The Famine of 1896-1897 in Bengal

The Famine of 1896-1897 in Bengal PDF

Author: Malabika Chakrabarti

Publisher: Orient Blackswan

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9788125023890

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This book is a focussed treatment of a famine both as an 'event' and a 'process'. It is a close-up of a peasant economy in the throes of a crisis which temporarily eroded the value-system determining the normal pattern of entitlements. An investigation of the socio-economic, ecological and cultural determinants of the famine helps evolve a coherent framework. The emphasis is on the distinctive problems of the various economic regions, most notably the tribal belts. Chakrabarti applies Amartya Sen's theory of exchange entitlements to a nineteenth century famine situation in Bengal, and finds that a market-based entitlement failure precipitating severe famine conditions, even without receiving any impulse from food production , has little relevance here. Though teh book underlines the predicament of the subalterns, the famine is not seen from the viewpoint of any specific group or community. The focus is, rather, on the phenomenon of famine in its totality---on the agony and trauma of a peasant society thrown out of gear in an abnormal situation, and the crisis of identities that ensued.

Late Victorian Holocausts

Late Victorian Holocausts PDF

Author: Mike Davis

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2002-06-17

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 1859843824

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This global environmental and political history “will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project” (Observer). “ . . . sets the triumph of the late 19th-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time . . . groundbreaking, mind-stretching.” —The Independent Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants’ lives.

Many Mouths

Many Mouths PDF

Author: Nadja Durbach

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781108705202

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"In 1968 Magnus Pyke argued that what "human communities choose to eat is only partly dependent on their physiological requirements, and even less on intellectual reasoning and a knowledge of what these physiological requirements are." Pyke, a nutritional scientist who had worked under the Chief Scientific Advisor to Britain's Ministry of Food during the Second World War, illustrated his point by recounting that in preparing the nation for war, military officials had demanded that land be allocated to grow gherkins. They had insisted, Pyke recalled, that the British soldier "could not fight without a proper supply of pickles to eat with his cold meat." The Ministry of War had apparently been "unmoved to learn from the nutritional experts" that pickles offered little of material value to the diet, as they had almost no calories, vitamins, or minerals. The Ministry of Food, Pyke asserted, nevertheless designated precious agricultural land for gherkin cultivation. For what the human body requires, this former government official conceded, often needs to be subordinate to what "the human being to whom the body belongs" desires.1 This pickle episode exemplifies why a book about government feeding must be more than merely a study of the impact of food science on state policy. The nutritional sciences, which began to emerge in the late eighteenth century and made significant advances from the 1840s,2 established that the nutritive and energy potential of food could be measured, calibrated, and deployed. Food science might have been one of the "engine sciences" that Patrick Carroll positions as central to modern state formation, particularly in the British Isles.3 But if science was integral to modern forms of governance, it must nevertheless be understood not as preceding and dictating state action but rather, as Christopher Hamlin has argued, as "a resource parties appeal to (or make up as they go along) for use wherever authority is needed: to authorize themselves to act, to compete for the public's interest and money, to neutralize real or potential critics."4 That there was "a sharp division" between "theoretical knowledge" of nutrition and "its practical implementation"5 was thus often strategic"--

Hungry Bengal

Hungry Bengal PDF

Author: Janam Mukherjee

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0190209887

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Examines the interconnected events including World War II, India's struggle for independence, and a period of acute scarcity that lead to mass starvation in colonial Bengal.

Diet for a Large Planet

Diet for a Large Planet PDF

Author: Chris Otter

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-10-12

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 022670596X

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A history of the unsustainable modern diet—heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar—that requires more land and resources than the planet is able to support. We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point? In Diet for a Large Planet, Chris Otter goes back to the late eighteenth century in Britain, where the diet heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar was developing. As Britain underwent steady growth, urbanization, industrialization, and economic expansion, the nation altered its food choices, shifting away from locally produced plant-based nutrition. This new diet, rich in animal proteins and refined carbohydrates, made people taller and stronger, but it led to new types of health problems. Its production also relied on far greater acreage than Britain itself, forcing the nation to become more dependent on global resources. Otter shows how this issue expands beyond Britain, looking at the global effects of large agro-food systems that require more resources than our planet can sustain. This comprehensive history helps us understand how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice—linked to wealth, luxury, and power—and shows how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply.

Castes of Mind

Castes of Mind PDF

Author: Nicholas B. Dirks

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2011-10-09

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1400840945

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When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

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