On the Bengal Famine
- Malthusianism as justification: Similar to the Irish Famine, British colonial authorities applied Malthusian logic to the 1943 Bengal famine. Officials, including the Secretary of State for India Leo Amery, initially took a "lofty Malthusian view" that India was overpopulated and that doing nothing was the best strategy. Winston Churchill also expressed Malthusian sentiments, allegedly stating that Indians would "breed like rabbits" regardless of food shipments, and was initially opposed to sending significant relief.
- Reality of the famine: Economists like Amartya Sen later demonstrated that the Bengal famine was not caused by an absolute lack of food availability but rather by a failure of "exchange entitlements" and British wartime policies that led to maldistribution and artificial scarcity.
Malthus is like a node whose concepts — population pressure, moral restraint, the “natural check” of famine — become incorporated into a much larger imperial ensemble of thought.
For Bengal you have (at least) five overlapping philosophical-moral streams in the British elite intellectual ecology.
1) Malthusian Scarcity Moralism
Population grows geometrically, food arithmetically, therefore the poor are destined to starve unless they “restrain themselves”.
This becomes a justification for non-intervention.
(Malthus himself was never a fascist, but his framework is incredibly easy to redeploy in a fascistic-anti-human direction).
2) Benthamite Utilitarian Statecraft (the imperial version)
This matters more than people usually realise:
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moral worth collapses into a calculus of efficiency
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rational rule is rule by experts, not sentimentalists
By the 20th century utilitarian statecraft becomes the ideology of the colonial technocrat who says:
“We must do what maximizes total welfare for the empire.”
And starving Indian subjects don’t count very much in that calculus.
3) Social Darwinism
(This is more 1860s-1930s, but by the 1940s is still ambient in the British officer class.)
→ famine as “selection pressure”
→ certain races are “less fit”
→ suffering is nature’s method of improvement
Churchill himself is steeped in this.
There is a reason that his comments look like US eugenicists of the same period.
4) A certain “classical liberal” political economy
i.e. the moral dogma of the free market.
Markets allocate resources better than states.
Therefore, intervention in grain markets is “distortion” — even if people are dying.
This is exactly the logic that Sen later eviscerates.
Sen’s point is precisely that:
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food was available
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labourers lacked exchange entitlement
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the “market” is not a neutral clearing house — it is a rationing mechanism that kills the marginal.
5) The imperial racial contract
(Charles Mills is very helpful here.)
Underlying all of this is the unspoken political ontology:
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Indian colonial subjects are not full members of the moral community.
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So the famine is processed intellectually as:
“a regrettable but possibly necessary cost of war”
rather than
“millions of persons dying”.
So the stack looks like this:
| Level | Ideological stream | Function |
|---|---|---|
| metaphysical | social darwinism & racial hierarchy | who is human in the thick sense |
| ethical | utilitarian statecraft | whose welfare counts |
| economic | classical liberalism / market naturalism | intervention is immoral / distortive |
| demographic | malthusianism | famine = nature’s correction |
| administrative | bureaucratic imperial governance | “don’t get politically involved” |
They interlock.
This is why blaming “Malthus” is half-true and half a misdirection.
Malthusianism is the moral alibi — the language of the alibi.
What actually kills is the political ontology:
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the racial contract
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the imperial presumption of moral distance
Malthus gives the imperial mind a scientific justification for what the imperial mind wanted to believe anyway.
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