The ripple that drowns? Twentieth-century famines in China and India as economic history

Economic History Review

Volumn 61, Issue SUPPL. 1, 2008, Pages 5-37

  Ó Gráda, Cormac ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECONOMIC HISTORY; FAMINE; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST; INDIA; SOUTH ASIA;

EID: 47949119780     PISSN: 00130117     EISSN: 14680289     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2008.00435.x     Document Type: Article

References (137)

1. Adamets, S., 'Famine in nineteenth and twentieth century Russia: mortality by age, cause, and gender', in T. Dyson and C. ÓGráda, eds., Famine demography (Oxford, 2002), pp. 158-80.
2. Alamgir, M., Famine in south Asia (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
3. Amery, L. S., The empire at bay: The Leo Amery diaries, 1929-1945, J. Barnes and D. Nicholson, eds. (1988).
4. Arrow, K., 'Why people go hungry', New York Review of Books, 29, 12 (1982), p. 29.
5. Ash, R., 'Squeezing the peasants: Grain extraction, food consumption and rural living standards in Mao's China', China Quarterly, 188 (2006), pp. 959-88.
6. Ashton, B., Hill, K., Piazza, A., and Zeitz, R., 'Famine in China, 1958-61', Population and Development Review, 10 (1984), pp. 613-45.
7. Asian People's Anti-Communist League, Famine as told by letters from the Chinese mainland (Taipei, 1962).
8. Aykroyd, W. R., The conquest of famine (1974).
9. Banister, J., China's changing population (Stanford, Calif., 1987).
10. Batabyal, R., Communalism in Bengal: From famine to Noakhali (New Delhi, 2005).
11. Bayly, C. and Harper, T., Forgotten armies: Britain's Asian empire and the war with Japan (2006).
12. Becker, J., Hungry ghosts: Mao's secret famine (New York, 1996).
13. Bernstein, T. P., 'Starving to death in China', New York Review of Books, 30, 10 (1983), pp. 36-8.
14. Bernstein, T. P., 'Stalinism, famine, and Chinese peasants: Grain procurements during the Great Leap Forward', Theory & Society, 13 (1984), pp. 339-77.
15. Bernstein, T. P., 'Mao Zedong and the famine of 1959-1960: A study in wilfulness', China Quarterly, 186 (2006), pp. 421-45.
16. Bhatia, B. M., Famines in India, 1860-1965: A study in some aspects of the economic history of India (Delhi, 1963).
17. Blunt, Sir E. A. H., The I.C.S.: The Indian Civil Service (1937).
18. Bose, S., 'Starvation amidst plenty: The making of famine in Bengal, Honan, and Tonkin, 1942-45', Modern Asian Studies, 24 (1990), pp. 699-727.
19. Bose, S., Peasant labour and colonial capital: Rural Bengal since 1770 (Cambridge, 1993).
20. Bose, S., Agrarian Bengal: Economy, social structure, and politics (Cambridge, 1993).
21. Bowbrick, P., 'The causes of famines: A refutation of Professor Sen's theory', Food Policy, 11, 2 (1986), pp. 105-24.
22. Boyle, P. P. and Ó Gráda, C., 'Fertility trends, excess mortality and the great Irish famine', Demography, 23 (1986), pp. 546-65.
23. Bramall, C., 'The last of the romantics? Maoist economic development in retrospect', China Quarterly, 187 (2006), pp. 687-92.
24. Brennan, L., 'The development of the India famine codes: Personalities, policies and politics', in B. Currey and G. Hugo, eds., Famine as a geographical phenomenon (Dordrecht, 1984), pp. 91-111.
