The Bengal famine in 1943, in the final years of India’s rule by Britain, killed some three million people, and for decades academics have fiercely debated the role played by Churchill, who was Britain’s prime minister at the time.
The starvation in Bengal was not the result of an inadequate food supply, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who has studied famines and who experienced the Bengal famine as a child <https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/09/business/profile-the-conscience-of-the-dismal-science.html>. Mr. Sen argued that a spike in food prices, brought on by Britain’s huge expenditures to fight Japan during World War II, led to many poor rural people going hungry. Some scholars have argued that Churchill’s policies contributed significantly to the famine <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study#:~:text=Mukerjee%20has%20presented%20evidence%20the,to%20elsewhere%20in%20the%20empire.>. Madhusree Mukerjee, a writer and physicist who is an outspoken critic of Churchill’s wartime administration, asserted in a 2010 book <https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/books/review/adam-kirsch-on-new-books-about-world-war-ii.html> that the British government was repeatedly warned that its policies could lead to famine in India, but continued to export rice from there. Other scholars, including Mr. Roberts, argue that the famine was caused mainly by a typhoon and the wartime destruction of supply lines <https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/churcills-secret-war-bengal-famine-1943/>. They say that once the Churchill administration became fully aware of the famine, it sent tens of thousands of tons of grain to India. > > https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/arts/churchill-bengal-famine-national-portrait-gallery.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42166): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42166 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119947756/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
