What is Reddit's opinion of Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

This is true of almost every famine in recent history, not just this famine. For people interested in how human actions have caused famine should check out this great book by Mark Davis:

https://www.amazon.com/Late-Victorian-Holocausts-Famines-Making/dp/1859843824

My comment never dismissed any bad aspects of India (past or present). I stated that we are definitely not any worse than them. Our past/present oppression of any group of people within India is nothing compared to their genocide of entire continents of native people or the Atlantic slave trade. They had a system in which they could take children from their slave mothers and sell them for profit. Whatever bad we may have done pales in comparison. Read about the horrors faced by captured slaves in ships from Africa to the Americas. Or maybe the Holocaust done on the Jews. Or the Trail of Tears. Or maybe the famine-based Holocausts committed on us by the British (e.g. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World)?

Dalits were forced to live in separate communities, but their children were never taken from them. They still had their families and community to depend on whatever happened to them. People avoided contact with them (i.e. untouchability), but it doesn't compare to the slave trade or the Holocaust or the genocide of entire continents worth of people. The rise of the alt-right in modern-day America and Europe is just a continuation of a long legacy of a group of people who are convinced their race is not only superior, but has the right to oppress and subjugate anyone else in the world. We Indians have never done anything like that. At worst, many Indians want foreigners to stay out of India, not conquer and subjugate them. Equating whatever racist tendencies we have to their racist tendencies is a joke.

If you cannot understand the difference I am speaking about, then I feel sorry for you. Seriously, your comment is a reflection of a slavish mentality among various Anglicized Indians. Your "analysis" is embarrassingly inferior.

I like capitalism, but it's not like blind application of capitalist ideology and the consequent economic dislocation has never caused similar disasters. All ideologies are prone to disaster when applied foolishly.

A) Give this book a read, if you care to learn something about British policy creating Indian famines at the time.

I got involved because I always get involved when I see someone unabashedly victim-bashing. There was nothing about the IRA. I got involved because you:

1) Identified yourself as an Englishman,

2) Proceeded to make fun of the decedents of your ancestor's victims, and

3) Responded to being called out for being a dick with the racist's motto, "I've got a friend who's [pick your race], so it's alright! I'm allowed to be a dick!"

Famine

The degree to which the British increased famine incidence is usually stated without evidence. This is a compendium of famines based off their usually short mentions in historical texts. These famines are simply not as well documented. Roy (2019) articulates this best:

>We cannot be sure if famines were more frequent or less frequent during British rule compared with past rules. The required sources do not exist for periods before the early-1800s [...] Mixing sources can lead to misleading conclusions about the long history of famines. Historians of Indian famines have often fallen in that trap.

This was also noted much earlier in Blair (1874)

>Reliable records are only available from the date of our rule in India; and it will be seen [...] that subsequent to this time these disasters have been very frequent.

Keniston (2007) concurs with this:

>Famines were always a fact of life in rural India, but it was only with the end of the East India Company’s rule in India that accurate records of famine mortality and incidence began to be collected.

Invariably we have very few records, and where we do, we very rarely have mortality estimates. Sometimes these differs see Kaw (1966)

>The great famine of 1745-46 alone took a heavy toll of 38 per cent of the valley’s population, of which we have no precise estimates; but the city of Srinagar was said to have 150 to 200 thousand inhabitants.

Dyson (2018) enumerates (some) precolonial famines:

>For the century as a whole, there were said to be severe food scarcities and famines in: ‘1613–1615, 1630–1632, 1636–1637, 1640, 1642, 1644, 1646, 1647, 1648, 1650, 1651, 1658–1660, 1662–1663, 1670, 1682, 1685, 1691, 1694‒1695, [and] 1696–1697’. This list is incomplete, however. It relates only to areas that were under Mughal control, and the records of English and Dutch trading companies increase its length. In addition, Geoffrey Parker notes that the monsoon failures of 1613–15, 1630–32, 1658–60, and 1685–87 appear to have been especially disastrous.

This translates to one famine every 3.6 years. If we are to believe Davis (2001) (don't) British India had one every 3.8 years. Comparatively better.

