In a recent article published in World Development, we drew on newly available data to calculate that India suffered 50-165 million excess deaths during the mortality crisis of 1881-1920 (an average of 1.3 to 4.1 million excess deaths per year over the period, depending on our assumptions about ‘normal’ mortality). Following recent scholarship, we attribute the crisis to British colonial policy, such as the use of asymmetrical tariffs and technology restrictions to undermine India’s manufacturing sector, and the forced drain of foodstuffs and raw materials out of India for export to England. In 1902, the Indian economist Romesh C. Dutt estimated that the annual outflow of goods from India was sufficient to meet the nutritional requirements of 25 million people. As Dutt put it: “If any of the prosperous countries of the world – America or England, France or Germany – had been subjected to such conditions, would not that country have been reduced to poverty, and visited by famines, within a few decades?”
We highlighted these figures in a short piece for Al Jazeera. Tirthankar Roy then challenged our claims in a series of tweets, which we respond to here.
Roy does not dispute our estimate of the scale of excess deaths during the 1881-1920 period. Instead, he disputes that the mortality crisis can be attributed to British colonialism (and seems to claim it was caused instead by Deccan monsoon patterns). He asks: if the crisis was caused by British rule, why did it not occur everywhere under British control? Why was the North (the Indo-Gangetic Basin) spared? A few things in response:
Roy assumes our mortality figures derive solely from the Deccan famines (he cites the 1876-78 and 1896-02 famines, although only the latter is relevant to the period we analyze). In fact, our figures derive from elevated mortality that occurred across India as a whole during the period 1881-1920. This includes the Deccan famines of 1896-02, but it also includes major mortality crises that occurred in the North, such as the influenza epidemic of 1918 (Mike Davis argues that the unusually high mortality rates suffered in North and West India during the epidemic were due to malnutrition induced by Britain’s policy of forcibly requisitioning grain, resulting in some 20 million deaths). Our estimate also includes deaths that occurred outside of major catastrophes, as India’s mortality rate remained chronically elevated for several decades. These deaths were not isolated to the South. According to Tim Dyson (2018: 129), North India’s mortality rate increased from 41.2 per 1,000 people in the 1890s to 47.6 in the 1900s (incidentally, this was higher than the mortality rate in the South, which increased from 31.9 to 34.5).
So, the North was not spared. And the claim that mass mortality under British rule was confined to the South of India is inaccurate even for the specific famines Roy mentions (i.e., those of 1876-78, 1896-7 and 1899-02). Over 1.2 million people died in the North Western Provinces, Oud, and adjoining districts of the Punjab in 1877, while the 1896 and 1899 catastrophes killed countless more in Punjab, the Delhi region, Kashmir, Bihar, the United Provinces, and Oud (for the geographic spread of famine in India, see the maps provided in Davis 2001: 29, 145, 163). Indeed, famine ravaged northern India frequently during the 200 years of colonial rule, including the Great Bengal Famine of 1769 (which also affected Bihar), the Agra famine of 1837, the Orissa Famine of 1866, the Rajputana Famine of 1869, the Bihar Famine of 1873, and the Bengal famine of 1943. The Indo-Gangetic Basin was not spared from famine under British rule. While it is true that the Deccan was vulnerable to food crises because of its monsoon ecology, this alone cannot explain the Indian famines.
Roy claims that the Raj ‘learned lessons’ after the late 19th c famines, and famines disappeared after 1900. First, even if we accept the claim that the Raj learned lessons from the famines, this does not disprove that their policies caused the famines in the first place. Second, whatever lessons they may have learned, it did not stop them from creating conditions that caused yet another deadly famine a few decades later, in Bengal in 1943 (which is widely understood to have been induced by a purposeful policy of income deflation pursued by Churchill’s government).
Perhaps more importantly, we know that the mortality crisis in fact extended well into the 20th century. In the 1900s and 1910s, the mortality rate remained higher, on average, than in the 1880s. Our research suggests that India experienced between 29 and 89 million excess deaths during the first two decades of the 20th century (again, the precise figure depends on one’s assumptions about ‘normal’ mortality).
After 1920, India’s mortality rate did finally drop below its 1880’s level. Nevertheless, India continued to suffer food crises during this time. The quantity of foodgrain available for consumption in India (net of exports) declined from 199kg per person in 1897-1902 to just 137kg in 1945-46, with much of the decline occurring after 1920. According to Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (2017: 102), this was a result of British colonial policies that forced India to produce cash crops for export rather than food for domestic consumption. This decline would have been disastrous for the Indian peasantry.
