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Article Evaluation on Late Victorian Holocausts:
-As far as what I can see from the Wikipedia page, the content is primarily quite superficial with the subsection of the chapters nearly blank and underdeveloped. The introduction, outline, and the reception of the book are built for the audience to grasp the overview of Mike Davis's writing, but that too is merely the introduction.
- The content lacks well built synopses for such intriguing topics like Late Victorian Holocausts.
- Additionally, the sources are not diverse enough to cover the content that is already touched upon.
- As this is basically bringing out the essence of a book, my take on the article would be to incorporate a clear summation of the key points Davis wanted to highlight about the famines.
PART 1 : The Great Drought, 1876-1878[edit]
Victoria's Ghost[edit]
The chapter opens introducing a quotation from Florence Nightingale in 1877 stating that, " The more one hears about this famine,the more one feels that such a hideous record of human suffering and destruction the world has never seen before."
This section discusses the repercussion that the provinces of Southern India as ell as North Western Provinces such as Madras, Deccan, and Bombay Presidency had to face due to failure of monsoon rain. In 1876, the Madras Observatory found that the annual precipitation for the year as only 6.3 inches compared to the annual average of 27.6 inches that was recorded during the previous decade.[1] Consequently, multitude of laborers and peasants had to flee the dying countryside after trying to survive on roots while awaiting the winter rains.[2] As surplus grains produced were exported to feed England, the prices of the remaining rations were escalating at an exponential rate. [3]This eventually lead to popular outburst against the unnatural price hike in the cities of Deccan district, neighboring Bombay Presidency, especially in Ahmednagar and Sholapur[4]. Furthermore, situations were accentuated through the persistent British antipathy to control the price hike as merchants across the country shipped their inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protecting it from the rioter).[5] Interestingly, the nineteenth century pointed out that the dearth was caused by not the lack of food but the lack of money and labor.[6] This was due to lack of adequate discounting for the fiscal impact of such modernization as the railroad revolution and trade liberalization through the tax of general people[7]. Moreover, such situations were accentuated through the depreciation of the Indian rupee due to the new International Gold Standard which steeply raised the cost of imports. and purchasing power of the local people.[7]
India's Nero[edit]
This chapter focuses on the central government, under the leadership of Lord Lytton vehemently opposed stockpiling the grain or otherwise interfering with market forces only to keep the surplus in India to support their own extravagant lifestyle.[8] Throughout the Autumn of 1876, while the kharif crops were withering in the field due to lack of winter rains, Lord Lytton was absorbed in organizing the immense grandeur for the Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Queen Victoria as Kaiser-i-Hind[9].[1] An English Journalist later estimated that 100,000 of Queen Victoria's subjects had to be starved to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton's spectacular Durbar.[10] For such, future generations of India would remember Lytton as the Nero of India[10]. In addition , military budgeting was strictly frugal due to the depreciation of the Indian rupee[10]. Adam Smith, a century earlier in his book The wealth of Nations had asserted that, " Famine had never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth[11]Even the grain merchants preferred to export a record of 6.4 million cwt. of wheat to Europe in 1877-78 instead of relieving starvation in India[12]. Lytton justified his actions, to be somewhat fair, by weighing what still had value-budget against lives that were doomed or devalued of any civilized human quality.
The 'Temple Wage'[edit]
The Temple Wage, put forward by Richard Temple, was duly introduced for people who would earn under a certain criteria of both physical and economic deprivation, consisting of rigorous physical labour. Famished people would require a license to travel outside of their community to work in the work camps as labour on railroad and canal projects that wouldn't even feed them a day's meal; furthermore, they were also prohibited to seek refuge unless and until they were categorized as " indigent, destitute and capable of only modicum of labour"[13] Work camps turned into extermination camps with the strenuous manual labour cherry topped with unhealthy sanitation. By the end of 1877, relief officers were shook to the ground with the number of inmates in the work camps that were dead by the beginning of the terrible summer. Dr. Cornish, Temple's most dogged critic, reported that the monthly mortality rate was equivalent to an annual death rate of 94%. Moreover, post-mortem reports showed the chief cause of death to be-"extreme wasting of tissue and destruction of the lining membrane of the lower bowel". Full grown men were starved to a point that their weight reduced below sixty pounds.[14] Ironically, the only exception to this mortality pattern were Jails, where people were better fed than the disease-ridden work camps. People would have been better off getting themselves arrested and go to jail for non-fulfillment of a contract.
