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Comment by SixSigma | Hacker News Reader

And did the same in Indian during that time period. Having turned Britain's agriculture to wool and much of India's agricultural output to cotton, the British exported food from Indian to feed Britain while 15 million Indians starved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I...

The British shot Indians caught trying to steal food from the docks.

Mike Davis is the author who called it "Late Victorian Holocausts" referenced in the article.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/150-late-victorian-holocaust...

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Another link on how British engineered the Bengal Famine Genocide in India: http://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide/

Winston Churchill casually diverted the supplies of medical aid and food that was being dispatched to the starving victims to the already well supplied soldiers of Europe. When entreated upon he said, "Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits." The Delhi Government sent a telegram painting to him a picture of the horrible devastation and the number of people who had died. His only response was, "Then why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?"

Or go back further, to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, where 10 million died in British India because the Brits had replaced too much of the food crop with cultivation of Opium to sell to China. Instead of relief from Britain the locals received aggressive tax collection to make up for the losses due to the famine.

Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII.

> Absolutely monstrous. But also not something that commonly comes up when people talk about Britain or even about the legacy of British Colonialism. Too often the face of Colonialism is modernity, efficient legal institutions, railroads, etc. Not these horrors, which continued in various forms up until the end of empire after WWII.

How do the positives and negatives compare to self-governing nations of the same time period? Life in those eras was (to a modern mind) unimaginably cruel, and plenty of rulers plundered their own populations into starvation.

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