What are the implications of suggesting that famines are produced in the context of plenty?
How does imperialism materially affect the production of famines?
Imperialism and Famine
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One of the consequences of dispossession is rendering individuals and those dependent upon them subject to the market as a means of meeting their needs. The market, however, tends to make payments based upon the individuals contribution regardless of wider needs and also to render access to resources contingent and casualised, for example, as day labourers. Imperialism is partly about opening markets for products produced elsewhere, but also about disciplining native populations for markets disrupting traditional modes of provisioning. One consequence of this has been the production of famines through orientation to the market, rather than simply as a result of any natural calamity.
Reading
*Bose, Sugata 1990. Starvation amidst Plenty: The Making of Famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin, 194245, Modern Asian Studies 24 (4): 699-727 Bose_Starvation_amid_Plenty.pdf download Preview the document
*Holmwood, John 2016. From Political Economy to Moral Economy: Provincialising Polanyi in Christian Karner and Bernhard Weicht (eds) The Commonalities of Global Crises: Markets, Communities and Nostalgia. Palgrave Macmillan, London Holmwood_Moral_Economy.pdf download Preview the document
*Nally, David 2008. That Coming Storm: The Irish Poor Law, Colonial Biopolitics, and the Great Famine, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98 (3): 714-41 Nally_Irish_poor_law.pdf download Preview the document
*Sen, Amartya 1982. The Great Bengal Famine in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further Reading:
Davis, M. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso
Gallagher, John and Ronald Robinson 1953. The Imperialism of Free Trade, The Economic History Review 6 (1): 1-15.
Goldstone, J. 2009. Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500-1850. Boston: McGraw-Hill
Pomeranz, K. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton. Princeton University Press.
Marx, Karl Production, Wages, Profits in Value, Price and Profit https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm (Links to an external site.)
Morris, I. 2011. Why The West Rules For Now. London: Profile Books
Grda, Cormac and Kevin H. O’Rourke 1997. Migration as Disaster Relief: Lessons from the Great Irish Famine, European Review of Economic History 1 (1): 3-25
Peacock, Mark S. 2010. Starvation and Social Class: Amartya Sen on Markets and Famines, Review of Political Economy 22 (1): 57-73
Tauger, Mark B 2003. Entitlement, Shortage and the 1943 Bengal Famine: Another Look, The Journal of Peasant Studies 31 (1): 45-72
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