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Hungary --- Civilization.

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By analysing two famine inquiry reports from 1880 and 1945, I argue in this paper that researchers of colonial famines should consider the set of beliefs held by actors responsible for the management of the economy and state policies in the regions suffering from famines. Bureaucrats ruling over India were highly trained individuals who acted upon the dominant social theories at the time. This set of beliefs in the age of empires was a positivist, functionalist vision in the era of classical modernity. In this paper, I suggest that the bureaucracy’s functionalist vision of society constrained the colonial state’s effort to mitigate the effects of famines caused by multiple factors. I suggest that British colonial authorities were against governmental interference in times of famines not only because they believed in Malthusian and Smithian theories but also because they saw India and Indian society as fundamentally fragile and thus prone to collapse. The evidence from the commission report of 1880 testifies to a functionalist vision of society, where the various actors perform specific functions in society. In such a society, social cohesion stems from mutual dependence. The famine report shows that the British administration saw its task first of all in maintaining this balance, that they saw as acutely fragile. By seeing social order fragile together with essentializing famine as a normal condition of India, in effect, tied the hands of decisionmakers during the great famines of the Victorian era. By the time of writing the report of 1945, the colonial bureaucracy had shifted its focus to small-scale technical questions of social engineering. In this way, I argue that by bringing in what we know about modernity to the study of famines, we can refine our understanding of why states acted as they did, why they prioritized certain solutions over others, and on what grounds they defined social problems at their time.