ABSTRACT
A confidential government document written in 1902 queries how to ensure that the people would be fed if foreign powers attempted to blockade British ports. This chapter shows how the Cotton Famine became a marker for larger governmental issues around the State’s ability and responsibility to feed its people in times of war or disaster. The increasing dependence of this country on foreign countries for its supply of wheat has given rise to apprehensions that this supply may be interrupted in time of war, and that a large section of the population may be thus reduced to want. The experience of the Lancashire cotton famine shows that a body of workpeople may be reduced to distress as effectually by cutting off the materials of their industry as by diminishing their food supply.
