Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T22:12:08.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2020

Andrea Major Open the ORCID record for Andrea Major [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British Empire. By comparing the responses of organization such as the Aborigines Protection Society and British India Society to that of proponents of the newly emergent indenture system, the paper seeks to contextualize responses to the famine in terms both of longer histories of famine in South Asia and of the specific imperial circumstances of the late 1830s. In doing so, it explores how ideas of agricultural distress in India fed into competing strategies to utilize Indian labor in the service of colonial commodity production both within India and around the empire.

Type
Original Manuscript
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 221 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See, for example, “Agra,” Friend of India (Calcutta), 24 August 1837, 266.

2 Famine Inquiry Commission, Report of the Indian Famine Commission, part 3 (London, 1885), 19.

3 James Peggs, “Proposed Subscription for the Relief of Famine in India,” Leeds Mercury, 28 July 1838, 6.

4 The traditional practice of a Hindu widow being burned to death on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. See, for example, Peggs, James, India's Cries to British Humanity (London, 1830)Google Scholar.

5 Barnett, Michael, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, 2011), 49–56Google Scholar.

6 James Peggs, “Proposed Subscription,” 6.

7 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 39.

8 A Correspondent of the Morning Herald, “Famine in India,” Essex Standard, 3 August 1838, 3.

9 Sharma, Sanjay, Famine, Philanthropy and the Colonial State: North India in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Delhi, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia (Basingstoke, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 B., J. H. “Famine in India” (letter to the editor), Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and Its Dependencies, n.s., 26, no. 104 (1838): 269–80Google Scholar, 278–9. (Hereafter, this periodical is cited as Asiatic Journal.)

12 Marshall, Peter, “The Moral Swing to the East: British Humanitarianism in India and the West Indies,” in East India Company Studies: Papers Presented to Professor Sir Cyril Philips, ed. Ballhatchet, Kenneth and Harrison, John (Hong Kong, 1986)Google Scholar, 76.

13 For more on these organizations, see Swaisland, Charles, “The Aborigines Protection Society, 1837–1909,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 2 (2000): 265–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mehrotra, S. R., “The British India Society and Its Bengal Branch, 1839–46,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 4, no. 2 (1967): 131–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laidlaw, Zoë, “‘Justice to India—Prosperity to England—Freedom to the Slave!’: Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and American Slavery,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22, no. 2 (2012): 299–324Google Scholar; Heartfield, James, The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836–1909 (New York, 2011)Google Scholar.

14 Skinner, Rob and Lester, Alan, “Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012): 729–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 729.

15 Skinner and Lester, “Humanitarianism and Empire,” 729.

16 Marshall, “Moral Swing to the East,” 69.

17 Lambert, David and Lester, Alan, “Geographies of Colonial Philanthropy,” Progress in Human Geography 28, no. 3 (2004): 320–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 321.

18 Skinner and Lester, “Humanitarianism and Empire,” 731.

19 Mukherjee, Natural Disasters, 13.

20 Zook, Darren C., “Famine in the Landscape: Imagining Hunger in South Asian History, 1860–1990,” in Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India, ed. Agrawal, Arun and Sivaramakrishnan, K. (London, 2000), 107–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 108.

21 Zook, “Famine in the Landscape,” 115.

22 Mukherjee, Natural Disasters, 21–22 and 36. See also Arnold, David, “Hunger in the Garden of Plenty: The Bengal Famine of 1770,” in Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Johns, Alessa (London, 1999), 81–112Google Scholar.

23 Cited in Mukherjee, Natural Disasters, 36.

24 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 64.

25 This controversy over the causes of famine is most apparent in the late nineteenth century, when four decades of persistent famine influenced nationalist polemics about the impact of colonialism on India's economy, but it can also be seen in response to earlier famines. See Zook, “Famine in the Landscape.”

26 Letter, Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (London), 14 August 1772, 1.

27 Burke, Edmund, The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 5th ed., 12 vols. (Boston, 1877), 10:180Google Scholar.

28 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh, 1827)Google Scholar, 215.

29 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 213–22.

30 Allen, Richard B., “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain and the Abolition of Slave Trading in India and the Western Indian Ocean, 1770–1830,” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 873–94Google Scholar, at 887.

31 Mukherjee, Natural Disasters, 36.

32 Cited in Arnold, “Hunger,” 92.

33 Ahuja, Ravi, “State Formation and ‘Famine Policy’ in Early Colonial South India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 39, no. 4 (2002): 351–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 351.

34 Metcalf, Thomas R., Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar, 29. For more on liberal ideologies and India, see Sartori, Andrew, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 “Debate at the East-India House [. . .] 19 December 1839,” Asiatic Journal, n.s., 28, no. 109, part 2 (1839): 64–74Google Scholar, at 72.

