Colonial Histories, Famine, and Lessons for Addressing Climate Change

Sociology has increasingly acknowledged the continuing legacies of colonialism and empire within contemporary societies and examined the significance of colonialism to the structure of the social sciences. In this paper, I develop such understandings in relation to thinking about how the histories of famine within colonial empires can shed light on the difficulties of addressing issues related to climate change in the present. Famine is of fundamental importance precisely because it is what climate change threatens for a significant proportion of the world’s population. The connection I want to draw out is how understanding famines in the past will help us to understand those to come and, in particular, the obstacles to addressing the challenges of impending famines that derive from the legacies of colonialism, including of Western democracy itself. The standard view is that famines occur because of climatic conditions and have particular consequences due to endemic poverty understood in endogenous terms. I draw attention to the serious limitations of such a view through a focus on the colonial political economy of the British empire in India and of how its democracy at home was implicated in the production of famine deaths within empire. While Amartya Sen has argued that democracy is central of the solution to famine, I suggest something different. Colonial political economy structures the mal-distribution of resources, including the consequences of climate change, rendering (Western) democracy in these contexts a problem. Specifically, it remains an obstacle to forms of reparation that would be necessary to effectively address the increasingly urgent challenges posed by climate change. A reparative historical sociology, cognisant of colonial histories, would be part of the process of reconstructing such understandings and, in the process, could facilitate the development of a more just world.