Empire, Colonialism, and Famine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
This volume, now available from CIUS Press, examines the often-overlooked connections between empire building, imperial rule, and mass starvation. The essays, which address famine in Soviet Ukraine, Ireland, and British-ruled Bengal, India; famine during World War II in occupied Ukraine and Moldova; Raphael Lemkin on famine; and minorities in Mao’s China in the 1958-62 famine, were developed from papers delivered at two conferences organized by HREC (in Toronto and Kyiv). While droughts and other natural disasters can lead to serious food shortages, a decline in food availability need not result in wide-scale starvation. Mass starvation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has almost always been linked to political decisions about food distribution—and some of the worst cases have occurred within empires or their colonies.
Table of Contents
* Introduction: Empire-Building, Imperial Policies, and Famine in Occupied Territories and Colonies / Bohdan Klid
* Famine As an Instrument of Nazi Occupation Policy in Ukraine, 1941-44 / Oleksandr Lysenko, Tetiana Zabolotna, Oleksandr Maievs’kyi (trans. Mark Baker)
* Dying Hungry: Nazi Ideology and the Pragmatism behind Starvation in Implementing the Final Solution / Kiril Feferman
* Food Supply, Starvation, and Food As a Weapon in the Camps and Ghettos of Romanian-Occupied Bessarabia and Transnistria, 1941-44 / Paul A. Shapiro
* Hunger Habitus: State, Society, and Starvation in Twentieth-Century Bengal / Janam Mukherjee
* Stalin’s Faminogenic Policies in Ukraine: The Imperial Discourse / Liudmyla Hrynevych; Andrew Sorokowski (trans.)
* Internal Colonialism, Alien Rule, and Famine in Ireland and Ukraine / Michael Hechter
* Was the Great Irish Famine a Colonial Famine? / Peter Gray
* The 1958-62 Chinese Famine and Its Impact on Ethnic Minorities / Lucien Bianco
* Raphaël Lemkin, Genocide, Colonialism, Famine, and Ukraine / Douglas Irvin-Erickson