“Anyone Should Have Seen Catastrophe Approaching”

The Bengal Famine of 1943 receives barely two paragprahs’ worth of ink in Now the Hell Will Start, a lamentable oversight that we now hope to correct as part of NtHWS Extras Month.

Our interest in the famine has less to do with its devastating scale—as many as 4 million Indians may have perished from hunger—than its obvious preventability. Because so much of Eastern India’s arable land was given over to tea production, the British raj made Burma the region’s bread basket—or, more accurately, its