Late Victorian Holocausts

On the expenditure side, a colonial budget largely financed by taxes on farm land returned less than 2 percent to agriculture and education, and barely 4 percent to public works of all kinds, while devoting a full third to the army and police.

In Russia, poor harvests during the dry years of 1888–90 were prelude to the catastrophic drought in spring and summer of 1891 that brought famine to the black soil provinces of the Volga valley as well as the Orenburg wheat-belt south of the Urals (epicenter of drought during the 1997–98 El Niño). Seventy percent of the rye crop, the chief subsistence of the muzhiks, was lost.

He vehemently opposed a proposal from Hume, whom he forced to resign, that would have imposed a modest income tax “on the ground that it would affect the higher income groups, both European and Indian.” His own preference was for a famine tax on potential famine victims (that is, a new land cess on the peasantry) – a measure that would have inflamed the entire country and was therefore rejected by Salisbury and the Council of India. As an alternative, Lytton and John Strachey drafted a scheme that was almost as regressive, reviving a hated license tax on petty traders (professionals were exempt) in tandem with brutal hikes in salt duties in Madras and Bombay (where the cost of salt was raised from 2 to 40 annas per maund).

Originally advocated by Lord Northbrook, the idea of a “famine insurance fund” was revived in 1877 by Hamilton and Salisbury to pre-empt the Liberals from making the terrible mortality in India an issue in the next election.

The journals of the North-West were persuaded into silence. Strict orders were given to civilians under no circumstances to countenance the pretence of the natives that they were dying of hunger. One civilian, a Mr. MacMinn, unable to endure the misery around him, opened a relief work at his own expense. He was severely reprimanded, threatened with degradation, and ordered to close the work immediately.

The militarization of relief, followed by the failure of the southwest monsoon and another doubling of grain prices in the six months from the middle of 1877, punctually produced lethal results.59 Exactly as medical officials had warned, the “Temple wage” combined with heavy physical labor and dreadful sanitation turned the work camps into extermination camps. By the end of May horrified relief officials in Madras were reporting that more than half of the inmates were too weakened to carry out any physical labor whatsoever.60 Most of them were dead by the beginning of the terrible summer of 1877. As Temple’s most dogged critic, Dr. Cornish, pointed out, monthly mortality was now equivalent to an annual death rate of 94 percent.

In the event, the “Temple wage,” as it became known, provided less sustenance for hard labor than the diet inside the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp and less than half of the modern caloric standard recommended for adult males by the Indian government.

In a self-proclaimed Benthamite “experiment” that eerily prefigured later Nazi research on minimal human subsistence diets in concentration camps, Temple cut rations for male coolies, whom he compared to “a school full of refractory children,” down to one pound of rice per diem despite medical testimony that the ryots – once “strapping fine fellows” – were now “little more than animated skeletons … utterly unfit for any work.” (Noting that felons traditionally received two pounds of rice per day, one district official suggested that “it would be better to shoot down the wretches than to prolong their misery in the way proposed.”)

In zealously following his instructions to the letter, he became to Indian history what Charles Edward Trevelyan – permanent secretary to the Treasury during the Great Hunger (and, later, governor of Madras) – had become to Irish history: the personification of free market economics as a mask for colonial genocide.

It was the only truly successful British relief effort in the nineteenth century and might have been celebrated as a template for dealing with future emergencies. Instead, Temple came under withering fire from London for the “extravagance” of allowing “the scale of wages paid at relief works to be determined by the daily food needs of the labourer and the prevailing food prices in the market rather than by the amount that the Government could afford to spend for the purpose.”41 In public, he was lambasted by The Economist for encouraging indolent Indians to believe that “it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive.”42 Senior civil servants, convinced (according to Lord Salisbury) that it was “a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows,” denounced the relief campaign as “pure Fourierism.”43 Temple’s career was almost ruined.