Famine and Dearth in India and Britain, 1550-1800: Connected Cultural Histories of Food Security

"Food security" is a complex, contested, and polemical issue, but its currency and importance are hardly debatable given present concerns about environmental change, resource management, and sustainability. Largely investigated within the disciplines of the sciences and social sciences, in current or very recent historical contexts, the concern about long-term availability and distribution of food, has, nevertheless, a history that can be traced far back. Temporally, this project considers food security from an early modern perspective, and geographically and culturally, it compares attitudes towards this concern in India and Britain. It aims to recover and define the practices, discourses, and literary modes through which these selected past societies articulated concerns about food availability and distribution. By recovering, and placing within an innovative Digital Humanities framework, a wide range of multi-lingual, geographically scattered sources of information about famine and dearth, this research will enable scholars to make transnational or cross-cultural comparisons, with particular attention to the effect of transitions from pre- to post-colonial environments on the way Britain and India have understood, imagined, and acted upon concerns about food security. By deepening our understanding of early modern constructions of famine, in comparative perspective, this project provides a new frame of reference for contemporary debates. The unpredictability and urgency of modern ecological crises have turned technological responses to famine, such as increasing agricultural output or addressing food distribution, into coping mechanisms rather than solutions. We are thus forced back into a pre-modern position. To address this issue, we need to considerably widen our cultural and chronological perspectives. Food, famine, and dearth are not issues that are, or have been, problematic for the "Third World" alone. The Western world itself has a long history of coping with famines and periods of dearth. The proposed research, despite its primary focus on the Indian context, will ensure that this aspect of the "temporally inflected lens" through which we view famine and dearth does not get obscured.
The project's activities focus on researching relevant multilingual sources held in 11 national and local archives and libraries in Britain, Bangladesh, and India, and creating collaborative possibilities on the basis of this research. The substantial archival research will lead to academic articles authored by the PI and CI. There are two other crucial elements in the project: firstly, the production of a publicly accessible website and database of selected primary sources and images relating to famine in India and Britain, 1550-1800. This relies on the collaboration of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, Calcutta (CI's institution), the Digital Humanities team, University of Exeter (PI's institution), and the various repositories across three countries where the records are held. Secondly, a workshop on "Food Security and the Environment in India and Britain", supported by the project partner, the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, University of Oxford, will be held to discuss findings, and test and debate the relationship between the sources and the digital technologies used to create the project's analytical framework. Together, these activities involve the collaboration of academics, universities, and libraries in India and the UK, and are designed to engage relevant policy forums, community initiatives, and the wider public in both countries.

Who will benefit from this research?
This research will benefit policy forums, NGOs, community led environmental initiatives, and the wider public. Food security is a polemical issue of considerable current importance given present concerns about environmental change, resource management, and sustainability. By opening up ways of investigating food security from humanities perspectives, this project offers routes for thinking forward through past experiences of food shortage and its concomitant problems. A key research question is how a comparison of specific cultural responses to famine and dearth in early modern India and Britain can offer useful perspectives on modern issues of food security. Collaborating institutions in both countries have been selected with this question in view. The individual research and institutional agendas of collaborators, described in Pathways to Impact, already have active impact routes which provide direct access to the potential beneficiaries listed above. Our project partner the Smith School has experience and commitment in supporting interdisciplinary environmental research and creating routes for knowledge exchange and impact on policy and on the wider community. The collaboration between Exeter University's Digital Humanities and Jadavpur University's School of Cultural Texts will enhance impact: both have long and positive track records for creating and maintaining publicly accessible electronic gateways to mediate results of academic research to the public. Individual scholars contributing to the workshop and database have experience of working with policy forums, the wider community, and public media. While the archival work proposed in this application provides a solid academic basis to the research, the workshop and web-database also have wider appeal and use.

How will they benefit from this research?
The project's research contexts reveal a disjunction between investigations of famine and dearth undertaken in economics, social sciences, economic and social history, on the one hand, and cultural investigations, on the other hand. This split has impeded the potential development of critical connections between past and present, humanities and social sciences, cultural perspectives and policy. Food security is not simply a "food availability decline" problem; the methods of social science research should include cultural perspectives on food security issues and policies. Thus the interdisciplinary aims of this project are directly intertwined with its impact aims. As outlined in Pathways to Impact, the connection with non-academic beneficiaries is envisaged using two demonstrable means: a workshop on "Food Security and the Environment in India and Britain" and a web-database of primary materials on famine. The workshop, not restricted to early modern contexts, aims to bring together the academic and non-academic beneficiaries to debate the interactive potential of their distinctive approaches to food security. Pre-modern cultural constructions of famine will be used to think through modern food security issues. Session topics reflect this wider reach and relate to the expertise and current interests of colleagues in the core team who aim to collaborate on future project plans. The web-database will disseminate the archival material at the heart of this project in a manner that will engage a wider audience. The material presented will be a selection, but we aim to establish the right methodology and pathway so that future collaboration can develop the content with direct participation from social scientists, policy forums, and relevant community initiatives. The website and database will be publicized through the Smith School and its networks, as well as the following organizations with which the collaborators have links: Food Security and Land Research Alliance, Exeter; Food Studies Institute, SOAS; Transitions Network; the Institute of Food Security, Food Corporation of India.