The British are often blamed for millions of Indian famine deaths. This is exactly backwards; like all Malthusian agrarian civilizations famines were a primordial feature of Indian life, ended in peacetime by Raj-built railroads that allowed shipping food to affected areas.
Part of the reason the Raj is attacked for this is that, unlike prior government in India, they wrote reports about the famines under them to try and figure out how to prevent future ones, and eventually succeeded (peacetime famines in India ended before they did in Russia).
The awful book Late Victorian Holocausts is one source of this myth. Not coincidentally it is written by an actual Communist (Trotskyist) who does not believe in market dynamics and does not understand the universality of poverty in the premodern world. hlogserver.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-refu…
Source: lse.ac.uk/economics/Asse…
This myth leads to, among other things, unhinged beliefs like British-caused-famines making Indians less muscular due to natural selection today. This would be funny, except you don't want people who see you as an ancestral racial enemy holding power over you.
The slight decline in Indian incomes under the Raj is because of rapid population growth in a land-limited agrarian society, a consequence of successful famine/disease control and above all peace. You see the same in most peaceful Malthusian societies.
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