State formation and 'famine policy' in early colonial south India

Abstract

The experience of dearth turning into famine, of crises of subsistence turning into crises of mortality, had shaped social and cultural practices in South Asia long before British domination. Nor did famines disappear under colonial capitalism. Transformations and higher levels of integration of the subcontinent’s political, economic and social structure merely changed the causes of famine. While malnutrition continued to be or even became endemic among the lower classes of many regions, hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of Indians died in major famines between 1769-70 and 1943.~ Yet famines not only extinguished