Observing Famine

Abstract This chapter is about the Bengal famine of 1770, and draws primarily upon the internal correspondence between Company officials stationed in Bengal from the early symptoms of crisis in 1769 up until the first efforts to enquire into the causes of the famine that took place under Warren Hastings’s presidency in 1772. The Court of Directors in London demanded that the presidency provide an explanation of the extent to which the famine could be understood as natural or artificial, encouraging officials in Bengal to utilize the same data available to calculate agricultural revenues to understand and assess its causes and to prosecute any individuals found guilty of profiting or hoarding. This famine, I argue, was the first in the history of the British Empire where substantial agricultural data were communicated through bureaucratic networks seeking to anticipate and understand the nature of a famine. As I show here, the Company officials engaged in this communication of data achieved little insight: the numbers that they produced were not trusted by their peers or supervisors, many Company officials refused or expressed disbelief at the instructions they received to compile data, and resentment and suspicion towards Bengal’s local elites, zamindars, and revenue collectors led to much of the information that officials succeeded in compiling being rejected as untrustworthy. However, these efforts to protect individual reputations and to justify financial and charitable decisions led many Company officials to seek to try and diagnose and explain the famine conditions within their own jurisdictions.