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Comment by orwin | Hacker News Reader

What's also interesting about the mongols and their inheritors (India's mughals especially) was how weird but effective their administration was. India knew around no global famines and very few local ones (none around the Bengal) in ~300 years of Mughal rule. In ~100 years of British rule, you had regular famines all around India, and some very harsh ones where millions of people died from hunger (which used to be more than extremely rare), including one in Bengal which never in its written history had ever suffered even a local one.

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There were several great famines during the Mughal reign in India, for example, Peter Mundy, the English merchant and traveller, describes the great famine of Deccan and Gujrat. The Mughal rule was brutal. The European travellers have written about the plight of the farmers who rebelled due to excessive taxation despite the fear of punishment. The Mughals built towers of severed heads outside each village and even they were not able to quell the rebellion, such was the state of affairs. So I'd say the assumption you're making isn't true.

Mughal rule in India was very inconsistent depending on the ruler in power at the time. There was a huge variety in quality of governance from Akbar to Aurangzeb.

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Famines are, with very few exceptions, politico-economic actions, often with intentional malice, rather than a complete inability to obtain enough food.

You’re so close to the point but not quite there.

Famines are political. They happen because one population is happy to starve another. The Mughals ruled themselves. The British stole harvests for themselves and let the local population starve.

The potato famine in Ireland is treated as some kind of unavoidable, natural event. No, the British just stole the harvest. And this continued right up until Churchill in India.

So the Mughals might’ve been effective but the big difference is they weren’t being exploited as an imperial subject.

> The Mughals ruled themselves

> So the Mughals might’ve been effective but the big difference is they weren’t being exploited as an imperial subject.

The Mughals were the imperium, ruling over their subjects. They came in to the subcontinent as outsiders, just like the British.

Western colonialism is a very high bar in terms of damage imo.

This subject really interesting to read, thank you for mentioning it!

Found this in case anyone is interested in reading about it

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

I worry Colonialism will come back again. Or at least in a different form.

Most International Relations practitioners are followers of (Systems) Realism. You might find some minor power with Idealists/Instituitonalists, but they only get that privilege by being under the umbrella of a great power.

Colonialism was not some greedy merchant/state thing, it was an Arms Race. It follows the inevitable forces produced by anarchy, there are no police to call so power is the greatest form of security. It causes a Tragedy of the Commons situation in the form of an Arms Race.

After Colonialism, we had essentially client states, which seems similarly brutal.

You may be right - Russian invasion of Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza (most westerners don't even know that Israel is a settler-colony - https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-fares-abraham-021826 that has been deliberately oppressing, chasing and killing Palestinians for a long time) and Trump demanding Greenland - all indicate that certain oligarchs are working to bring back imperialism.

All westerners have heard this claim repeated many times, but it’s never called a “colony” after gaining independence - otherwise every country on earth would be a colony.

Not sure what you are saying - Israel has colonised Palestine. Palestine is still not free or independent. Nor have the Palestinian natives been absorbed and made Israeli citizens like the Americans, Canadians or Australians did with the natives on the land they colonised. Do you see why this is problematic - by not giving them their own state or making them citizens, and culling them over the decades, they are effectively seeking the genocide of Palestine. And then westerners act surprised when Palestinians fight for their freedom (is the second amendment only for white, Christian, Americans?).

Israel has fully absorbed and given equal citizenship to the 2 million Arab Palestinians that live within the borders of the state of Israel. Their numbers grew from 156,000 in 1948 to 2,000,000 today. So your claims of a “culling” are ridiculous.

The Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza have also grown exponentially since the Israeli occupation.

None of these facts are even disputed.

Um, colonialism never left. It just morphed. The most common form is the economic colonialism/imperialism by the United States.

The World Bank and IMF are tools of colonialism. We extract resources and exploit cheap labor from the Global South. We kidnap heads of state and seize that country’s oil.

We may not send settlers like we did in the colonial era. We’ve just found a more efficient method.

What's the saying, the Irish famine was caused by a parasite, known as the British.

Even if you can argue the British didn't deliberately cause famine over their subjects, they almost never took active steps to alleviate them.

> Even if you can argue the British didn't deliberately cause famine over their subjects, they almost never took active steps to alleviate them.

They sent Protestant missionaries with free food for kids (souperism). Private charities, but the government used them as an excuse to not provide more government aid.

And a lot of Catholic parents decided they’d rather their children be dead than risk them becoming Protestant.

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