Famine

The relationship between famine and economic modernity (capitalism, imperialism, markets, central planning) is an intriguing question. Below are some useful readings:

Top picks:

• • Ó'Gráda, Cormac. 2009. Famine: A Short History. Princeton University Press.

  • Ó’Gráda, Cormac, and Economic History Society. 1995. The Great Irish Famine. Cambridge University Press.

  • Davis, Mike. 2002. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso Books.

  • Roy, Tirthankar. 2022. Monsoon Economies: India’s History in a Changing Climate. MIT Press.

  • Sen, Amartya. 1982. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. OUP Oxford.

  • Drèze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 1990. Hunger and Public Action. Clarendon Press.

  • Cameron, Sarah. 2018. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Cornell University Press.

  • Davies, R., and S. Wheatcroft. 2016. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933. Springer.

  • Ellman, Michael. 2007. “Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932 – 33 Revisited.” Europe-Asia Studies 59(4): 663–93. 

  • Wheatcroft, S. G. 2004. “Towards Explaining Soviet Famine of 1931-3: Political and Natural Factors in Perspective.” Food and Foodways 12(2–3): 107–36.

  • Waal, Alex de. 2017. Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. John Wiley & Sons.

Also worth reading:

• • Gráda, Cormac Ó. 2020a. Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton University Press.

  • Gráda, Cormac Ó. 2020b. Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future. Princeton University Press.

  • Halder, Tamoghna. 2023. “Colonialism and the Indian Famines: A Response to Tirthankar Roy.” Developing Economics. 

  • Burgess, Robin, and Dave Donaldson. 2010. “Can Openness Mitigate the Effects of Weather Shocks? Evidence from India’s Famine Era.” American Economic Review 100(2): 449–53.

  • Dando, W. A. 1976. “Man‐made Famines: Some Geographical Insights from an Exploratory Study of a Millennium of Russian Famines.” Ecology of Food and Nutrition 4(4): 219–34.

  • Meng, Xin, Nancy Qian, and Pierre Yared. 2015. “The Institutional Causes of China’s Great Famine, 1959–1961.” The Review of Economic Studies 82(4): 1568–1611.

  • Roy, Tirthankar. 2019. How British Rule Changed India’s Economy: The Paradox of the Raj. Springer.

  • Sullivan, Dylan, and Jason Hickel. 2023. “Capitalism and Extreme Poverty: A Global Analysis of Real Wages, Human Height, and Mortality since the Long 16th Century.” World development 161: 106026.

  • Bilinsky, Yaroslav. 1999. “Was the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933 Genocide?” Journal of Genocide Research.

  • Dreze (ed), Jean, and Amartya Sen. 1990. The Political Economy of Hunger: Volume 1: Entitlement and Well-Being. Clarendon Press.

  • Ellman, Michael. 2007. “Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932 – 33 Revisited.” Europe-Asia Studies 59(4): 663–93.

  • Majd, Mohammad Gholi. 2013. The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran: 1917-1919. University Press of America.

  • Mishra, Vimal, Amar Deep Tiwari, Saran Aadhar, Reepal Shah, Mu Xiao, D. S. Pai, and Dennis Lettenmaier. 2019. “Drought and Famine in India, 1870–2016.” Geophysical Research Letters 46(4): 2075–83.