The Transformation of the World (46 page)

It is still not altogether clear how the destructive fungus reached Ireland; one plausible theory is that it came in shiploads of guano fertilizer from South America. Relief measures, at first involving private initiatives, began shortly after the first crop failure became apparent, as reports aroused sympathy and support in many countries. The Catholic Church and the Quakers were especially active in the work of organization; even the Chocktaw nation sent donations from Oklahoma. As a reasonably good experience in 1822 had already shown, massive government aid at the beginning of the crisis might have been successful in controlling it; wheat could have been imported from the United States, for example, which unlike Europe had had a record harvest in 1846. But several factors determined the actual response of the British government. The ruling ideology of laissez-faire excluded any interference in the “free play” of market forces, because that would have been damaging to the landowning and commercial interests. Also influential was the view that the collapse of the potato economy would create opportunities for the modernization and reorganization of agriculture
and allow it to achieve a “natural equilibrium.” Some Protestants even believed that the crisis was a gift from the Almighty, making it possible to root out the evils in Ireland's Catholic society. Another element was British hostility to Irish landowners (whose greed and neglect of agricultural improvements were held responsible for the problems in the country), so that it saw little reason even to repair the damage.

In 1845–46, the first year of the famine, the Tory government of Sir Robert Peel bought emergency supplies of Indian meal (a cheap, coarsely ground cornmeal) from the United States and had it distributed at various official sales points; at the same time it inaugurated a program of public works. The Whig government of Lord John Russell that came to power in June 1846 continued with this approach but refrained from any involvement in the trade. Soup kitchens were set up in 1847 but soon were discontinued. It has often been asked how three million people could have been so dependent on the potato. The answer is probably that it had proved its worth for decades and that people did not think it left them open to excessive or incalculable risks. One theory is that the disaster of 1845–49 brought the long decline of the Irish economy to a head, while another school of historians sees the fungus invasion as an exogenous blow to a process of slow economic modernization. But a purely naturalistic explanation will not do. The Irish famine does not invalidate the general insight that from the beginning of the seventeenth century, European agriculture was productive enough to satisfy the basic needs of the population and that “famines were manmade rather than natural disasters.”
¹⁴⁶

The famine of 1891–92 in the Tsarist Empire, which claimed approximately 800,000 lives, mostly in the Volga region, had quite different causes. It was not due to an absolute shortage of food: the harvest of 1891 was very small but no more so than those of 1880 or 1885, when Russia had pulled through without any major relief effort. A number of other factors came into play at the beginning of the 1890s, however. In the preceding years, farmers in the black soil region in particular had tried to raise output by redoubling their labor and putting a relentless strain on the earth. Then bad weather came on top of the exhaustion of people, animals, and soil; soon all reserves kept for a rainy day were used up. The famine of 1891–92 was a turning point in the history of Russia. It brought to an end the “reactionary” period following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and introduced a phase of social unrest that issued in the Revolution of 1905. In general the Tsarist government did not perform badly in disaster relief, but this counted for little in the realm of symbolic politics. It seemed to the public of the time that famines happened only in “uncivilized” colonial or semicolonial countries such as Ireland, India, and China. The anachronistic famine of 1890–92 appeared to demonstrate once again the growing gap between the Tsarist Empire and the progressive, prosperous countries of the West.
¹⁴⁷

The New World was also one of these “civilized” areas of the globe. North America was free of famine in the nineteenth century: only small communities
of Indians may have been temporarily reduced to extreme subsistence levels. The fact that people in the Western hemisphere were not undernourished made a favorable impression on many poverty-stricken Europeans during the great crisis years of 1816–17 and 1846–47. An immigrant from northern Italy, where the rural population suffered from the vitamin deficiency disease pellagra and had meat on the table only on the main feast days, found a surplus of meat in Argentina. Even in Mexico, which was not a classic country of immigration, the age of famines lay in the past; the last one had occurred in 1786. The food situation improved markedly during the first half of the nineteenth century, as grain production increased twice as fast as the population. The new republic also took better precautionary measures than the Spanish colonial state had done, and on several occasions after 1845 it bought cereals from the United States in time of need.
¹⁴⁸
In Australia and New Zealand, too, there was no longer any reason to fear an outbreak of famine.

Africa and Asia

Things looked different in the Middle East and Africa. In Iran, a great famine between 1869 and 1872 claimed approximately 1.5 million lives.
¹⁴⁹
In sub-Saharan Africa, the 1830s, 1860s, and 1880s were marked by especially severe drought, and after 1880 the colonial wars of conquest everywhere exacerbated the food supply problem. In perhaps the worst known famine before the First World War, 25 to 30 percent of the population perished in 1913–14 in the Sahel region, not long after another famine in 1900–1903.
¹⁵⁰
Drought does not automatically result in famine. African societies had a lot of experience in averting food shortages and starvation and in cushioning their impact. The mechanisms of crisis prevention and management included a change in production methods, the mobilization of social networks, and the use of ecological reserves. Supply maintenance techniques were highly developed. But it is true that in persistent drought, often followed by scarcely less dangerous periods of monsoon-like rainfall that brought diseases such as malaria in their wake, social orders might fall apart. People then dispersed into the bush to increase their chances of survival. Violence was more widely practiced by warrior groups in such situations. In southern West Africa (Angola), for instance, there was also a long-standing connection with the slave trade: drought victims would flock toward populated centers and become subjugated as “slaves”—a pattern still apparent in the generation affected by the extended drought of 1810–30.
¹⁵¹

