Ira Klein

Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India

The dark and fatal passage of plague across the Indian sub-continent in the early twentieth-century, and the inability of Western medicine quickly to halt its incursions symptomized disharmonies in the relationship between modernization and Indian society and ecology. The impact of economic development and environmental change on Indian mortality has been examined elsewhere, but the result was the perpetuation or increase of high death-rates from a multiplicity of diseases through the end of World War I. In the half-century 1872-1921 annual mortality ranged between 40 and 50 per thousand, more than twice the death-rates of the advanced West, and life expectancy fell from about 25 to 20 years. The Indian experience was not unique. Epidemics of cholera and the ‘white plague’ of tuberculosis in the industrializing West, and the ordeal of mortality in the colonial Philippines also illustrated how development activities induced social and environmental disruptions and sustained or promoted high death-rates.

Urban Development and Death: Bombay City, 1870–1914

Historians, statesmen, administrators, nationalists and others have disagreed sharply about the impact of modernization in the era of Western domination. Did Western rule provide the tools for Indian progress but did economically medieval, ‘other-worldly’ Indians fail to maximize the benefits of modernization and even thwart advances? Conversely, did Western imperialism systematically impoverish India by making it a ‘satellite,’ freezing the subcontinent into a neo-feudal social pattern while sucking up its wealth? Finally, is a ‘new revisionist’ interpretation correct that India experienced real if undramatic economic growth during the Western era and that notions of exploitation or Indian suffering induced by development were myths? Interpretations expressing either the great success and benign innovations of Western rule, or its exploitiveness both appear flawed, according to Bombays modernizing experience. Bombay underwent a great expansion of wealth and became the source of Indias new factory textile production, the hub of a great newwork of trasport and trade, and the cosmopolitan abode of wealth Indian merchants, industrialist and professionals, whose affluence, modernity, industrializing activies and eventual nationalist orientation distinguished them from a supine or neo-feudal comprador class, cooperating with Western masters in exploiting ‘natives’ for a myrmidons share of the profits. Alternatively, Bombays prosperity did not flow down to the masses; its modernization was complex, dynamically helping to produce progress and wealth, but for some decades impoverishing and destroying many lives. In the half-century of rapid development preceding the first world war, the great majority of Bombays populace, its ordinary working classes, experienced significant declines in living standards, worsening environmental conditions and escalating death-rates. Diminished real income and increased mortality among Bombays ordinary inhabitants warn against extrapolating from rising indices of material production an optimistic conclusion about the general human condition in the city or in British India.

When the rains failed: famine, relief, and mortality in British India

In the five decades ending just after World War I India experienced a grim crescendo of death in which terrible epidemics of malaria, plague and influenza destroyed tens of millions of lives, other endemic diseases were highly fatal, the sub-continent was stricken by the most widespread famines in its recorded history, life expectancy fell to twenty years, and population growth was sharply curtailed despite high fertility.’ In the following halfcentury, however, there was a notable transition; a ’mortality revolution’ occurred in which a dramatic long-term decline in the death rate saved many millions of lives and precipitated a rapid but burdensome population growth.2 2 Perhaps the most striking feature of India’s post-World Way’ mortality revolution was the ’conquest’ of famine-the disappearance of the horrible multi-provincial ordeals of crop failure, disorganisation, starvation and ensuing epidemics which had destroyed great multitudes in the preceding fifty years, or in the earlier epochs of Indian history.3 In the half-century 1871-1920,

Population growth and mortality in British India Part II: The demographic revolution

The author continues to examine the causes of the rapid growth of population that occurred in India following World War I. In this second part of a two-part article he looks at the causes of the mortality decline that occurred in the interwar period particularly why mortality declined so rapidly without significant evidence of material advances among the population as a whole. The causes of the decline are identified as a reduction in mortality from diseases such as the plague and the expansion of a general biological immunization in the population rather than as the development of successful social policies.

