I recorded the numbers, but did not look deeper.Īt the first presentation of the dataset at LSE in London, the way I had coded the 1876-9 famine was challenged.
A number of scholars have written about this, and they only seemed to refer to conflict in passing (Edgerton-Tarpley 2008 Li 2007 Davis 2001), and it seemed that state incapacity was the primary reason hampering famine relief (Fuller 2015). Drought struck China’s five large northern provinces in 1876, and by the time the rains returned, an estimated 9-13 million people had died of starvation or famine related diseases (Edgerton-Tarpley 2013). Imperial China had a long history of famines and disasters, but the North China Famine of 1876-9 was its most lethal. Image: Victims of the famine forced to sell their children from The Famine in China (1878)
I was, therefore, interested in the mortality from the famines as well as the political context in which famine occurred. The idea behind the project was to create a dataset recording two overlapping events: the first was the incidence of ‘great famines’ since 1870, that is famines which caused more than 100,000 excess deaths (Devereux 2000), and the second, drawing on work by David Marcus (2003), was to record the incidence of armed conflict during these famines and the use of deliberate mass starvation in these conflicts. International criminal prosecutors have concerned themselves with direct violence-murder, torture, and rape-avoiding the question of culpability for starvation.” (de Waal 2015) Scholars of mass atrocity focus on violent killing, and have not analysed mass death from the perspective of starvation and disease. Specialists in food and agriculture tend not to analyse war and genocide. “Too often, famines and mass atrocities that involve forced starvation have been studied separately. The World Peace Foundation’s research project on famine trends had emerged from a simple contradiction in prior famine research: I learned this the hard way, when researching the Chinese famine of 1876-1879. This is, of course, self-evident, but it is a trap that is surprisingly difficult to evade. As a researcher, it is easier to replicate the work of scholars who have already worked on a subject, than to come up with original research.
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