this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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1770 The Great Bengal Famine occurs killing 30 million thanks to extractive taxation by England.
1775 America violently rejects extractive taxation policies and goes on to win independence from England.
1845 The Great Irish Famine kills 1 million with at least 2 million fleeing as refugees due to extractive policies on food. Which had Ireland continue to net export food during the famine.
The difference is America knew what came next and acted accordingly.
Well, I'd point at the difference being "America was organized and ready to take advantage of anti-British sentiment, while the other two were not".
People often want to think it's the scale or intensity of the injustice which triggers revolutions, but it's really not - it's the chances of success. People can suffer almost infinitely if they don't believe they can win. Britain's policy of 'benevolent neglect' bit them in the ass, because it forced us to organize ourselves, including in local companies, militia units, and colonial representative bodies, which came in handy once we realized that not being represented was a really shit deal.
I'd agree having knowledge of what happened in India enabled the Americans to foresee the inevitable outcomes of ignoring the taxes and take early action to organize and resist. 1770 and 1775 were very close in time. If not for the Great Bengal Famine perhaps the American Revolution would have gone much differently.
If the result of fighting and failing and not fighting are both the same suddenly 1% sounds like great odds.
What bit Britain was two things the excessive spending on the French Indian war and the fact that we weren't forced to have representative bodies and militias we wanted them. American considered themselves Englishmen and to have all the rights afforded to Englishmen. Americans fought most of 1775 and into 76 not fighting for independence but for the respect of those rights after England tried to dissolve our legislative bodies.
England had no more a right to tax the colonies than Russia has to tax a Frenchman. If America didn't reject a tax on tea (even though it actually made tea cheaper) they'd be accepting the notion that it was a just authority of England to tax them. And if they had authority to tax a penny they could tax a pound. As shown in Bengal the power to tax was the power to destroy.
I mean, while that is true, I don't know how much the news of a recent event like the Great Bengal Famine in a time of slow news and even slower analysis really impacted the American Revolution's internal support. Most American colonists were probably not particularly aware of the Great Bengal Famine, and those that were were probably not in possession of the full data of the event and its causes; and revolutionary sentiment had been on the rise all through the 1760s in any case.
I think calling the rising sentiment of the 1760s as revolutionary is a presentist perspective. The sinking of the Gaspee was in 1772 and the Tea Party in 1773 both are at most forms of uncivilized protest rather than revolt. At earliest revolution/independence wasn't even a firm niche view until 1775 IMO.
As for the pace at which word spread regarding India, here is an article from Sept 1771 on the matter published in a New Hampshire newspaper https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025582/1771-09-27/ed-1/seq-3/ (pg 3). I do not think it is unreasonable that by 1775 the American people would have been informed of the hazards of the extractive policies of Britain as evidenced by Bengal.
Obviously one newspaper article doesn't show full knowledge of the extent of the incident (despite that it was published in various other local journals). But thinking of the terrible conditions often unpaid men faced in the patriot camps avoiding what even this one article claims seems like a worthy hill to die on. Here's a section:
“On our arrival here, we found a river full of dead human carcasses floating up and down, and the streets crowded with the dead and dying, without anyone attempting to give them relief; so horribly has the famine raged here, that they who were able to walk and procure food for themselves were so accustomed to see their fellow creatures perishing before them, that it did not even create a painful emotion."