Even before the colonial invasions of the 1880s, however, two new developments made it more difficult to apply such tried-and-tested strategies. First, the spread of the caravan trade and the “Oriental” slave trade in the savannah belt south of the Sahara led to a new kind of commercialization from the 1830s on; long-distance trade started to bring in food supplies through regional distribution networks. Second, a new factor both in the Mediterranean North and in South Africa was the vigorous competition for land between African societies
and European settlers. An additional complication was that colonial ideas about natural conservation often corresponded more to European fancies of a “savage” Africa than to the survival needs of the indigenous population.
¹⁵²

In Asia, which in the second half of the twentieth century left starvation behind faster than Africa did, the nineteenth century witnessed the most devastating famines. They seem to have been particularly deadly where, in conditions of low agricultural productivity and meager surpluses, societies found themselves temporarily trapped between growing marketization of the food supply and an underdeveloped structure of disaster relief. Despite its relatively productive agriculture and exceptionally good health conditions, Tokugawa Japan was not spared the visitation of famine. Like Europe, it had repeatedly witnessed hunger crises in the early modern period—for example, in 1732–33 and again in the 1780s, when the eruption of the Asama volcano in August 1783 added to the ecological and economic difficulties facing the country. The Tempō famine, the last great tragedy of its kind to strike Japan, broke out in 1833 as a result of crop failures and aggravated by infectious diseases; the next two harvests were not much better, and the one of 1836 was a disaster.

There are indications that between 1834 and 1840 Japan suffered a drop in population of about 4 percent.
¹⁵³
A sharp rise in social protest was directly linked to the food crisis, but, as in large parts of Europe around the same time, it signaled the end of the recurrent threat of famine. The size of this threat should not be exaggerated. It had always been lower than in many parts of mainland Asia: Japan was not susceptible to climate-induced harvest failure (except in the far North), nor did its agriculture perform badly. The Tokugawa economy kept the growing cities fed, and the average food situation in the eighteenth century was probably not essentially different from that which prevailed in Europe. The second quarter of the nineteenth century followed a period of relative prosperity that had begun around 1790. The Tempō famine, comparable in scale to the European crisis of 1846–47, was felt as a great shock and a symptom of a broader social crisis precisely because it was
uncharacteristic
. Though the Japanese were by no means generally protected from hunger, they were no longer accustomed to the kind recurrent food shortage that haunted other societies in Asia.
¹⁵⁴

The Asian famines of the nineteenth century that caused the most deaths and attracted the greatest attention in the rest of the world were those in India and China. These countries experienced unusually severe weather conditions at almost the same time, from 1876 to 1879 and from 1896 to 1900–1902. Also Brazil, Java, the Philippines, and northern and southern Africa suffered poor harvests that have since been blamed on the meteorological phenomenon known as El Niño (although this is still disputed). For India and China together, the excess mortality during these years has been estimated at a total of 31 to 59 million.
¹⁵⁵
In both cases, unlike Russia in the 1890s or Japan in the 1830s, it is questionable whether the famines triggered major historical changes. In China the famine of the seventies, which was considerably graver than the one at the end of the
century, led to no really significant increase in political or social protest. The Qing Dynasty, which shortly before had withstood the far greater challenge of the Taiping Revolution, was not seriously destabilized and eventually collapsed in 1911 for quite different reasons. British rule similarly held firm in India—as it had in Ireland after the Great Famine. But the famous naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, in the assessment of the Victorian age that he wrote in 1898, included both these famines among the “most terrible and most disastrous failures of the nineteenth century.”
¹⁵⁶

But although famines are not always turning points in history, they invariably tell us something about the society in which they occur. In neither India nor China was the whole country affected. In India, where monsoon failure was the trigger, the worst famine of the nineteenth century was concentrated in the south, mainly in the provinces of Madras, Mysore, and Hyderabad, with a second center in the north-central region south of Delhi.
¹⁵⁷
In China, only the northern parts of the country between Shanghai and Beijing were affected, especially the provinces of Shanxi, Henan, and Jiangsu. Undoubtedly the actions of the colonial government made the situation worse in India; contemporary critics already blamed the severity of the famine on doctrinaire adherence to free-market principles. It took some time before the administration was willing to acknowledge the scale of the disaster and to suspend the collection of taxes.
¹⁵⁸
In northern India, where the harvest failure had been relatively minor, high prices in the British market sucked away so much grain that not enough was left to cover the subsistence minimum of the peasantry. Despite many initiatives by lower-level authorities to relieve the disaster, the policy of the Raj was to place nothing in the way of the private grain trade and to avoid as far as possible any additional public expenditure. The results were the same in 1896–98: grain could be bought at high prices even in areas where the harvest had suffered the worst damage.
¹⁵⁹

Commissions put in place by the government in London were among the critics of the British authorities, but they found no fault with the principle of “colonialism on the cheap.” The great famines of the last quarter of the century were less an expression of primitive Indian resistance to progress than, on the contrary, the symptom of an early crisis of modernization. Railroads and canals, which made it easier to transport aid to crisis-hit areas, were at the same time the logistical basis for engaging in speculation with the harvest yield; they facilitated both an inflow and an outflow of grain. Poor harvests were inescapably reflected in high prices.
¹⁶⁰
Hoarding and speculation had always been a possibility in premodern conditions. What was new was that traditional village reserves of food were also caught up in the flow of all-Indian and international trade, so that even small changes in harvest yield led to exceptional price increases. The severity of the impact on the rural population—the cities remained fairly well supplied—was ultimately due to the fact that incipient modernization made certain social groups more vulnerable, especially small leaseholders, landless laborers, and home weavers. The decline of home weaving in the countryside and of many
social institutions that had formerly offered some protection against disasters (castes, the family, village communities) was an intensifying factor.