Churchill’s Secret War:The British Empire and the Ravaging of India by Madhursree Mukerjee

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the kind provision of an Amazon Gift Card that allowed me to acquire this book

Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis - Essential background 

Churchill’s Secret War:The British Empire and the Ravaging of India by Madhusree Mukerjee will not be popular with unabashed admirers of Winston Churchill.  The theme of the book, I am very much convinced of the truth of her claims but some are not, is that the racism and jingoistic attitudes of Churchill combined with the Idea of England first lead directly to the starvation of around two million people in the Bengali region of India in 1943 to 1944.

I do highly recommend you read another book before you read this one, Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. It helped me understand why British Imperial rule almost always lead to famines and for most readers it will help you see how some very unpleasant truths.  Where ever the British ruled for any length of time, the exceptions to this in Australia, New Zealand and North America actually establish the great depth of English racism, famine followed. In India, Ireland, Africa hundreds of millions died 


from man made famines.  In school they teach you believe in crop failures and droughts as the causes.  This is not the truth.

Holocausts by Mike Davis will show you the truth. you I recently read a very good history of the Irish famines in which the author said in terms of sheer numbers it was not as bad as the famines in Russia and China in the 20th century but never mentioned  that there was a far worst famine in India famines  in the  1870s in which 60 million people died  

 I was completely stunned by the revelations in Late Victorian Holocausts. Most people have no knowledge of these famines and those few who do, as Davis shows us, attribute them to bad weather.   Davis explains that very few of the great famines of modern  history were caused only by a lack of food. They were 

caused by the poor not having the means to buy the available food.   (There was plenty of food to feed the Irish but social planners  thought giving out free food would 


encourage idleness. ).   Indian troops with English officers stood guard in front of huge granneries while millions starved.   Indian land was planted in cotton to be either shipped to the UK or sold in India.   This was part of the cause of the famines.  I know now Gandhi knew this.  Davis explains how El Nino weather patterns worked to limit the rainfall in India, China and Brazil.   

Davis begins his book with a horrifying description of the famines.  I do not want to get into a "whose famine was worse" contest but my first impression was that that in India was worse than Ireland in terms of human suffering and in terms of the moronic and immoral way the country was administered by the British.   

During the 1870s famine Lord Lytton, ruler of Indian, and his staff were only concerned with not turning Indians into idlers by giving them free food.   When he did give free food to those in work houses, he gave less than was given in German concentration camps.   The rulers of Indian puppet states were all lackeys of the English and were often  
worse than them in terms of their indifference to human suffering.

Davis explains how much of the suffering was caused by the transition of India, China and Brazil from small subsistence farmer economies to capitalistic societies.   The famines had large scale social consequences.  The spawned the Boxer rebellion in China and created many religious cults.  Before around 1776 the average Indian peasant lived better than an English or European slum dweller or tenant farmer .   This began to shift as England took more and more of the resources of India.   

Davis expands history to explain how these famines brought in the poverty of the third world and contributed to their stagnation and decline.   

Davis shows how Indian was made to pay for the cost of the British army and when their planners tried to impose European systems of agricultural management the results were disastrous.

Everything I learned in Late Victorian Holocausts is 
documented by Mukerjee in her book on India in World War Two.  Before the Raj took control of Indian, Bengali had a very diverse agricultural base with lots of different crops.  The British changed the economy to a cash basis and moved the area to a one crop economy rice, exactly what they did in Ireland with the potato. Once a drought came you have a recipe for mass death. Churchill is portrayed as a total racist by Mukerjee.  He felt India “owed” the British for protecting them from the Japanese.  From this he sent vast numbers of Indians to fight for the British.  He diverted food meant for India from Canada to England even though the English did have adequate food.  Churchill personalised this in a hatred for Grandi.  He lied to Indian leaders about him wanting to set India free after the war.  The inability of Churchill and other English politicians to see Indians as equals lead to the bloodshed of the partition in which no thought was given to the consequences of the partition.

Mukerjee’s themes are perfectly argued.  To this day, the evil policies of Churchill negativity impact the lives of millions.  Admirers of Churchill have attacked this book, calling it left wing anti-colonial ideology. 

I strongly urge all those interested in British Colonial history to read this book and the work of Mike Davis.

Madhusree Mukerjee was born in India and moved to the U.S. to train as a physicist. She received a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago.

After a stint as a post-doc she changed careers to journalism and served on the board of editors of Scientific American for seven years. She left the magazine to have a baby and to write her first book, The Land of Naked People, with the help of a Guggenheim fellowship. Her second book is Churchill's Secret War.

Madhusree is currently finishing a third book, an intimate profile of an indigenous struggle against mining. She lives in New York City and works as a senior editor with Scientific American.                       

From madhusree.com

Mel u

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