Conclusion

Abstract This concluding chapter explores the entanglements between the Board of Agriculture and the East India Company, and reviews how these entanglements produced new concepts of famine and methods for attempting to quantify food insecurity. The conclusion points towards how these decades (1770–1800) were crucial in providing methodological means of distinguishing famine in India from famine in Europe and Britain. These new concepts were, of course, fruits of the new efforts to compile and produce data on scarcity and famine. Surveying the period, I argue that we can observe a rapid proliferation of new moral expectations of the state. I suggest that we can understand these expectations as being a product of the new means of observing famine through quantitative analysis and statistics. The new means of observing and measuring famine determined new moral responsibilities of the state. Following this, I return to the question of how efforts to measure famine and scarcity reinforced expectations that anthropogenic and natural (or ‘real’) phenomena could be distinguished from one another through statistical analysis. I conclude by considering whether the concept of ‘natural’ famine has been superseded by our changing attitudes towards nature and human impacts on the environmental changes that threaten food security.