25. Brennan, L., 'Government famine relief in Bengal, 1943', Journal of Asian Studies, 47 (1988), pp. 542-67.
26. Carefoot, G. L. and Sprott, E. R., Famine on the wind: Plant diseases and human history (1969).
27. Chakrabarti, M., The famine of 1896-1897 in Bengal: Availability or entitlement crisis? (New Delhi, 2004).
28. Chakraborty, R. L., Rural indebtedness in Bengal (Calcutta, 1997).
29. Chang, G. H. and Wen, J. G., 'Communal dining and the Chinese famine of 1958-61', Economic Development and Cultural Change, 46, 1 (1997), pp. 1-34.
30. Chang, J., Wild swans: Three daughters of China (New York, 1991).
31. Chen, G. and Wu, C., Will the boat sink the water?: The life of China's peasants (New York, 2006).
32. Chen, T., Population in modern China (Chicago, Ill., 1946).
33. Chi, W., 'Water conservancy in Communist China', China Quarterly, 23 (1965), pp. 37-54.
34. Chu, V., The inside story of communist China (New York, 1964).
35. Coale, A. J. and Banister, J., 'Five decades of missing females in China', Demography, 31, 3 (1994), pp. 359-79.
36. Das, S. C., The biography of Bharat Kesri Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, with modern implications (New Delhi, 2000).
37. Das, T., Bengal famine (1943) as revealed in a survey of the destitutes in Calcutta (Calcutta, 1949).
38. Dasgupta, M. K., 'The Bengal famine, 1943 and the brown spot of rice: An inquiry into their relations', History of Agriculture, 2, 3 (1984), pp. 1-18.
39. Davis, M., Late Victorian holocausts (2001).
40. Devereux, S., 'Sen's entitlement approach: Critiques and countercritiques', Oxford Development Studies, 29 (2001), pp. 245-63.
41. Drèze, J. and Sen, A. K., Hunger and Public Action (Oxford, 1989).
42. Dwyer, D. J., 'China's natural calamities and their consequences', Geography, 47 (1962), pp. 301-6.
43. Dyson, T., 'On the demography of south Asian famines, part 2', Population Studies, 45 (1991), pp. 279-97.
44. Dyson, T. and Maharatna, A., 'Excess mortality during the Bengal famine: a re-evaluation', Indian Economic and Social Review, 28 (1991), pp. 281-97.
45. Eckstein, A., Hudson, G. F., La Dany, L., Li, C., Lindsay, M., MacLeish, R., Robertson, F., Walker, K. R., Walker, R. L., and Wu, Y., 'On China's descending spiral', China Quarterly, 12 (1962), pp. 19-53.
46. Ellman, M. J., 'Soviet repression statistics: Some comments', Europe-Asia Studies, 54 (2002), pp. 1151-72.
47. Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal (New Delhi, 1945).
48. Ghose, A. K., 'Food supply and starvation: A study of famines with reference to the Indian subcontinent', Oxford Economic Papers, 34 (1982), pp. 368-89.
49. Goswami, O., 'The Bengal famine of 1943: Re-examining the data', Indian Economic and Social History Review, 27 (1990), pp. 445-63.
50. Grajdanzev, A. J., 'Food crisis in India', Far Eastern Survey, 13, 1 (1944), pp. 2-7.
51. Greene, F., A curtain of ignorance (New York, 1964).
52. Greenough, P., Prosperity and misery in modern Bengal (Oxford, 1982).
53. Gupta, P. S., 'Food situation', in P. S. Gupta, ed., Towards freedom: documents on the movement for independence in India, 1943-1944, vol. 2 (Delhi, 1997), pp. 1817-2065.
54. Han, D., 'The Great Leap Famine, the cultural revolution and post Mao rural reform: The lessons of rural development in contemporary China '[WWW document]. URL http://www.chinastudygroup.org/article/26/ [accessed on 1 April 2003].
55. Heilig, G. K., 'Many Chinas? The economic diversity of China's provinces', Population and Development Review, 32 (2006), pp. 147-61.
56. Heston, A., Summers, R., and Aten, B., 'Penn World Table version 6.2', Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of Pennsylvania [WWW document]URL http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/php_site/pwt62/pwt62_form.php [accessed on 7 March 2008].
