During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the height of the British Empire, 30 million Indians perished needlessly of famine in what the historian Mike Davis has called the ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’. Needlessly, because even at the peak of the famine there was a net surplus of food. In fact, Indian grain exports more than tripled during this period, from 3 million tons in 1875 to 10 million tons in 1900.
