Famine - Ireland, India & China and the British Empire

Ireland, India and China suffered appalling famines that killed millions while British citizens administrated their tax infrastructure and British sailors and soldiers enforced their rules. The famines raised questions about the causes, the responsibilities of government, and the measures to alleviate suffering and to prevent famines in the future, which are still argued over today. The three territories suffered very different British occupation, yet all suffered similar famines. This book focuses on the common factors of Irish, Indian and Chinese occupation, their vulnerability to invasion, their trade deficit, and the loss of control of their tax revenues and effective military forces. This is a warning for Europe and other territories. Their decline is comparable to that of India and China before they were occupied by Britain. The British Empire was the most successful of the European colonial enterprises in terms of size administered, population taxed, and duration. Nowhere was that success greater than in the most profitable of its colonies, Ireland, India and China. While China was not officially a British colony, Britain and British administrators controlled its most important taxation, the land and maritime customs, and decided what could be imported and exported, commanding the most powerful military forces at sea, up the rivers and on Chinese soil. During Britain’s control, Ireland, India and China suffered appalling famines. Taxation forms the basis for this analysis of the worst aspect of Britain's colonial heritage. Great Britain’s tax system was highly efficient. It was the largest customs union in the world. It operated a tax monopoly that replaced delegated feudal responsibilities with centralised collection and expenditure. The tax-collectors were almost in their entirety also the largest tax-payers. This made them particularly sensitive to expenditure, and focused it on those activities that granted them the greatest return from their investments. British trade and industry grew faster than that of any other country in the world. The population also grew faster than that of any other country and, while not as large as that of France, India or China, it was still one of the largest populations in the world. The heterogeneous nature of Britain, with its English middle class, its Scottish and Dutch aristocracy, its Scottish and Huguenot technocracy, its Scottish lawyers and economists, and its Irish writers, made it a peculiarly tolerant and inclusive country. This facilitated further improvement in its agriculture, technology, education and trading networks. From the time of the Union with Scotland in 1703, Britain drove the creation of the largest colonial empire the world had ever seen. Far from the technological powerhouse that it is seen as in retrospect, Britain did not start its industrial revolution until the 1750s, but it had already achieved its greatest victory, the conquest of Bengal, by 1757, and defeated the French in the Seven Years War by 1763. The industrial revolution was therefore the result of its efficient tax system, not the cause of the empire. Just a few short years after conquest by the British, Bengal suffered its first famine. The same tax system in Britain that drove the industrial revolution was able to kill millions of its own tax-payers through purely economic means. Although a demographic disaster, the economic success for individual Britons involved in the Bengal occupation led to similar developments elsewhere. What started as a commercial trading empire or an agricultural plantation evolved in Ireland, China and the rest of India into one of extraction to finance trade and banking investments elsewhere. Driven by the economic and demographic growth of the homeland, a limitless supply of young men eager to succeed and powerfully armed established within a few years profitable trading factories in Bombay and Madras, conquered Bengal, and opened trade with China. Over a hundred years, they opened the doors to trade in China along the coast and along the mighty rivers a thousand miles inland. By then, famines in Ireland and India had made the news, and famine in China soon followed. Famine was nothing new, in Ireland, India or China, but the regularity, the scale and the effect on the local economies and tax receipts were significantly different from anything that happened before or afterwards. Each famine brought with it the hope that it would be the last but, as they stretched out into a never ending string of disasters, varied only by their geographic location, the government in London and administrators locally were forced to act. First they defended their actions, then justified their inaction; they attempted to hide or minimise the most obvious problems, and finally blamed the natives. Famine management became a political process which has continued into the 21st Century.