Malaria and Mortality in Bengal, 1840-1921

During the British rule in Bengal, tigers and wolves roamed through the once &dquo;magnificent&dquo; palaces of the ancient capital, Gaur. Its &dquo;beautiful ... artifical lakes&dquo; were the refuge of &dquo;fierce alligators.&dquo;’ Gaur did not collapse because of defeat and sack in war. Rather, the new Moghul government was reputed to have neglected public health measures in the crowded city, and in 1560 plague broke out, causing desertion and decay. The image might have chilled more modern health officials and engineers, particularly the Bengal government’s chief engineer in the 1930’s, S. C. IB1ajumdar. He feared that unless remedial measures were found for problems of

English Free Traders and Indian Tariffs, 1874—96

Indian tariff policies, historians of British India have stressed, illustrated an economic determinism in imperialism, in which Manchester blatantly served its self-interest in generating exploitative policies. Ironically, the influential work of John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, which indirectly qualified the idea of an imperialism that was solely economically motivated, has helped to produce a new view of British economic exploitation regarding Indian policy.

Development and death: reinterpreting malaria, economics and ecology in British India.

British policies inadvertently brought ’death by development’ to colonial India, for efforts towards material progress expanded gross domestic product and international trade but promoted an era of heightened human destruction by disease, partly because of the social, ecological and epidemiological consequences of development programmes. Significantly linked to the fall of Indian longevity to a recorded

VI. British Intervention in the Persian Revolution, 1905–1909

The activity of the foreign Powers in Persia during the early twentieth century has begun to receive historians’ attention; the British role in the Persian struggle against Kajar despotism, however, has not been made clear. The British have been pictured as indecisive and as not significantly supporting the Persian revolution. Or, where they have been described as aiding rebellion, only vague implications exist as to their purpose: hints that before the Anglo-Russian Convention the British encouraged the revolutionaries in order to extend British influence, presumably at Russian expense, and that after the Convention the British tried to make the shah honour his promises to the constitutionalists to obtain political stability and a secure environment for British trade. At least partly correct, if limited in scope and inexplicit about details, these ideas do not allow a full understanding of British policy during the tumultuous Persian struggle for a constitution. A thorough examination of the exact impact of the Anglo-Russian Convention on Russians and revolutionaries in Persia is required for comprehension of British attitudes and policies.

British Reforms, Commercial Agriculture, and Agrarian Distress in India

I. THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF AGRARIAN PROGRESS The best laid plans for social and economic transformation often fail, fare badly, suffer poor implementation, take a century or more to succeed, or deceptively mask other motivations. Those deviations from stated objectives characterized British agrarian policies in India. Agricultural development represented a major justification for British occupation of India, and ideals of agrarian plenty promoted progressive ideas and theories of growth. Notably, utilitarians hoped to create thriving, progress-oriented peasant communities, and advocated establishing secure, individual, ryotwari (peasant-based) land tenures across the subcontinent. Advancement would be attained, these reformers believed, through moderate, skilled assessments, objective laws, and sufficient education to encourage strategic economic planning by village cultivators. In practice, colonial rulers gave priority to creating transport, expanding irrigation, nurturing the growth of valuable export crops, and promoting the sale of cheap raw materials to Britain and India’s purchase of British manufactures. They failed to endorse some reform ideals, scrimped on mass education and law reform, and did not transform capital markets. Although a minority of India’s landholders obtained prosperity during colonial rule, partly through a substantial growth of commercial agriculture, British measures achieved only limited progress for the great mass of cultivators. Along with commercial development, colonial policies sometimes provoked considerable distress, as shown by census data, gazetteers, land-assessment reports, and famine-commission records, many seldom used in previous scholarly work. Analyzing the impact of reforms requires examining several facets of colonial policies, including education, commercial and social laws, assessment methods, demographic practices, credit regulations, foreclosures, and the resulting changes in agrarian society.