Skip to content

Late Victorian Holocausts

Metadata

Highlights

Each global drought was the green light for an imperialist landrush. If the southern African drought of 1877, for example, was Carnarvon’s opportunity to strike against Zulu independence, then the Ethiopian famine of 1889–91 was Crispi’s mandate to build a new Roman Empire in the Horn of Africa. Likewise Wilhelmine Germany exploited the floods and drought that devastated Shandong in the late 1890s to aggressively expand its sphere of influence in North China, while the United States was simultaneously using drought-famine and disease as weapons to crush Aguinaldo’s Philippine Republic. — location: 328 ^ref-62902

By the end of Victoria’s reign, however, the inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes. Humanity had been irrevocably divided. And the famed “prisoners of starvation,” whom “The Internationale” urges to arise, were as much modern inventions of the late Victorian world as electric lights, Maxim guns and “scientific” racism. — location: 388 ^ref-27329

in the aftermath of the 1899–1902 catastrophe, the official Report on the Famine in the Bombay Presidency underlined that “supplies of food were at all times sufficient, and it cannot be too frequently repeated that severe privation was chiefly due to the dearth of employment in agriculture [arising from the drought].” — location: 436 ^ref-8010

Local people, like his Darfurian friends in the western Sudan, do not build definitional firewalls between malnutrition and famine, poverty and starvation. — location: 475 ^ref-8228

even while focusing on “famines that killed” (and killed on a gigantic scale), we must acknowledge that famine is part of a continuum with the silent violence of malnutrition that precedes and conditions it, and with the mortality shadow of debilitation and disease that follows it. — location: 479 ^ref-54082

“During the great famines,” adds Klein, “the overwhelming majority of deaths resulted from the synergistic effect of extreme undernourishment on infection.” — location: 485 ^ref-63368

“famine camps were notorious centres of disease and may have killed with microbes as many lives as they saved with food.” — location: 491 ^ref-50430

American missionary described how a group of weavers begged him to have them arrested for nonfulfillment of a contract. “We are very sorry, sir, but we have eaten up all the money you gave us, and we have made no clothes. We are in a starving condition, and if you will only send us to jail we shall get something to eat.” It was an eminently sensible request. “Prisoners were the best fed poor people in the country,” and, accordingly, “the jails were filled to overflowing.” — location: 814 ^ref-1195

where native states retained their independence, the widespread subsistence crises in Asia and Africa invited a new wave of colonial expansion that was resisted in many cases by indigenous millenarianism. El Niño was thus followed by gunboats and messiahs as well as by famine and disease. — location: 1718 ^ref-57187

Spanish power essentially collapsed in the island interiors, leaving the babaylans and their followers to confront the more ruthless, usurper colonialism of the Americans a decade later. — location: 1834 ^ref-20999

Although some of Communards in penal exile on New Caledonia joined the race war against the Kanaks, Michel passionately supported the Kanak struggle for “liberty and dignity.” — location: 1873 ^ref-43411

instead of the 1 million Irish dead of 1846–49, “a population equal to the [whole] population of Ireland had disappeared under the desolating breath of the famine of 1877.” — location: 2112 ^ref-59024

The spring monsoon failed two years in a row, devastating winter wheat in Hebei (Zhili) and northern Shandong. Scorching winds withered crops and farmers dropped dead in their fields from sunstroke. Provincial grain supplies were utterly inadequate to the scale of need. Yet unlike the late nineteenth century, there was no mass mortality from either starvation or disease. Why not? — location: 5273 ^ref-50475

Under the skilled Confucian administration of Fang Guancheng, the agricultural and hydraulic expert who directed relief operations in Zhili, the renowned “ever-normal granaries” in each county immediately began to issue rations (without any labor test) to peasants in the officially designated disaster counties. — location: 5277 ^ref-58539

this was famine defense in depth, the “last word in technology at the time.” No contemporary European society guaranteed subsistence as a human right to its peasantry (ming-sheng is the Chinese term), nor, as the Physiocrats later marveled, could any emulate “the perfect timing of [Guancheng’s] operations: — location: 5285 ^ref-26126

while the Qing were honoring their social contract with the peasantry, contemporary Europeans were dying in the millions from famine and hunger-related diseases following arctic winters and summer droughts in 1740–43. — location: 5288 ^ref-58212

State capacity in eighteenth-century China, as Will and his collaborators emphasize, was deeply impressive: a cadre of skilled administrators and trouble-shooters, a unique national system of grain price stabilization, large crop surpluses, well-managed granaries storing more than a million bushels of grain in each of twelve provinces, and incomparable hydraulic infrastructures. — location: 5300 ^ref-50753

This was another differentia specifica of Qing absolutism. It is hard to imagine a Louis XVI spending his evenings scrupulously poring over the minutiae of grain prices from Limoges or the Auvergne, although the effort might have ultimately saved his head from the guillotine. — location: 5330 ^ref-14891

government during the high Qing era was proactively involved in famine prevention through a broad program of investment in agricultural improvement, irrigation and waterborne transportation. — location: 5338 ^ref-12537

makeshift.” Guancheng also wrote a famous manual (the source of much of Will’s account) that codified historically tested principles of disaster planning and relief management: something else that has little precedent in backward European tradition. — location: 5343 ^ref-14970

The Moguls, to be sure, did not dispose of anything like the resources of the centralized Qing state at its eighteenth-century zenith, nor was their administrative history as well documented. — location: 5376 ^ref-21813

the perverse consequence of a unitary market was to export famine, via price inflation, to the rural poor in grain-surplus districts.) — location: 5383 ^ref-55001

