Great Bengal Famine

1770

Monsoons failed; Company tax collectors did not. Peasants sold their bullocks, then their children, then starved. An estimated ten million people - a third of Bengal - died. The Company's directors in London blamed the weather; their clerks in Calcutta had been issuing rice-monopoly licenses all year. The catastrophe prompted the first parliamentary inquiry into the Company's conduct and stirred Edmund Burke to his earliest indictments of imperial greed.