In the chief famine districts, some little rain that fell during April-May 1877 was unable to prevent ryots in districts after districts to sell their "bullocks, field implements, the thatch of the roofs, the frames of their doors and windows" to survive the dreadful first year of the drought. As a result, people died in myriads in late August and September that year and more suffered from acute malnutrition characterized by hunger edema and anemia which modern science now refer to as "skeletonization"[15] The only part of the population that was properly fed was the pariah dogs, "fat as sheep", that feasted on the bodies of dead children.[16] Most of the officials, however, denied to share such horrors with the English or educated Indians public; whereas, the vernacular press charged that the deaths and starvation were being deliberately misreported to hide the gravity of the famine[17] About three-fifth of the peasantry was "hopelessly indebted" and paid off their loans through ornaments or cattle. Jairus Banaji commented," A household without cattle was a household on the verge of extinction". Poona with Ahmednagar was the center of the famous Deccan Riots in May-June 1875 that beated up moneylenders and destroyed debt records.[18] [19] In response to such situations, Lord Lytton sent Sir Richard Temple, the lieutenant government of Bengal, as the plenipotentiary delegate for famine to tame down the "out of control" prices that would pose a potential threat to the financing of the planned invasion of Afghanistan in 1876[20]. The Times deluded by his docile personna stated that " Sir Richard Temple, whether rightly or wrongly, has the reputation of having a mind so plastic and principles so facile that he can in a moment change front and adopt mostly to contradictory lines of policies."[21]
The Relief Strike[edit]
The relief strike or otherwise known as the "passive resistance" was embraced in 1877 when families on village relief refused orders to transfer to the works camps where the men were separated from their wives and children. They were afterwards joined by thousands more who left the camps in protest of starvation wage and mistreatment by the overseers of the camps .This section of the chapter introduced the harsh policies that reduced "the wages of general working people which reduced the wages drove away the smaller children from the works, who till then , had been receiving their small compensation return for their nominal labour"[22].
- ^ a b McFreely, William (1981). Grant: A biography. New York. pp. 453, 457–60, and 471.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Ibid., pp.458-71
- ^ Young, John Russell. Around the World with General Grant. New York 1878-79. pp. 242 & 246.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link) - ^ Ibid., pp.266-7 and 274
- ^ Ibid., pp. 278 and 284-5
- ^ Ibid., p. 622
- ^ a b Davis, Mike. (2001) p.27
- ^ Young., pp. 624
- ^ Lytton quoted in McFreely, p.473
- ^ a b c Headley, J.T. The Travels of General Grant. Philadelphia 1881. p. 444.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link) - ^ Smith, Adam (1930). An inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Weath of Nations (5th ed.). London. pp. 27–8.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Derived from Bhatia, Table 5, p.38
- ^ Cf.Rao, p.118, and Curie, p.47.
- ^ Digby, vol.2, pp.203-4
- ^ Singh, K. Suresh. The Indian Famine. New Delhi 1975. p. 242.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link) - ^ Digby, William. The Famine Campaign in Southern India. Vol. vol.1 unless otherwise noted. London 1878. p. 505.
{{cite book}}:|volume=has extra text (help) - ^ Digby, p.105
- ^ The Nineteenth Century. Famine and Debt in India. September 1877. p. 184.
- ^ Banaji, Jairus (1992). "Capitalistic Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century". In Prakash, Gyan (ed.). The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India. Delhi. p. 124.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Digby, pp.46-7 and 265
- ^ The Times, 5 Feb. 1877.
- ^ Quoted in Digby, pp.341-2. Lytton's granite face toward India's starving children in these months- like Temple's repudiation of his own "excessive charity" in 1874- perhaps his father's (Bulwar Lytton's) cruel attck on his "unmanly repining' after the death of his little son in 1871 (Harlan, p.2015)