The Economics of Starvation: Laissez-faire ideology and famine in colonial India

TY - CHAP

T1 - The Economics of Starvation

T2 - Laissez-faire ideology and famine in colonial India

AU - Stahl, Rune Møller

PY - 2016/1/1

Y1 - 2016/1/1

N2 - Stahl investigates the role of liberal economics in the formulation of the disastrous famine policy of the British colonial administration in nineteenth-century India, where millions of Indians starved to death in a series of famines. The chapter examines the influential debates around the Great Famine of 1876–1878. Despite widespread critique from the public in India and Britain, the colonial administrators abstained from active policies to help the famine victims. They did so out of a fear of interfering with self-regulating market forces and creating long-term dependence on public aid. The hegemonic position of free trade ideas and economic liberalism allowed for proponents of a hard laissez-faire line to mobilize considerable intellectual resources, from Adam Smith to Ricardo, to overcome humanitarian critiques.

AB - Stahl investigates the role of liberal economics in the formulation of the disastrous famine policy of the British colonial administration in nineteenth-century India, where millions of Indians starved to death in a series of famines. The chapter examines the influential debates around the Great Famine of 1876–1878. Despite widespread critique from the public in India and Britain, the colonial administrators abstained from active policies to help the famine victims. They did so out of a fear of interfering with self-regulating market forces and creating long-term dependence on public aid. The hegemonic position of free trade ideas and economic liberalism allowed for proponents of a hard laissez-faire line to mobilize considerable intellectual resources, from Adam Smith to Ricardo, to overcome humanitarian critiques.

UR - http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-59416-7_11

M3 - Bidrag til bog/antologi

SN - 9781137594150

SP - 169

EP - 184

BT - The intellectual history of economic normativities

A2 - Thorup, Mikkel

PB - Palgrave Macmillan

ER -