The Starving Empire
Title | The Starving Empire PDF eBook |
Author | Yan Slobodkin |
Publisher | Cornell University Press |
Pages | 193 |
Release | 2023-11-15 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1501772368 |
The Starving Empire traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, Yan Slobodkin reveals how the French colonial state and an emerging international community took increasing responsibility for subsistence, but ultimately failed to fulfill this responsibility. Europeans once dismissed colonial famines as acts of god, misfortunes of nature, and the inevitable consequences of backward races living in harsh environments. But as Slobodkin recounts, drawing on archival research from four continents, the twentieth century saw transformations in nutrition, scientific racism, and international humanitarianism that profoundly altered ideas of what colonialism could accomplish. A new confidence in the ability to mitigate hunger, coupled with new norms of moral responsibility, marked a turning point in the French Empire's relationship to colonial subjects—and to nature itself. Increasingly sophisticated understandings of famine as a technical problem subject to state control saddled France with untenable obligations. The Starving Empire not only illustrates how the painful history of colonial famine remains with us in our current understandings of public health, state sovereignty, and international aid, but also seeks to return food—this most basic of human needs—to its central place in the formation of modern political obligation and humanitarian ethics.
Hungry Bengal
Title | Hungry Bengal PDF eBook |
Author | Janam Mukherjee |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 346 |
Release | 2015 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0190209887 |
Examines the interconnected events including World War II, India's struggle for independence, and a period of acute scarcity that lead to mass starvation in colonial Bengal.
Betting on Famine
Title | Betting on Famine PDF eBook |
Author | Jean Ziegler |
Publisher | New Press, The |
Pages | 306 |
Release | 2013-08-06 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1595588493 |
Few know that world hunger was very nearly eradicated in our lifetimes. In the past five years, however, widespread starvation has suddenly reappeared, and chronic hunger is a major issue on every continent. In an extensive investigation of this disturbing shift, Jean Ziegler—one of the world’s leading food experts—lays out in clear and accessible terms the complex global causes of the new hunger crisis. Ziegler’s wide-ranging and fascinating examination focuses on how the new sustainable revolution in energy production has diverted millions of acres of corn, soy, wheat, and other grain crops from food to fuel. The results, he shows, have been sudden and startling, with declining food reserves sending prices to record highs and a new global commodities market in ethanol and other biofuels gobbling up arable lands in nearly every continent on earth. Like Raj Patel’s pathbreaking Stuffed and Starved, Betting on Famine will enlighten the millions of Americans concerned about the politics of food at home—and about the forces that prevent us from feeding the world’s children.
"Starving Armenians"
Title | "Starving Armenians" PDF eBook |
Author | Merrill D. Peterson |
Publisher | University of Virginia Press |
Pages | 230 |
Release | 2004 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780813922676 |
Between 1915 and 1925 as many as 1.5 million Armenians, a minority in the Ottoman Empire, died in Ottoman Turkey, victims of execution, starvation, and death marches to the Syrian Desert. Peterson explores the American response to these atrocities, from initial reports to President Wilson until Armenia's eventual absorption into the Soviet Union.
Late Victorian Holocausts
Title | Late Victorian Holocausts PDF eBook |
Author | Mike Davis |
Publisher | Verso Books |
Pages | 367 |
Release | 2017-01-01 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1781683603 |
Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.
Famine
Title | Famine PDF eBook |
Author | Cormac Ó Gráda |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 352 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 9780691122373 |
History.
Red Famine
Title | Red Famine PDF eBook |
Author | Anne Applebaum |
Publisher | Anchor |
Pages | 587 |
Release | 2017-10-10 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0385538863 |
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.