The Bengal Famine and the Legacy of Colonialism

 

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED

5-19-26

 

Many sources document the horrific consequences of the Bengal famine of 1943 in greater detail, and I encourage readers to explore them. I chose this particular account because it connects that famine to the broader issue of British colonialism. It doesn't frame capitalism as the root cause, nor does it advocate for democratic socialism as the remedy — partly because it originates from within the BRICS group. Still, given that each BRICS country has been a victim of western colonialism brings a different historical perspective than that of western European capitalism.

Winston Churchill's alleged statement — "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like Rabbits." — echoes what British establishment figures routinely said of the Irish. Churchill similarly expressed contempt for the Chinese. This was not a personal flaw of his, he was expressing British policy toward the people it colonized.

British colonial attitudes toward India and Africa were tested first in Ireland. A Parliamentary inquiry into Irish immigration described it as "an example of a less civilised population spreading itself as a substratum beneath a more civilised community." The novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley, visiting Ireland in the mid-19th century, wrote to his wife that he was "haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country."

The same world view was exported to the Americas. In a letter to a Swiss mercenary, the British military official Jeffrey Amherst — later Governor of Quebec and Virginia — wrote, "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." It's worth noting that the deliberate distribution of infected blankets was not a widespread documented practice; what the letter reveals is the attitude — the casual willingness to contemplate genocide.

That attitude persists. Today, members of the US Congress and the current administration deploy similar language when speaking about Palestinians and Iranians, even as the US and its western allies support what many are calling a genocide in Gaza and a war of aggression against Iran.

The pattern is consistent: to colonize or subjugate a people, the aggressor must first dehumanize them — both to justify the assault and to secure the loyalty of its own working class. The bitter irony is that the contempt the British ruling class directed at the Irish or Indians was the same contempt it held for its own workers at home.

That fact alone reveals something important: the most reliable allies of working people in any country are the working people of other countries. We share the same enemy. Wars fought over disputes between competing ruling classes are not fought in our interests.

It's why Marx's simple slogan — Workers of the World Unite — remains so threatening to the global capitalist elite. It names the one coalition that could actually end the arrangement.