36 For an overview of this literature see Hall-Matthews, David, “Famines in (South) Asia,” History Compass 2, no. 1 (2004): 1–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 2.

37 Damodaran, Vinita, “The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth-Century Bengal,” in The East India Company and the Natural World, ed. Damodaran, Vinita, Winterbottom, Anna, and Lester, Alan (London, 2015), 80–101Google Scholar, at 85.

38 Brewis, Georgina, “‘Fill Full the Mouth of Famine’: Voluntary Action in Famine Relief in India 1896–1901,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 4 (2010): 887–918CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 892.

39 See Guha, Ranajit, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Delhi, 1982)Google Scholar. For more on the political economy of East India Company–controlled India, see Sen, Sudipta, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia, 1998)Google Scholar; Webster, Anthony, The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860 (London, 2009)Google Scholar; Bayly, Christopher, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar.

40 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 292–98.

41 Kharif crops include rice, maize, sorghum, and pearl millet. The rabi crops include wheat, barley, oats, and chickpeas, among others.

42 Sharma, Sanjay, “The 1837–38 Famine in U.P.: Some Dimensions of Popular Action,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 30, no. 3 (1993): 337–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 339.

43 Nally, David, “‘That Coming Storm’: The Irish Poor Law, Colonial Biopolitics, and the Great Famine,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98, no. 3 (2008): 714–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 721.

44 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 64.

45 Brewis, “Fill Full the Mouth of Famine,” 843.

46 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 64.

47 “Debate at the East-India House [. . .] 19 December 1839,” 66.

48 Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 29.

49 Cited in Bell, John Hyslop, British Folks and British India Fifty Years Ago: Joseph Pease and His Contemporaries (London, 1891)Google Scholar, 24.

50 Bric, Maurice, “Debating Empire and Slavery: Ireland and British India, 1820–1845,” Slavery and Abolition 37, no. 3 (2016): 561–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 See Nally, “That Coming Storm,” 730–31. For more on the Irish Poor Law, see Gray, Peter, The Making of the Irish Poor Law, 1815–43 (Manchester, 2009)Google Scholar.

52 For more on the political economy of antislavery, see Drescher, Seymour, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar.

53 For more on Malthusian attitudes to poverty and famine in Ireland, see Gráda, Cormac Ó. and O'Rourke, Kevin H., “Migration as Disaster Relief: Lessons from the Great Irish Famine,” European Review of Economic History 1, no. 1 (1997): 3–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 See Thorne, Susan, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, 1999), 25–53Google Scholar.

55 For more on this see Davis, David B., “James Cropper and the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1823–1833,” Journal of Negro History 46, no. 3 (1961): 154–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 See Major, Andrea, “The Slavery of East and West: Abolitionists and ‘Unfree’ Labour in India, 1820–1833,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 4 (2010): 501–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 For more on the Victorian antislavery movement, see Huzzey, Richard, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, 2012)Google Scholar.

58 Hall, Catherine, “The Lords of Humankind Re-visited,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66, no. 3 (2003): 472–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 474.

59 See Hall, Catherine, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar for a detailed account.

60 See Webster, Twilight of the East India Company; Bowen, Huw, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Laidlaw, “Justice to India,” 305–6.

62 Bell, British Folks and British India, 80.

63 Thompson, George, Lectures on British India: Delivered in the Friends’ Meeting House in Manchester (Pawtucket, 1840)Google Scholar, 18.

64 Thompson, Lectures on British India, 6.

65 Thompson, 6.

66 Messrs. Keep, and Dawes, , “Letter from England,” Liberator, 9, no. 32 (1839): 1Google Scholar.

67 For more on Indians in nineteenth-century Britain, see Fisher, Michael Herbert, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi, 2006)Google Scholar.

68 The members of the provisional committee of the society were Lord Brougham, General Briggs, Sir Charles Forbes, Sir C. E. Smith, Dr. Bowring, Joseph Pease, Jonathan Backhouse, William Aldam, A. Haviside, William Adam, Francis Carnac Brown, and George Thompson. Thomas Clarkson was its nominal president, though age and ill health prevented him taking an active role.

69 For more on the relationship between the Anti-Corn Law League, the antislavery movement, and East India reformers, see Morgan, Simon, “The Anti-Corn Law League and British Anti-Slavery in Transatlantic Perspective, 1838–1846,” Historical Journal 52, no. 1 (2009): 87–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 George Thompson to Elizabeth Pease, 14 September 1839, Raymond English Anti-Slavery Collection, John Rylands Library, GB 133 REAS/3/6.

