Paddy fields in Ruppur, Nadia District, West Bengal. In the 1760s, much agricultural land in Bengal was held and taxed by hereditary landowners, zamindars, who paid a fee to their ruling prince and then collected as much tax as they wanted from their tenants. The East India Company fitted itself into this system fairly uncritically, and British officials dealt as unscrupulously as their Indian counterparts. Warren Hastings’s attempts at reform largely failed, owing to ideological differences among the British. It was abolished in 1951, four years after Indian independence.
Part 1 of 2
IN 1769, farming in Bengal was already in a weakened state after years of harassment by Maratha raiding parties,* burning crops and destroying villages. Then heavy monsoon rains and a subsequent drought caused two rice harvests to fail.
Governor John Cartier, who managed Bengal on behalf of the British East India Company, could have done little about that. But in 1772, his successor Warren Hastings conducted an inquiry, and concluded that the Company had nonetheless gravely exacerbated the crisis.
Following the Battle of Buxar in 1764, the Company had been granted the right to collect tax revenue in Bengal.* Taxing the labour of others is much easier than labouring yourself, and Edmund Burke later complained that despite their favoured position and handsome profits the Company had “built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs.” They had, however, taken the policy decision to turn grain fields over to poppies for the lucrative export of opium.*
The Maratha (Mahratta) were tribes of Hindu warriors spread across central India, chiefly in Maharashtra, forming a loosely confederated empire in the middle of the eighteenth century. They harassed neighbouring Indian states and caused the British considerable trouble too, until victory in the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817-1818) left most of India under the control of the British East India Company. See A map of British India in 1760, with the Maratha Empire in yellow. Bengal lies in the northeast of India.
Control of Bengal had been briefly wrested from the East India Company after they ousted the Nawab, Mir Jafar (whom they had installed) and replaced him with his son-in-law Mir Kasim. Jafar was restored in 1764, and the Company’s authority grew to that of a civil service with executive powers, with the Nawab as a ceremonial figurehead. The Governor, Robert Clive, was a brilliant military commander and respected on all sides in Bengal, but he left politics to his subordinates, and retired home to England in 1767 having made only a handful of reforms to the Company’s culture of corruption.
Governments are still making the same disastrous policy decisions today. “It doesn't get madder than this” wrote George Monbiot in The Guardian back in 2007. “Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava.”
Précis
In 1769, a combination of heavy rains, drought and an agricultural industry weakened by war conspired to plunge Bengal into a serious food shortage. After the worst was passed, Governor Warren Hastings’s inquiry into the handling of the shortage concluded that high taxes and a lack of investment by the East India Company had exacerbated the crisis. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
‘The Famine in Bengal – Arrival of relief at a distressed village,’ from the Illustrated London News, 1874. The famine was caused by a monsoon and two failed harvests, but exacerbated by long-term political instability, a local economy based on tax revenue rather than growth, and bureaucratic bungling. Efforts to alleviate the suffering were made, even if some, such as price controls, did more harm than good. See An Avoidable Tragedy. Sadly, famines were a recurrent feature of British India; lessons simply were not learnt.
NOR had anyone reformed Bengal’s archaic land laws. Hereditary landowners called Zamindars paid tax to the Treasury and recovered the money from their tenants, taking far more than they should. Middle-ranking Company officials now joined in the racket, and Governor Hastings was shocked to find that despite the famine tax rates had been kept ‘violently high’.
Relief columns brought grain to stricken villages, but the Company also introduced what economist Adam Smith called ‘improper regulations and injudicious restraints’, such as price controls and penalties for stockpiling, which succeeded only in turning a crisis into a catastrophe.* Hastings prosecuted corrupt officials, streamlined the system and employed more Indians in the service, but wider reforms foundered on fears that British notions of property rights should not be imposed on India.*
By 1774, starvation and disease had carried off up to a third of Bengal’s population, perhaps ten million souls. Reports and graphic images soon reached London, and though Bengal’s finances recovered, the Company’s reputation was permanently damaged.*
For Smith’s arguments, see An Avoidable Tragedy. In brief, price controls and the ban on stockpiling grain meant that farmers could not vary prices to meet demand or need, and were forced to sell off precious stocks cheaply. Smith, who assumed Indian farmers knew more about Bengal’s economy than British bureaucrats did, believed that a free market would have prevented the shortage being anything more, but free trade was utterly alien to the Company’s ethos.
British sensitivity on this point may have been misplaced. In 1951, just four years after achieving independence, the Indian government abolished the system that Hastings had been compelled to leave in place by the British.
Lessons were not learnt, however. London kept up her EU-style ‘single market’ among her colonies, punishing foreign competition, imposing price controls and raking in tax revenue from trade within it. It all became too much for the Americans, who dumped a consignment of Company tea into Boston harbour in 1773, and a revolution ignited. See The Boston Tea Party.
Précis
Throughout the Bengal famine on 1769, a culture of corruption, high taxes and ill-advised meddling in the local economy had turned a shortage into a famine costing millions of lives through starvation and disease. Hastings ordered criminal prosecutions and proposed wider reforms, but was unable to win support for his entire programme. (51 / 60 words)
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