Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

“Each global drought was the green light for an imperialist landrush.”

Davis argues throughout Late Victorian Holocausts that natural disasters like droughts facilitated the expansion of imperial power, particularly British power. These disasters caused mass starvation, death, and internal weakness, making it easier for the British to seize land from locals. There was, therefore, no real impetus for colonial authorities to care about famine relief because it was not to their political or economic benefit.

“By official dictate, India, like Ireland before had become a Utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were wagered against dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets overcoming the ‘inconvenience of dearth.’”

The British Raj imposed ideas about social relief on India’s famine victims. Authorities like the viceroy, Lord Lytton, and his successors shunned charity and insisted on tying limited relief to labor. This Utilitarian attitude meant that many who needed aid never received it or the rations doled out where below subsistence levels. This policy caused preventable mass mortality.

“The famine campaign in Lytton’s conception was a semi-military demonstration of Britain’s necessary guardianship over a people unable to help themselves, not an opportunity for Indian initiative or self-organization.”

The British viceroy, Lord Lytton, did not view famine relief through a benevolent lens, nor did his administration seek to empower those afflicted by severe drought through state support. Rather, British aid came with work requirements to discourage victims from seeking it, and those who could not labor for their rations because they were too malnourished were forced into hated poorhouses, which functioned like internment camps, where many perished in squalid conditions.