71 Gurney, Peter J., “‘Rejoicing in Potatoes’: The Politics of Consumption in England during the ‘Hungry Forties,’” Past and Present 203, no. 1 (2009): 99–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 For more on Chartist attitudes to empire, see Vargo, Gregory, “‘Outworks of the Citadel of Corruption’: The Chartist Press Reports Empire,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 2 (2012): 227–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 George Thompson to Elizabeth Pease, 20 September 1939, Raymond English Anti-Slavery Collection, John Rylands Library, GB 133 REAS/3/6.

74 Skinner and Lester, “Humanitarianism and Empire,” 731.

75 Baldwin, Edward (for the British India Society), British Subjects Destroyed by Famine (London, 1839)Google Scholar, 1.

76 Baldwin, 2.

77 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 314.

78 Society, British India, Speeches Delivered at a Public Meeting for the Formation of a British India Society (London, 1839)Google Scholar, 30.

79 Kelleher, Margaret, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork, 1997)Google Scholar.

80 Thompson, Lectures on British India, 57–9.

81 Sharma, “The 1837–38 Famine in U.P.,” 338.

82 Sharma, 338.

83 See Laidlaw, “Justice to India,” 305–6.

84 See Major, Andrea, “‘Hill Coolies’: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836–38,” South Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (2017): 23–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Thompson, Lectures on British India, 60.

86 See also Nayar, Pramod K., “The Imperial Sublime: English Travel Writing and India, 1750–1820,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (2002): 57–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Arnold, David, “Deathscapes: India in an Age of Romanticism and Empire, 1800–1856,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26, no. 4 (2004): 339–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 349.

88 Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790; repr. Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar, 58.

89 British India Society, Speeches, 30.

90 Bell, British Folks and British India, 48.

91 Grove, Richard, “Conserving Eden: The (European) East India Companies and their Environmental Policies on St. Helena, Mauritius, and in Western India, 1660 to 1854,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 2 (1993): 318–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 318.

92 Grove, “Conserving Eden,” 342.

93 “Famine in India,” Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh), 22 October 1838, 2. “Famine in India,”

94 See David Hall-Matthews, “Famines in (South) Asia,” for more.

95 Cited in Mukherjee, Natural Disasters, 70.

96 See, for example, Pease, Joseph, A Letter [. . .] on the subject of Slave Trade and Slavery (Darlington, 1842)Google Scholar, 4.

97 See also Connolly, Jonathan, “Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: Free Trade, Race, and Labour in British Public Debate, 1838–1860,” Past and Present 238, no. 1 (2018): 85–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, Clare, “Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 1 (2009): 93–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrea Major, “Hill Coolies.”

98 Kale, Madhavi, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2010)Google Scholar, 109.

99 Green, William A., “Emancipation to Indenture: A Question of Imperial Morality,” Journal of British Studies 22, no. 2 (1983): 98–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 103.

100 Green, “Emancipation to Indenture,” 110.

101 Kale, Fragments of Empire, 117.

102 British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention (London, 1840)Google Scholar, 383.

103 “Debate at the East-India House [. . .] 22 June,” Asiatic Journal, n.s., 38, no. 151, part 2 (1842): 189–215Google Scholar.

104 The desirability of turning small peasant cultivators into landless laborers can also be seen in debates about the Irish Poor Law around this time. See Nally, “That Coming Storm,” 723.

105 “Debate at the East-India House [. . .] June 22,” 196.

106 Bates, Crispin and Carter, Marina, “Enslaved Lives, Enslaving Labels: A New Approach to the Colonial Indian Labor Diaspora,” in New Routes for Diaspora Studies, ed. Banerjee, Sukanya, McGuinness, Aims, and McKay, Steven C. (Bloomington, 2012), 67–92Google Scholar.

107 Courier, cited in Spectator, 21 July 1838, 14.

108 “Debate at the East-India House [. . .] June 22, 1842” 192.

109 “Debate at the East-India House [. . .] 22 June 1842,” 199, 200.

110 “Debate at the East-India House [. . .] 22 June 1842,” 192.

111 See for example, “Sugars and the Slave Trade,” Liverpool Mercury, 17 August 1821, 51.

112 John Chapman to George Thompson, [no day or month] 1842, Correspondence with George Thompson MP relating to Indian affairs, British Library, MSS Eur E234/91.

113 Kling, Blair, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India, (Berkeley, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 177; Sarkar, Sumit, A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta, 1985)Google Scholar.

114 See Bell, British Folks and British India, 1.

115 Turley, David, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London, 1991)Google Scholar, 98.