Disease, Alcohol Consumption, and Excise in Nineteenth-Century British India

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century the provincial governments of British India successfully harnessed excise taxation as an important—and growing—source of government revenue. Although keen to cite modest increases in revenues from liquor as evidence of improved excise administration, the bureaucrats charged with managing the Abkari (Excise) Departments were well aware that the increasingly vocal critics of British India’s excise policy were sure to see any dramatic increase in liquor revenues as proof that the Government of India was deliberately fostering insobriety for the sake of generating excise revenue. Faced with a need to justify any unexpected results, the authors of the annual provincial excise reports frequently cited disease, particularly epidemic diseases such cholera and plague, as explanations for sudden fluctuations in excise revenues. This chapter takes a closer look at the nature of such claims and argues that despite seeming reasonable at first glance (and being sufficient to deflect unwanted criticism), the actual relationship between disease and excise revenues was tenuous, at best.