Famine: A Short History

Famine......Page 2
 A Short History......Page 4
Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press......Page 5
Today, Africa is the continent most at risk from famine.  Its pre-modern famines are poorly documented, notwithstanding accounts of individual famines in medieval Egypt, in pre-colonial Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mali, and elsewhere. However, in the second edition of his Essay on Population (1803) Malthus claimed, mainly on the basis of reading explorer Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), that famines were common in Africa.  Park interpreted the sale of humans into slavery as evidence of ‘the not unfrequent recurrence of severe want’, and referred in particular to a recent three-year famine in Senegambia, which had resulted in widespread resort to voluntary enslavement.   Even more devastating was the mid-eighteenth century famine that forced the ruling Hausa clans to cede much of the southern Sahel to the more drought-resilient Tuareg.  Recent specialist accounts claim, however, that in pre-colonial Zimbabwe famines were rare, and that between the 1750s and 1913 the Hausa lands straddling northern Nigeria and Niger did not experience any ‘massive subsistence calamity that embraced the entire savannas and desert-edge community’—although regional crises were becoming ‘increasingly common’.......Page 29
On the other hand, although enslavement is synonymous with brute force and exploitation, it was not unusual during famines for desperately poor people to sell themselves or their children into slavery, concubinage, or some other form of servitude as a survival strategy, or as a means of escaping some worse fate such as abandonment or death by starvation.  Again there is a biblical precedent; in Genesis destitute Egyptians pleaded with Joseph, the Pharaoh’s agent: ‘Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh’ (Gen. 47: 19).......Page 65
Not so elsewhere.  During the Famine of One Rabbit (c. 1454) the Aztec king Moteuczomah ordered his people to quit the capital city in search of food.  Many sold their children in the province of Totonacapan, where grain was abundant; girls fetched four hundred ears of maize and boys five hundred ears.  In the Indian Deccan in 1630AD ‘life was offered for a loaf, but none would buy’.  On the Indian subcontinent in the seventeenth century, famines led to short-lived booms in the slave trade, and Dutch colonial traders exported thousands of slaves to Ceylon, Indonesia, and elsewhere.  Famines in the 1820s and in 1884-85 in northeastern Tanzania also prompted the considerable export of slaves.  Peaks in slave sales at Saint Louis (Senegal) in 1754 and on the Angolan coast in the 1780s have been linked to serious droughts in their respective hinterlands.......Page 66
A poem appended to a graphic woodblock published at the height of the ‘Incredible Famine’ of 1876-8 in north China contained the couplet:......Page 73
Table 4.2. Main Causes of Excess Deaths in Ireland in the 1840s [%]......Page 125
Occup. Group......Page 189
Table 8.2.  Grain Production, Grain Consumption, and Mortality, 1958-65......Page 248
Bernstein, Thomas P. 1983. ‘Starving to death in China’.  New York Review of Books, 30(10), June 16.......Page 290
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Hodges, Sarah. 2005. ‘‘Looting’ the Lock Hospital in Colonial Madras during the Famine Years of the 1870s’. Social History of Medicine, 18(3):379-398.......Page 298
Li, Wei and Yang, Dennis Tao.  2005. ‘The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster’. Journal of Political Economy, 103(4): 840-77.......Page 300
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Whelan, Karl.  1999.  ‘Economic geography and the long-run effects of the Great Irish Famine’. Economic and Social Review, 30(1), 1-20.......Page 310