Lesson 21: Famines, Empire and Policy: Ireland, India, Ukraine, China and Ethiopia

Famines are rarely caused by a single failed harvest. In the five cases in this lesson — Ireland in the 1840s, India in 1943, Ukraine in 1932–33, China in 1959–61 and Ethiopia in 1983–85 — harvest failure, war, markets, colonial or imperial policy, and government decisions combined in different proportions. Comparing them shows both the recurring patterns and the limits of any single explanation.

Ireland, 1845–52

The Irish famine began when the potato blight (Phytophthora infestans) destroyed much of the potato crop from 1845. The potato was the staple food of a large part of the rural poor, and successive blighted harvests left millions without food or income. Around one million people died and around one million emigrated, in a population of roughly 8 million — figures that are widely cited, though exact counts are impossible because registration was incomplete. Historians debate the British government's role: food continued to be exported from Ireland during the famine, relief works were often inadequate, and the workhouse system deterred many from seeking help. Few historians now argue that famine was a deliberate policy of extermination, but many argue that a doctrine of limited government intervention and faith in the market made relief slower and smaller than it might have been.

India: Bengal, 1943

The Bengal famine of 1943 killed an estimated two to three million people, by the most commonly cited scholarly range. Amartya Sen's influential argument in Poverty and Famines (1981) was that Bengal had food in aggregate but that war, inflation, hoarding and the loss of wartime imports from Burma destroyed the entitlements of the rural poor — labourers and fishermen could no longer afford to buy food that existed. The famine occurred while India was under British rule and while the Second World War disrupted shipping and administration. Debate continues over how much weight to give to wartime priorities in London, to provincial administration, and to market speculation; Sen's entitlement framework is widely used even by historians who disagree with him on the balance of causes.

Ukraine, 1932–33

The Soviet famine of 1932–33, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, followed forced collectivisation of agriculture and high grain requisitions. Demographic reconstructions commonly place deaths in Ukraine at around three to four million, with higher all-Union figures when Kazakhstan and Russia are included. Whether the famine was deliberately aimed at Ukrainians as a nation remains contested: the Ukrainian parliament and a number of other states have recognised it as genocide, while some historians argue that Stalin's policies were aimed at peasants and at meeting grain targets across the Soviet Union, with catastrophic effects that fell hardest on Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The lesson records both positions and notes that the dispute turns on intent, which is harder to establish from archives than the fact and scale of the deaths.

China, 1959–61, and Ethiopia, 1983–85

China's Great Leap Forward famine is treated in depth in this course's lesson on capitalism, socialism and Marxism; the relevant point here is comparative. Demographic studies of excess deaths in 1959–61 commonly range from roughly 16.5 million to around 30 million, with higher figures also present in the literature. The famine followed the collectivisation of agriculture, inflated grain reports that led to excessive requisitions, and the diversion of labour to backyard furnaces and other projects. The Chinese Communist Party's 1981 Resolution acknowledged serious errors in this period.

In Ethiopia in 1983–85, drought combined with civil war, forced resettlement and restrictions on the movement of food and people. Death estimates vary widely, commonly in the hundreds of thousands, with some estimates approaching one million. International relief, including the Band Aid and Live Aid campaigns of 1984–85, raised large sums, but historians and aid workers debate how much reached those in need, given the Ethiopian government's controls and the war in Tigray and Eritrea.

Why it matters

Famines are not only tragedies of the past. The same questions — who controls food, who moves it, and who decides who eats — recur in modern food crises, and the habit of asking for ranges, sources and competing explanations is the best defence against both denial and exaggeration.