“One of the foundations of Crown Rule was the belief that … India’s past was full of depravity.” — location: 5385 ^ref-19374

“The picture of an emaciated and oppressed peasantry, mercilessly exploited by the emperor and his nobility, is being seriously altered in the light of new interpretations of the evidence.”32 Recent research by Ashok Desai indicates that “the mean standard of food consumption in Akbar’s empire was appreciably higher than in the India of the early 1960s.” — location: 5386 ^ref-42492

Like their Chinese contemporaries, the Mogul rulers Akbar, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb relied on a quartet of fundamental policies—embargos on food exports, antispeculative price regulation, tax relief and distribution of free food without a forced-labor counterpart—that were an anathema to later British Utilitarians. — location: 5392 ^ref-15380

Aurangzeb’s extraordinary relief campaign during the (El Niño?) drought-famine of 1661: “The 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.” — location: 5404 ^ref-24049

The Moguls had “laws of leather,” wrote journalist Vaughan Nash during the famine of 1899, in contrast to the British “laws of iron.” — location: 5425 ^ref-25992

thirty-one serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia. — location: 5432 ^ref-45471

China’s population was no higher in 1890 than in 1820 while per capita income was significantly lower.120 — location: 5855 ^ref-29805

Europe faced even more severe demographic and ecological pressures at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but was able to resolve them with the help of New World natural resources, massive colonial emigration and, eventually, urban industrialization. — location: 5884 ^ref-53947

a major achievement of the Qing Golden Age, as well as of the Mogul zenith, had been the high sustained levels of state and village-level investment in flood control and irrigation. As we shall see in detail, however, the nineteenth century was characterized by the near-collapse of hydraulic improvement. — location: 5894 ^ref-38665

“Traditional water-harvesting systems,” emphasizes David Hardiman, “disintegrated and disappeared in large parts of India during the early colonial period [and] high rates of land-tax left no surplus for the effective maintenance of irrigation systems.”127 — location: 5896 ^ref-9535

irrigation in British India lagged behind expansion of agriculture until Independence. — location: 5899 ^ref-32452

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947.1 Indeed, in the last half of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than 50 percent. — location: 5920 ^ref-63212

Moreover in the age of Kipling, that “glorious imperial half century” from 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent, a deterioration in human health probably without precedent in the subcontinent’s long history of war and invasion. — location: 5929 ^ref-45661

Only moneylenders, absentee landlords, urban merchants and a handful of indigenous industrialists seemed to have benefited consistently from India’s renewed importance in world trade. — location: 5939 ^ref-37390

“British industry wanted Indian raw cotton as a sort of permanent twelfth man, always ready in the pavilion but only occasionally brought on to the field of play. This role hardly produced the consistency of demand necessary to promote a more extensive commercial agriculture.” — location: 5978 ^ref-51210

A society formerly celebrated for its rich cotton fabrics was virtually unclothed by poverty as per capita textile consumption plummeted in inverse ratio to soaring exports of raw cotton. — location: 5989 ^ref-41755

local food security was eroded by the advance not only of cotton production (which doubled its acreage in the last quarter of the century) but of grain exports as well. During the famine of 1899–1900, when 143,000 Beraris died directly from starvation, the province exported not only tens of thousands of bales of cotton but an incredible 747,000 bushels of grain. — location: 5994 ^ref-28467

“life expectation at birth” twice dipped into the 15 years range before finally falling to less than 10 years during the “extremely bad year” of 1900.16 — location: 5998 ^ref-42090

Narmada wheat, which began to reach Liverpool via the Suez Canal in 1871, arrived in English grain exchanges just in time to buffer the decline of Russian exports in the wake of the emancipation of the serfs (1873 was the last year that Russia was Britain’s main grain supplier). It stabilized the price of flour in the season when other imported grains were scarce and provided a reserve for lucrative re-export during grain shortages on the Continent. — location: 6047 ^ref-56247

the British merely “skimmed cash crops off the surface of an immobilized society.” — location: 6155 ^ref-29918

It was the state itself, as Naoroji and Dutt had argued in their pioneering critiques, that ultimately ensured that no productivity-raising benefit could flow from export booms to direct producers. — location: 6157 ^ref-33538

“The gap between British legal theory and Indian local practice was immense.” — location: 6173 ^ref-59351

British rule, which replaced traditional patrimonial obligations with the inflexible enforcement of debt laws, provided massive institutional support for this systematic pillage of the direct producers. — location: 6178 ^ref-7741

British rule in India was “so hard and mechanical in its character” that “to the great mass of the people, the English official is simply an enigma … a piece of machinery possessing powers to kill and tax and imprison.”) — location: 6192 ^ref-10516

“It became progressively more ‘economically rational’ to sustain accumulation through coercion and the ‘natural’ decline in the share of the social product accorded to labour rather than to put valuable capital at risk by investment.” — location: 6204 ^ref-31938

Although the British regularly denounced the “parasitism” of the moneylenders and grain speculators, they were both father and mother to the system. — location: 6209 ^ref-24337

The British constantly complained about the ‘inertia’ of India, but when it came to potentially life-saving local public works, they themselves were the embodiment of decisive inaction. — location: 6472 ^ref-63083

If to most foreigners the cultural and ecological landscapes of the north epitomized China’s inability to modernize, to others they represented the very essence of China’s epochal achievement as a civilization. — location: 6553 ^ref-18747