>My impression
heh
>is that the Bengal Famine was the result of
>crappy economic policies combined with having to
>serve the war effort. I.e., not intentional.
In anticipation you might point out that the below is not about the Bengal Famine, that makes no difference in the context of this discussion.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/dec/27/eu.turkey
>In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published
>in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines
>that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians.
>These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by
>British state policy. When an El Niño drought
>destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in
>1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat
>in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted
>that nothing should prevent its export to
>England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the
>famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m
>hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to
>starve, officials were ordered "to discourage
>relief works in every possible way". The
>Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877
>prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private
>relief donations that potentially interfered
>with the market fixing of grain prices". The
>only relief permitted in most districts was hard
>labour, from which anyone in an advanced state
>of starvation was turned away. In the labour
>camps, the workers were given less food than
>inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly
>mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
>
>As millions died, the imperial government
>launched "a militarised campaign to collect the
>tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The
>money, which ruined those who might otherwise
>have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to
>fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that
>had produced a crop surplus, the government's
>export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine,
>manufactured hunger. In the north-western
>provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought
>in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.