Churchill’s Dark Side

[bwv]

The U-Boat war in the Atlantic is irrelevant. It was the large scale rice exports from Bengal, done with callous disregard for the population, were the primary cause of the famine. The cessation of exports from Burma contributed to the situation, but was a smaller factor.

If we are going to hold Lenin and Mao responsible for the famines they caused with similar policies, one ought to hold the UK to the same standard - and this was by no means the only famine caused by Imperial policies, there being of course the Irish famine as well as the even more catastrophic Bengal famine in the 1770s.

It was the 1943 Bengal famine that led economist Amartya Sen to note that mass famine is entirely a political phenomenon and it does not occur within functioning democracies.