While India’s death rates in the 1920s through 1940s were, on average, lower than in the 1880s, they remained very high by international standards. As Table 1 demonstrates, India’s mortality rate from 1921 to 1950 was higher than England’s in the 16th and 17th centuries (even though for the latter, modern medicines, basic vaccines, sanitation systems, etc did not exist). In fact, it was higher even than the average mortality rate that afflicted China during the Great Famine of 1959-61 (according to demographic reconstructions by Banister, who corrects for underreporting). In China this death rate represented a sharp deviation from usual conditions. In British India it was normal. The notion that the Raj “learned lessons” after 1900, and that the final half-century of British rule was characterised by enlightened governance, does not hold water. For the first 50 years of the 20th century, the population of India suffered a mortality rate that was chronically higher than China’s during its 3 years of famine. It was only after independence in 1947 that population health finally began to make meaningful progress. As Dyson puts it, “The association of this with the transference of political power was far from coincidental.”
Table 1: mortality and longevity in late-colonial India (compared to early modern England and China’s ‘Great Famine’)
Source: for India, see, Dyson (2018: 172); for England, Wrigley and Schofield (1981: 528); for China, Banister (1984: 254).
Finally, Roy argues that famine and mass mortality were just as bad under the Mughals as they were under the British. There are two responses to this. First, even if famine occurred under the Mughals, this does not clear Britain of blame for famines that occurred under British rule. Second, empirical evidence demonstrates that living standards were higher in the Mughal period than under the Raj. In a pioneering 1972 study of agricultural productivity, prices and wages during the reign of Akbar (1556-1605), Ashok Desai (1972) concluded that: “The mean standard of food consumption in Akbar’s empire was appreciably higher than in the India of early sixties.” These findings were later confirmed by the economic historian Robert C. Allen (2005), who estimated that real wages in India declined by 23% between 1595 and 1961. Indeed, in our paper (see Figure 11) we reviewed evidence on Indian real wages from the 16th century to the 2000s, finding that the incomes of Indian labourers were slightly higher in certain periods of Mughal rule than in the 21st century (as of the most recent data), and that the lowest point was during the British colonial period. Of course, real wages may not capture the full story because much of the Indian population obtained their livelihoods through subsistence farming and household production. Allen (2020) has used more detailed income data and found that the share of the Indian population living in extreme poverty increased dramatically under British rule, from less than 23% to over 50%. In Allen’s words, “Many factors may have been involved, but imperialism and globalization must have played leading roles.”
Furthermore, there were substantial differences between the way that Mughal and British rulers handled famine relief. According to historical accounts of the period, in the event of drought the Mughal emperors sought to ensure food security by actively intervening in the grain market, both by embargoing exports and applying price controls. In fact, the effectiveness of Mughal famine relief was acknowledged by the colonizers themselves. The first Famine Commission Report (1880) noted that during drought the Mughal emperor “opened his treasury and granted money without stint. He gave every encouragement to the importation of corn and either sold it at reduced prices, or distributed it gratuitously amongst those who were too poor to pay. He also promptly acknowledged the necessity of remitting the rents of the cultivators and relieved them for the time being of other taxes. The vernacular chronicles of the period attribute the salvation of millions of lives and the preservation of many provinces to his strenuous exertions.”
All of this stood in marked contrast to the British, who exported millions of tons of grain and imposed taxes and rents on the peasantry even during the worst droughts. The British refused to offer famine relief to any more than a tiny fraction of the Indian population. Those who did receive relief were forced to perform hard labour in exchange for below-subsistence rations. Mike Davis describes British relief centres in the 1876 famine as “extermination camps,” noting mortality rates in the camps approached 94%. British disdain for famine relief was so strong that during the 1876 famine, Viceroy Lytton outlawed private charity, threatening with imprisonment anyone who distributed food to the poor. British colonisers claimed that famine relief would interfere with the sacred operation of the ‘free market,’ but this did not stop them from using Indian taxes to export grain out of the country. These policies depart dramatically from the public famine-relief programmes pursued by the Mughals.
This is not to say that famines were unknown in Mughal times. The Deccan experienced a major famine in 1630-32, linked to crop failure and warfare. But if empirical data demonstrates that living standards were generally worse under British rule, and if Mughal governments tended to be more generous with famine relief, British colonialism clearly has a lot to answer for.
There is a strong literature describing the role of British policy in causing famine in India (see, Davis, Mukerjee, Sen, etc). This literature has demonstrated that there was always sufficient food produced in India to ensure everyone was adequately fed, but British colonial policies prevented people from accessing this food. Roy does not engage with these arguments. Instead, he says that (local?) governments lacked capacity to prevent or respond to famines. It is not clear what he is referring to here. If he means local communities then yes, they lacked capacity, precisely because they were colonized and subject to drain. If he means the colonial state then no, it clearly did not lack capacity; on the contrary, we know that during the late Victorian famines they exported record quantities of grain out of India. Roy seems to have an outdated understanding of famine as a result of food shortages and natural disaster. But there is now an academic consensus that famine is intimately tied to dictatorship and repression, and must be considered a type of mass atrocity crime. As Alex de Waal puts it in his 2017 book Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, “the key links in the chain that leads to famine are always political.”
—Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel