ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to construct the economic history from the data on subsistence crises in eighteenth-century Bengal. It suggests that prices did reflect availability, and people starved, or died, because they couldn’t afford to buy food at prevailing prices. Subsistence crises – dearth and famines – are often seen as exceptional occurrences, as severe dislocations in the “normal” run of things, or as aberrations. Their economic consequences are considered economic “excess” points – excess starvation, excess mortality and excess misery, without clarity about what constitutes the “normal”. Famine was typically a situation when a subsistence and mortality crisis became combined in a critical conjuncture lasting for a length of time, which stretched beyond the critical threshold of a food shock. Cultural norms were important in determining social boundaries; but procuring food during such crises was an economic matter fraught with grave consequences.
