ABSTRACT
Social historians of the long-term have often drawn attention to the devastating impact of famine on pre-modern societies. Marc Bloch argued that famine and pestilence together caused so many premature deaths among the poor of Medieval Europe that a continuous sense of insecurity existed, in turn giving rise to a widespread «emotional instability. While much is now understood about the great Indian famines of the British period, and reactions to them, this is not so of many other devastating visitations which are known to have occurred in the centuries that immediately preceded British dominance. From the early years of the sixteenth century the Portuguese were encountering the phenomenon of famine in south and southwest Asia, and their writers began to comment on it. Correia tells us that during 1540 the Portuguese transported rice to Mylapore by sea from other parts of India.
