ABSTRACT
Wakimura's paper draws our attention to high death rates in India in an age of economic transformation. In the period from 1870 to 1921, despite the development of railway and canal networks and the commercialisation of agriCUlture, there were repeated famines and epidemics which kept the country's general level of mortality high during this period. In one northern region alone epidemics killed as many as 1,860,000 people in the famine years of 1877-79, most of whom are believed to have died of malaria. Indeed, in a half-century period from 1870, the United Provinces experienced at least four mortality crises of this magnitude for which the famine-epidemics link can be established. A pattern identified by the Wakimura paper, as well as Tim Dyson's recent article on a similar subject, l is that severe drought caused crop failures which prompted food prices to rise sharply. This was accompanied by a decrease in conceptions, and then, with the return of the rains, followed by malaria outbreaks. Although it is now widely recognised that pre-modern societies were prone to repeated 'crises' triggered by either famines or epidemics, or both, we are nonetheless overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of famine casualties and the severity of their demographic effects in British India. It is not entirely clear whether an immediate effect of economic transformation was that it worsened mortality conditions, or that the Malthusian check continued to operate in spite of the transformation. Either way, the following discussion should offer some relevant points of comparison.
