Devastating famines

A few years after Plassey, the Company won the right to collect revenue (taxes) in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, some of India's richest regions. Clive called Bengal 'the paradise of the earth'.

Its agents squeezed out as much revenue as possible and spent very little on governing or development.

In 1770–1772, on top of two years of crop failure, the Company's harsh tax targets (a high cash tax on what the land produced, whatever the harvest) caused a terrible famine. Nearly one-third of Bengal's people died, an estimated 10 million.

The crucial detail: the Company kept its collection targets, and even raised the land tax during the famine.

The official W.W. Hunter later wrote: "The husbandmen sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field."

Famines came again and again under British rule. In the Great Famine of 1876–1878, up to 8 million died, mostly in the Deccan, while the government kept exporting about one million tonnes of rice a year to Britain, and some Indian traders held back stocks hoping for higher prices.

The 'free market' policy made it worse. The Viceroy, Lord Lytton, ordered that "there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of the Government with the object of reducing the price of food". And in 1876, at the famine's height, he held a week-long durbar feast in Delhi for 68,000 officials and maharajas.

Across the whole of British rule, estimates of famine deaths run from 50 to 100 million, close to the number killed in World War II. Famines had always happened in India, from droughts, floods and wars, "but never on such a scale".