57. Hionidou, V., Famine and death in occupied Greece, 1941-1944 (Cambridge, 2006).
58. Houser, D., Sands, B., and Xiao, E., 'Three parts natural, seven parts man-made: Bayesian analysis of China's Great Leap Forward demographic disaster' [WWW document]. URL http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~exiao/china.pdf [accessed on 12 Oct. 2006].
59. Hughes, M. K., Wu, X. D., Shao, X. M., and Garfin, G. M., 'A preliminary reconstruction of rainfall in north-central China since A.D. 1600 from tree-ring density and width', Quaternary Research, 42 (1994), pp. 88-99.
60. Islam, M. M., 'The Great Bengal Famine and the question of FAD yet again', Modern Asian Studies, 41 (2007), pp. 421-40.
61. Jones, R. W., 'A three-factor model in theory, trade and history', in J. Bhagwati, R. W. Jones, R. Mundell, and J. Vanek, eds., Trade, balance of payments and growth (Amsterdam, 1971), pp. 3-21.
62. Knight, Sir H., Food administration in India, 1939-1947 (Stanford, Calif., 1954).
63. Kueh, Y. Y., 'A weather index for analyzing grain yield instability in China, 1952-81', China Quarterly, 97 (1984), pp. 68-83.
64. Kueh, Y. Y., Agricultural instability in China, 1931-1990: Weather, technology, and institutions (Oxford, 1995).
65. Kung, J. K. and Lin, J. Y., 'The causes of China's Great Leap Famine, 1959-1961', Economic Development and Cultural Change, 52 (2003), pp. 51-73.
66. Lardy, N., 'The Chinese economy under stress, 1958-65', in R. MacFarquhar and J. K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge history of China, vol. 14 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 360-97.
67. Lavely, W., Lee, J., and Wang Feng, W., 'Chinese demography: The state of the field', Journal of Asian Studies, 49 (1990), pp. 807-34.
68. Law-Smith, A., 'Response and responsibility: The government of India's role in the Bengal famine, 1943', South Asia, XII, 1 (1989), pp. 49-65.
69. Lee, J. Z. and Wang, F., One quarter of humanity: Malthusian mythology and Chinese realities, 1700-2000 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
70. Li, L., 'Life and death in a Chinese famine: Infanticide as a demographic consequence of the 1935 Yellow River flood', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33 (1991), pp. 466-510.
71. Li, L., 'Introduction: Food, famine, and the Chinese state', Journal of Asian Studies, XLI (1982), pp. 687-707.
72. Li, L., Fighting famine in North China: State, market, and environmental decline, 1690s-1990s (Stanford, 2007).
73. Li, W. and Yang, D. T., 'The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a central planning disaster', Journal of Political Economy, 103 (2005), pp. 840-77.
74. Lin, J. Y. and Yang, T., 'Food availability, entitlements and the Chinese famine of 1959-61', Economic Journal, 110 (2000), pp. 136-58.
75. Liu, X., Jackson, S., Song, J., and Sleigh, A. C., 'Malaria control and fever management in Henan Province, China, 1992', Tropical Medicine and International Health, 1, 1 (1996), pp. 112-16.
76. Luo, S., 'Reconstruction of life tables and age distributions for the population of China, by year, from 1953 to 1982' (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1988).
77. MacFarquhar, R., The origins of the cultural revolution, vol. 2: 'The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1960' (Oxford, 1983).
78. MacFarquhar, R., The origins of the cultural revolution, vol. 3: 'The coming of the cataclysm, 1961-1966 '(Oxford, 1997).
79. Macintyre, K., 'Famine and the female mortality advantage', in T. Dyson and C. ÓGráda, eds., Famine demography: Perspectives from the past and present (Oxford, 2002), pp. 240-60.
