Having large numbers of people starve to death seems like a pretty damning indictment of a system. But I dunno, maybe I’m overly attached to food?
Having large numbers of people starve to death seems like a pretty damning indictment of a system. But I dunno, maybe I’m overly attached to food?
The Irish potato famine was more an exogenous factor (a blight) not the direct result of mismanagement, which is generally a feature of communism. So that’s a pretty poor comparison.
Bengal was a mostly agrarian state so not really an advanced capitalist society. Again, not a particularly good comparison.
you are emphatically wrong about the irish famine ohhhmygawd.
Ireland was brought into the UK and were almost immediately subjected to renting (capitalist) landlords who mostly lived in England. they were kept in poverty and forced to be reliant on the potato as primary nourishment because the potato was the only fully-nutritious crop that was worth growing on their tiny parcels of alloted land, while the rest of the food they produced was sold out of country (by capitalists).
the British forced the Irish to be reliant on one staple crop, and when the blight happened it kicked the final leg out of the stool. to narrow this down to “an exegenous factor” is incredibly misinformed and ignorant in the face of disgusting colonialist practice.
Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine, which isn’t a sign that markets were functioning properly at the time and that government policy was in part to blame.
Bengal was somewhat wealthy and had a decent industrial base before the British took over the region. The whole Indian subcontinent went through a reverse in industrialization under the British as the British sought to destroy local economic competition and monetize resources in India.
There were significant famines under communism with links to the government, but the British have a lot of blood on their hands.