Explaining Famine in the British Empire: Agricultural Science, Food Security, and the Rise of Statistics

Famine is humanity's oldest fear. Famine memorials and stories are literally carved into the stones that lie on the beds of Europe's rivers.Our science fiction and fantasy literature often begin by evoking a world of hunger and scarcity.Famine shapes our past, it threatens our future, and we struggle to explain how it is tolerated and permitted to unfold in the present.In eighteenth-century Britain, rising food prices provoked a politics of hunger, manifested in food riots, fears of revolution, and political arguments over how to feed a growing population.In the 1790s, fear of famine provoked the state to experiment with something new: funding a voluntary board of experts to compile agricultural data and promote the use of scientific methods in food production.The problem of scarcity and the threat of famine were to be plainly and clearly represented in statistical data, transparent to both the state and the public. This book is about the famines and food shortages that struck India an