Churchill's Secret War by Madhusree Mukerjee

The Bengal Famine poses a serious threat to this benign paradigm, indeed it makes it untenable. While they will often accept that there were some abuses, even occasional crimes, overall the empire was a force for good.

Why this historical amnesia? The reason is quite simply that the majority of British historians of the empire have a benign view of British imperialism. The immensely prestigious multi-volume Oxford History of the British Empire, the summation of Anglo-American scholarship on the subject, also manages to ignore the episode. And most astonishingly, he does not mention it in his biography of the Indian nationalist leader, Nehru, even though Nehru himself described the famine quite correctly as “the final judgement on British rule”. More surprisingly perhaps, he does not mention it in his history of the British Raj, The Lion and the Tiger. Professor Denis Judd, for example, in his acclaimed one-volume account, Empire, does not so much as mention the Bengal Famine. Even more incredible is the way the famine is routinely ignored in histories of the British Empire. Similarly with biographies of the deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee, the millions who died of starvation and disease while he occupied that post go unmentioned. One can read any number of the many biographies of the prime minister of the time, Winston Churchill, without coming across any mention of the catastrophe that he presided over.

And yet it has almost completely disappeared from the history books. Certainly, it was, as the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, put it, “one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule”. According to Madhusree Mukerjee’s new book, the death toll has to be revised upwards from the generally accepted figure of 3.5 million men, women and children to over 5 million. The Bengal Famine of 1943–44 is one of the most terrible episodes of the Second World War. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).Ĭhurchill’s Secret War: the British Empire and the Ravaging of India during the Second World War John Newsinger Book Review Forgotten famine (Spring 2011)įrom International Socialism 2 : 130, Spring 2011.Ĭopied with thanks from the International Socialism Website. John Newsinger: Forgotten famine (Spring 2011)

Churchill's Secret War by Madhusree Mukerjee