Tangentially, but not substantially so, the bracketed quip was not made in a vacuum. Morrison (2019) offers a scathing critique:

>Late Victorian Holocausts, a book that has acquired near-canonical status despite being riddled with elementary errors of historical fact and tradecraft. [...] His argument was that the integration of peasant subsistence farmers into global markets made them far more vulnerable to famine caused by fluctuations in global grain prices. For this argument to work, Davis had to demonstrate that famine had been unknown or at the very least much rarer in precolonial times, which he did by cheerfully taking absence of evidence as evidence of absence. As one of the leading historians of famine, Cormac O’Grada, puts it: “again and again, historians have been unable to resist the temptation to infer the incidence and frequency of famines from the documentary record.” Davis is a particularly egregious example of this tendency, claiming that “Mogul [sic] India was generally free of famine until the 1770s,” while the British colonial state that succeeded it was unable to prevent or mitigate famine because of its doctrinaire adherence to laissez- faire and reluctance to intervene in grain markets. [...] Davis’s work is highly contentious and has been strongly criticized by economic historians of India and specialists in the history of famine, most notably Tirthankar Roy and Brian Tomlinson. As Roy notes, partly thanks to the work of B. M. Bhatia (heavily relied upon by Davis) it has become commonplace to attribute late 19th-century Indian famines to colonialism and to suggest that the colonial state’s failure to cope with them was a sign of deliberate neglect rather than a lack of capacity that it probably shared with its predecessors. The appalling death rates seen in 1876, 1896, and 1898 did not recur thereafter. The 1943 Bengal famine notwithstanding, the 20th century saw a permanent fall in mortality and a demographic transition, with no further serious population shocks after 1915. Since, Roy notes, colonialism did not come to an end in 1915, we must look elsewhere for explanations both for the continued occurrence of famine in 19th-century India and its disappearance thereafter. Instead, he considers that it was the increased openness of Indian markets, aided by a spreading rail network, which helped mitigate famines after 1915. This was combined with increased knowledge and capacity on the part of the state, aided by the ever more voluminous famine reports—and the codes that were based on them—compiled by the authorities from the 1870s onward. As O’Grada puts it, “In the longer run, although colonial rule may have eliminated or weakened traditional coping mechanisms, it meant better communications, integrated markets, and more effective public action, which together probably reduced famine mortality.” Forth’s famine camps, however unpleasant and humiliating for their inmates, were a part of that increasingly effective response

He also references laws that do not exist Bala (2019).

Jones (2016) & Davis call the famines as a "genocide". Unfortunately he cites Davis to make this point, and since Davis has been thoroughly eviscerated, we can ignore him.

Successful for who? It wasn't very successful for the people they colonised...

At least they never committed a mass genocide of 30 million Chinese people and 30 million Indian people like the British Christians:

https://www.amazon.com/Late-Victorian-Holocausts-Famines-Making/dp/1859843824

The mass killings in the Congo under Belgium's rule were most definitely planned. King Leopold wanted to extract as much wealth and resources from the area as quickly as possible, and didn't give a damn about the millions of people who were killed, and the millions more who were tortured, mutilated, and disfigured under his reign. This is definitely comparable to the atrocities perpetrated by Stalin.

Likewise, the horrors of famines under the British Raj are comparable to the famines in Mao's China. Both were the result of backwards, idiotic, and ideologically-motivated policies that made a bad situation infinitely worse. The famines in India were caused by the British attempting to rapidly impose free-market ideologies onto the population, by preventing famine relief and exporting food from famine-stricken areas back to England to fuel British industrialization. All of this is described and analyzed in detail in Mike Davis' <em>Late Victorian Holocausts</em>.

All in all, the atrocities committed by capitalist and communist regimes are comparable. And both stem from the imposition of economic and political models from the top down, in an authoritarian and violent fashion.

>They were successful even before their colonies.

What are you talking about? The average Indian or Chinese peasant had a similar, if not better, standard of living than his/her counterpart in Europe during the 1700s and early 1800s. And both of those counties had very complex and prosperous pre-capitalist market economies. (At least, according to books like <em>Late Victorian Holocausts</em>). The European countries were only able to surpass countries of the modern Global South after their militaries and corporations established authoritarian footholds and secured cheap resources for domestic markets.

>Well we aren't holding a gun at them.

Well, other than Western countries funding and providing military aid to dictators. Which is basically like paying somebody else to hold a gun to them...