Famine had been an established part of India’s social reality for thousands of years, and was only truly defeated following independence in 1947. Early English travellers had commented with horror on the scale of the terrible famine of 1631, which had severely disrupted normal trade. Yet, the incidence of famine expanded dramatically, first under Company and then under the British Crown. In fact, British control of India started with a famine in Bengal in 1770 and ended in a famine—again in Bengal—in 1943.
Working in the midst of the terrible 1877 famine that he estimated had cost another 10 million lives, Cornelius Walford calculated that in the 120 years of British rule there had been 34 famines in India, compared with only 17 recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia. One of the factors that explained this divergence was the Company’s abandonment of the Mughal system of public regulation and investment. Not only did the Mughals use tax revenues to finance water conservation, thus boosting food production, but when famine struck they imposed ’embargos on food exports, anti-speculative price regulation, tax relief and distribution of free food’. More brutally, if merchants were found to have short-changed peasants during famines, an equivalent weight in human flesh would be taken from them in exchange.
Like previous failures of the natural cycle, the inadequate monsoon of 1769 in Bengal could have been managed without great loss of life. But the Company had significantly increased Bengal’s vulnerability to natural disaster. Bengal had been picked clean by the Company and its executives in the preceding decade. Revenue collection had increased dramatically from just £606,000 the year before the Company took over the diwani to a peak of £2,500,000 two years later. Flows of bullion into Bengal fell from £345,000 in 1764 to £54,000 in 1765, and ceased entirely in 1766. Instead, silver started leaving Bengal to pay for the Company’s tea trade. By 1769, Richard Becher, the Company’s Resident at Murshidabad, admitted with some shame that ’the condition of the people of this country has been worse than it was before’, arguing that ’this fine country, which flourished under the most despotic and arbitrary government, is verging towards its ruin while the English have so great a share in the Administration'.
Throughout 1769, the Company monitored the situation, and in November, the Calcutta Council wrote back to London that revenues would be reduced in the year ahead. A harrowing letter published under the name of J.C. in the Gentleman’s Magazine in September 1771 reveals the unrelenting pursuit of self-interest that governed the Company’s approach to the crisis. Rather than take action to curb price speculation in grain, ‘as soon as the dryness of the season foretold the approaching dearness of rice’, wrote I.C., ‘our Gentlemen in the Company’s service were as early as possible in buying up all they could lay hold of’. The peasants quickly complained to the Nawab that the English had ’engrossed all the rice’. But when these accusations were put before the Company’s Calcutta Council, the complaint was met with howls of laughter and thrown out.
With no pictures or photographs to drive home the horror of the event, we are left with eye-witness accounts of the living feeding off the dead, of the Hugli full of swollen bodies and, in the words of Karim Ali, author of Muzaffarnamah, of whole families being yielded up to the ’talons of the wrath of the godless’. However, the Company’s first concern was to feed its army and then to ensure that its taxes were secure. Not only did the Company continue to collect its land revenues throughout the famine - instead of introducing some form of relief in the Mughal fashion - but it actually increased the rate. In February 1771, Calcutta reported back to the directors that ’notwithstanding the great severity of the late famine and the great reduction of people thereby, some increase has been made’ in revenue collection. Many of the Company’s leading executives used their position to purchase grain by force even seed for the next year’s planting - and then sold this at famine prices in the big cities of Calcutta and Murshidabad. Eventually, the Company did act, providing Rs90,000 in relief, a pittance in a land of some 30 million people with annual revenues of over Rs17 million. Even later imperial historians admitted that the Company did not even ‘attempt to cope with the disaster’. This was a man-made catastrophe.
The Corporation that Changed the World, “The Great East Indian Crash”, p90-92