80. Maddison, A., 'World population, GDP and per capita GDP, 1-2003 A.D.' (August 2007 update) [WWW document]. URL http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/ [accessed on 7 March 2008].
81. Mahalanobis, P. C., 'Recent experiments in statistical sampling in the Indian Statistical Institute', Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 109 (1946), pp. 326-70.
82. Mahalanobis, P. C., 'The Bengal famine: The background and basic facts', Asiatic Review, XLII (1946), pp. 310-18.
83. Mahalanobis, P. C., Mukherjea, R., and Ghose, A., Famine and rehabilitation in Bengal. Part I: A sample survey of after effects of the Bengal famine of 1943 (Calcutta, 1946).
84. Maharatna, A., The demography of famines (Delhi, 1996).
85. Mallory, W. H., China: Land of famine (New York, 1926).
86. Malthus, T. R., 'An investigation of the cause of the present high price of provisions', in The pamphlets of Thomas Robert Malthus (1970), pp. 5-26.
87. Malthus, T. R., An essay on the principle of population (1798).
88. Mansergh, N., ed., The transfer of power, vol. IV: 'The Bengal famine and the viceroyalty, 15 June 1943-31 August 1944 '(1973).
89. Marx, K., Capital, vol. 1: A critical analysis of capitalist production (New York, 1967).
90. Mitchell, B. R., International historical statistics: Africa, Asia & Oceania, 1750-1988 (Stockton, 2nd rev. edn. 1995).
91. Mokyr, J., Why Ireland starved (2nd edn. 1985).
92. Mokyr, J. and ÓGráda, C., 'What do people die of during famines? The Great Irish Famine in comparative perspective', European Review of Economic History, 6 (2002), pp. 339-64.
93. Mookerjee, S. P., Leaves from a diary (Calcutta, 1993).
94. Moon, P., Wavell: The viceroy's journal (1973).
95. Morgan, S. L., 'The welfare consequences of the Great Leap Forward famine in China, 1959-61: The stature of the survivor' [WWW document]URL http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers3/Morgan.pdf [accessed 8 March 2008].
96. Mukerjee, K., 'The famine of 1943 and the nature of land transfer in a village in Bengal', Modern Review (Calcutta), 80 (1947), pp. 309-12.
97. Mukerji, K., Agriculture, famine and rehabilitation in south Asia (Santiniketan, 1965).
98. National Bureau of Statistics, Comprehensive statistical data and materials on fifty years of new China (Beijing, 1999).
99. North, R. N., 'Health trends in China since the Great Leap Forward', China Quarterly, 22 (1965), pp. 181-9.
100. Notestein, F. W., 'A demographic study of 38,256 rural families in China', Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 16, 1 (1938), pp. 57-69.
101. Ó Gráda, C., Ireland: A new economic history, 1780-1939 (Oxford, 1994).
102. Ó Gráda, C., Black '47 and beyond: The Great Irish Famine in history, economy and memory (Princeton, N.J., 1999).
103. Ó Gráda, C., 'Making famine history', Journal of Economic Literature, 45 (2007), pp. 3-36.
104. Ó Gráda, C., 'Markets and famines in pre-industrial Europe', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 36 (2005), pp. 143-66.
105. Ó Gráda, C., Ireland's great famine: Interdisciplinary perspectives (Dublin, 2006).
106. Ó Gráda, C., Famine: A short history (Princeton, N.J., 2009).
107. Ó Gráda, C. and O'Rourke, K. H., 'Mass migration as disaster relief: Lessons from the Great Irish famine', European Review of Economic History, 1 (1997), pp. 1-27.
108. Ortega Osona, J. A., 'The attenuation of mortality fluctuations in British Bengal and Punjab, 1870-1947', in T. Liu, J. Lee, D. S. Reher, O. Saito, and W. Feng, eds., Asian demographic history (Oxford, 2001), pp. 306-49.
