things right the first time. And this was an era where they had only just started compiling the necessary statistics to inform their decisions. From our modern perspctive it is hard to appreciate the extent to which these Ministers and officials were groping in the dark (absolutely no reference to contemporary politics intended).
Obviously the subject is an emotive one in Ireland and India so there have been exaggerations of British culpability in both cases. I'd say in Ireland the problems were structural but to a large extent caused by British rule. In Bengal it seems more unwilling to learn what worked earlier from native sources. So some blame in each case but (Trevelyan always excepted) not so much on persons but institutions.