Hazards, Vulnerability and Resilience in Colonial India. A Comparative Analysis of Three Famines in Nineteenth-Century Bihar.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a global wave of famines and India was among the worst affected regions. Famines were both frequent and devastating, causing the death of millions. Scholars have since debated whether ‘natural’ or ‘man-made’ factors were responsible for the extraordinary famine mortality in this half-century. These two competing views on the causes of famines go back to Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith, the former stressing natural factors and the latter human agency in their explanations of famines. The most recent shift in famine thinking has occurred in the field of historical disasters studies where famines are understood as an interaction between a natural hazard and a vulnerable society. This project conducts a comparative analysis of three Indian famines based on these recent insights. The famines of 1866, 1873–74 and 1888–89 are particularly interesting case studies because they occurred in a comparatively small and ecologically coherent region within a short but eventful period of time. In a first step, the project reconstructs the hazard, i.e. the drought, that preceded each of these famines based on a combination of paleoclimatic and instrumental data as well as meteorological data retrieved from written archival records. Secondly, we assess the affected society’s vulnerability and resilience over time. We study shifts in real wages, cash-crop production, access to common property resources and famine relief, with a focus on the most vulnerable social groups: landless labourers, lower castes and females. Essentially, this research project is a historical experiment in which important variables such as general climatic conditions, agricultural patters and basic social relations remain constant. This allows us to focus on a range of other factors that might have had an impact on the final outcome of famines.