109. Peng, X., 'Demographic consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China's provinces', Population and Development Review, 13 (1987), pp. 639-70.
110. Perkins, D. H., Agricultural development in China, 1368-1968 (Edinburgh, 1969).
111. Perry, E., Rebels and revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945 (Stanford, Calif., 1980).
112. Pinnell, L., With the sanction of government describing the career of L.G. Pinnell before, during and after his time in the Indian Civil Service [published privately; copies deposited in the Centre of South Asia Studies, Cambridge and in the British Library].
113. Prieler, S., Temperature and precipitation variability in China: A gridded monthly time series from 1958 to 1998 [WWW document]. URL http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Publications/Documents/IR-99-074.pdf [accessed on 7 March 2008].
114. Ravallion, M., Markets and famines (Oxford, 1987).
115. Ravallion, M., 'Famines and economics', Journal of Economic Literature, XXXV (1997), pp. 1205-42.
116. Riskin, C., 'Seven questions about the Chinese famine of 1959-61', China Economic Review, 9, 2 (1998), pp. 111-24.
117. Santhanam, K., The cry of distress: A first-hand description and an objective study of the Indian famine of 1943 (New Delhi, 1944).
118. Sen, A. K., Poverty and famines (Oxford, 1981).
119. Sen, B. R., Towards a newer world (Dublin, 1982).
120. Smith, Col. W. J., Economic growth of Communist China, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Publication no. L60-168 (Washington, D.C., 1960); available at: http://libweb.uoregon.edu/ec/e-asia/readb/ L60-169.pdf [accessed 7 March 2008]
121. Snow, E., The other side of the river: Red China today (New York, 1962).
122. Stephens, I., Monsoon morning (1966).
123. Studer, R., 'India and the great divergence: Assessing the efficiency of grain markets in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India', Journal of Economic History (forthcoming, 2008).
124. Tauger, M., 'Entitlement, shortage, and the 1943 Bengal famine: Another look', Journal of Peasant Studies, 31 (2004), pp. 45-72.
125. Tawney, R. H., Land and labour in China (New York, 1964 [1st edn. 1932]).
126. Terrill, R., R. H. Tawney and his times: Socialism as fellowship (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).
127. UN demographic yearbook 1997: Historical supplement [WWW document]. URL http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/dyb/dybhist.htm [accessed on 8 March 2008].
128. Walter, J. and Wrightson, K., 'Dearth and the social order in early modern England', Past & Present, 71 (1976), pp. 22-42.
129. Weigold, A., 'Famine management: The Bengal famine (1942-1944) revisited', South Asia, XXII, 1 (1999), pp. 63-77.
130. White, T. A., In search of history: A personal adventure (New York, 1978).
131. 'W.K.', 'Communist China's agricultural calamities', China Quarterly, 6 (1961), pp. 64-75.
132. Wolf, C., Yeh, K. C., Zycher, B., Eberstadt, N., and Lee, S., Fault lines in China's economic terrain (Santa Monica, 2003).
133. Wright, T., 'Distant thunder: The regional economies of southwest China and the impact of the Great Depression', Modern Asian Studies, 34 (2000), pp. 697-738.
134. Yang, D., Calamity and reform in China: State, rural society, and institutional change since the Great Leap Famine (Stanford, Calif., 1996).
135. Yao, S., 'A note on the causal factors of China's famine in 1959-1961', Journal of Political Economy, 107 (1999), pp. 1365-69.
136. Young, M. S., 'When your enemy hungers: The Kennedy administration, public opinion, and the famine in China, 1961-1962' (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Bowling Green State Univ., 2000).
137. Zhang, H., Sun, Z., Luo, Y., Zhang, S., and Li, Q., 'The analysis and assessment of the climate conditions of China in 1959-61: The three-year difficult period', Proceedings of SPIE (Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers), vol. 6298, 27 Sept. 2006; available at http://spie.org/x648.xml?product_id=682966.