Abstract
This book has three main objectives: first, to provide an empirical analysis of how famine developed and was responded to in an arid district over a 15-year period in colonial western India; second, through that, to develop an understanding of the relationship between the state and the peasantry, paying particular attention to the conflict between a developmentalist agenda and the food insecurity of poorer landholders; and, third, to analyse debates and decision-making at all levels of the colonial state with a view to understanding how long-term policy relating to famine prevention and relief was formulated. Thus, famine is used as a basis for evaluation of the internal workings of the colonial hierarchy and of its treatment of a significantly neglected part of its subject population. At the same time, colonial history provides an excellent context for investigation of how famines emerge and linger; of how chronic and sudden, collective and individual, endogenous and exogenous factors combine to create crises and of how crises contribute to further chronic immiseration.1
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Notes
See Bruce Currey, ‘Coping with Complexity in Food Crisis Management’, in Bruce Currey and Graeme Hugo (eds), Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon (Dordrecht, 1984), pp. 183–202.
Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, 1981), p. 4.
Amrita Rangasami, ‘“Failure of Exchange Entitlements” Theory of Famine: A Response’, Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), XX (41 and 42) (1985), 1747–52, 1797–1801;
Alexander de Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984–85 (Oxford, 1989);
David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983–1989 (Princeton, NJ, 1989);
Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (Minneapolis, MN, 2000).
David Hall-Matthews, ‘The Historical Roots of Famine Relief Paradigms’, in Helen O’Neill and John Toye (eds), A World without Famine? New Approaches to Aid and Development (Macmillan, 1998), pp. 107–27.
Sumit Guha, The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, 1818–1941 (Oxford, 1985).
Stephen Devereux, Theories of Famine (Hemel Hempstead, 1993), pp. 28–32.
See, inter alia, B. M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study in some Aspects of the Economic History of India with Special Reference to Food Problem 1860–1990, 3rd edn (Delhi, 1991);
Michelle McAlpin, Subject to Famine: Food Crises and Economic Change in Western India 1860–1920 (Princeton, NJ, 1983);
H. S. Srivastava, The History of Indian Famines and Development of Famine Policy. (Agra, 1968);
Srinivasa Ambirajan, ‘Political Economy and Indian Famines’, South Asia, 1 (2) (1971), 19–28;
Ira Klein, ‘When the Rains Failed: Famine, Relief and Mortality in British India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review (IESHR), 21 (2) (1984), 185–214;
Sanjay Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy and the Colonial State: North India in the Early Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2001);
Jean Drèze, ‘Famine Prevention in India’, in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (eds), The Political Economy of Hunger, Vol. II, Famine Prevention (Oxford, 1990), pp. 13–122;
Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–44 (Oxford, 1982);
Lance Brennan, ‘Government Famine Relief in Bengal, 1943’, Journal of Asian Studies, 47 (1988), 542–67;
Mohiuddin Alamgir, Famine in South Asia (Cambridge, MA, 1980).
The most notable exception, which looks far more closely at peasant perceptions than this book, is David Arnold, ‘Famine in Peasant Consciousness and Peasant Action: Madras 1876–8’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III (Delhi, 1984), pp. 62–115.
See, for example, Tim Dyson, ‘On the Demography of South Asian Famines, Part I’, Population Studies, 45 (1991), 5–25;
Greenough, Prosperity and Misery; Roland Lardinois, ‘Famine, Epidemics and Mortality in South India: A Reappraisal of the Demographic Crisis of 1876–1878’, EPW, XX (11) (1985), 454–65;
Amartya Sen, ‘Famine Mortality: A Study of the Bengal Famine of 1943’, in Eric Hobsbawm, Witold Kula, Ashok Mitra, K. N. Raj and Ignacy Sachs (eds), Peasants in History: Essays in Honour of Daniel Thorner (Calcutta, 1980), pp. 194–220;
Elizabeth Whitcombe, ‘Famine Mortality’, EPW, XVIII (23) (1993), 1169–79; Arnold, ‘Famine in Peasant Consciousness’.
Neil Charlesworth, ‘Rich Peasants and Poor Peasants in Late Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra’, in Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins (eds), The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London, 1978), pp. 97–113;
Ravinder Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Maharastra (London, 1968); Sumit Guha, Agrarian Economy; McAlpin, Subject to Famine;
Jairus Banaji, ‘Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century’, EPW, XII (33 and 34) (1977), 1375–1404.
David Washbrook, ‘The Commercialization of Agriculture in Colonial India: Production, Subsistence and Reproduction in the “Dry South”, ca. 1870–1930’, Modern Asian Studies (MAS), 28 (1) (1994), 129–64.
See Peter Robb ‘Introduction. Land and Society: The British “Transformation” in India’ in Peter Robb (ed.), Rural India: Land Power and Society under British Rule (Delhi, 1983), pp. 1–23.
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, 2001).
For a discussion of how gradual losses of assets cause livelihoods to spiral into destitution and food insecurity, see Margaret Buchanan-Smith and Susanna Davies, Famine Early Warning and Response: The Missing Link (London, 1995), pp. 5–6.
For an excellent regional case study of how British famine relief in India was initially conceived, in the 1830s, as a counterpoint to local philanthropic traditions, see Sanjay Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy, pp. 135–92. On the philosophy of the Poor Laws, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984), p. 163.
Keen, Benefits, p. 13. See Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford, 1989), pp. 104–6 for an argument in favour of targeting.
Stephen Devereux, Paul Howe and Luka Biong Deng, ‘Introduction’, IDS Bulletin, 33 (4) (2002), 5.
Bombay Gazette, cited in William Digby, The Famine Campaign in South India, Vol. I (London, 1878), p. 370.
See Edward Clay and Bernard Schaffer, Room for Manoeuvre: An Exploration of Public Policy in Agriculture and Rural Development (London, 1984).
See Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959);
Tom Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton, NJ, 1964);
and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1998).
See Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London, 1993);
Bradford Spangenberg, British Bureaucracy in India: Status, Policy and the ICS in the Late Nineteenth Century (Delhi, 1975);
and David Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, MAS, 15 (1) (1981) 649–721f.
See, for example, David Hardiman (ed.), Peasant Resistance in India, 1858–1914 (Oxford, 1992);
Hamza Alavi, ‘Peasants and Revolution’ in Kathleen Gough and H. P. Sharma (eds), Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia (New York, 1973), pp. 291–337;
Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1978); Arnold, ‘Famine in Peasant Consciousness’.
Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I (Delhi, 1982), pp. 1–9.
See C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988);
or Neil Rabitoy, ‘System v Expediency: The Reality of Land Revenue Administration in the Bombay Presidency, 1812–20’, MAS, 9 (4) (1975), 529–46.
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990).
Clive Dewey, ‘Patwari and Chaukidar: Subordinate Officials and the reliability of India’s Agricultural Statistics’, in Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins (eds), Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London, 1978), pp. 280–314.
See Deccan Riots Commission Report (DRCR), Appended evidence of unnamed Sub-Judge of Ahmednagar, p. 1, and Ian Catanach, ‘Agrarian Disturbances in Nineteenth Century India’, in David Hardiman (ed.), Peasant Resistance in India 1858–1914 (Delhi, 1992), 192–3.
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© 2005 David Hall-Matthews
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Hall-Matthews, D. (2005). Introduction. In: Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510517_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510517_1
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