Reading about the horrors of the British rule/Raj in India, in Inglorious Empire, one cannot help but relate to such a conclusion made by "the doughty nationalist Lala Lajpat Raj:
'The British are not a spiritual people. They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents.'
The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate government measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths) and financial prudence (don't spend money we haven't budgeted for). On these grounds, Britain had not intervened to save lives in Ireland, or prevented emigration to America, during the famine there.
Thus the Governor for Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon ... was more concerned with fealty to the free-market principles of Adam Smith, and the damage to his political reputation, were he seen to be intervening in the 'natural laws' of economics, than the tragedy of the deaths of people in Orissa.
During the very 1866 Orissa Famine that would so disturb [the Marquess of ] Salisbury's sleep, while a million and a half people starved to death, the British insouciantly exported 200 million pounds of rice to Britain.
The fatality figures are horrifying: from 1770 to 1900, 25 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines, including 15 million in the five famines in the second half of the nineteenth century. The famines of the twentieth century probably took the tatal of over 35 million. William Digby pointed out that in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5 million people died in all the wars around the world combined, whereas in just ten years 1891-1900, 19 million had died in India in famines alone.
While comparisons of human deaths are always invidious, the 35 million who died of famine and epidemics during the Raj does remind one of the 25 million who died in Stalin's collectivization drive and political purges, the 45 million who died during Mao's cultural revolution, and the 55 million who died world-wide during World War II."
Typical of many who today blame climate change and its consequences on everybody, an official report into the Bengal Famine blamed the public and the government of Bengal. "[W]hen you blame a tragedy on everybody, you blame it on nobody, " writes Shashi Thahroor.
— Inglorious Empire, 2017, pp. 150-53
'The British are not a spiritual people. They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents.'
The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate government measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths) and financial prudence (don't spend money we haven't budgeted for). On these grounds, Britain had not intervened to save lives in Ireland, or prevented emigration to America, during the famine there.
Thus the Governor for Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon ... was more concerned with fealty to the free-market principles of Adam Smith, and the damage to his political reputation, were he seen to be intervening in the 'natural laws' of economics, than the tragedy of the deaths of people in Orissa.
During the very 1866 Orissa Famine that would so disturb [the Marquess of ] Salisbury's sleep, while a million and a half people starved to death, the British insouciantly exported 200 million pounds of rice to Britain.
The fatality figures are horrifying: from 1770 to 1900, 25 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines, including 15 million in the five famines in the second half of the nineteenth century. The famines of the twentieth century probably took the tatal of over 35 million. William Digby pointed out that in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5 million people died in all the wars around the world combined, whereas in just ten years 1891-1900, 19 million had died in India in famines alone.
While comparisons of human deaths are always invidious, the 35 million who died of famine and epidemics during the Raj does remind one of the 25 million who died in Stalin's collectivization drive and political purges, the 45 million who died during Mao's cultural revolution, and the 55 million who died world-wide during World War II."
Typical of many who today blame climate change and its consequences on everybody, an official report into the Bengal Famine blamed the public and the government of Bengal. "[W]hen you blame a tragedy on everybody, you blame it on nobody, " writes Shashi Thahroor.
— Inglorious Empire, 2017, pp. 150-53
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