M&D-related: East India Company

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

 From another new book:

" ... In 1772, at the end of the famine, Warren Hastings reported to the 
court of directors that close to one third of the population of greater 
Bengal had disappeared over the course of two or three years./ Hunter 
describes the famine of 1769-1770 as the most significant event in the 
Gangetic delta, one that shaped the course of the history of Bengal over 
the next forty years. Edmund Burke, in one of his lengthy speeches 
during the trial of Warren Hastings, described the Bengal famine as the 
singular episode that 'dishonored and disgraced' the government of the 
East India Company in Bengal in the eyes of both England and Europe at 
large (...)/ Richard Becher, the English resident at Murshidabad, 
observed at the onset of the famine in 1769 that the East India 
Company's accession to the management of land revenue had significantly 
worsened the living conditions of the common people. It was, according 
to Becher, the very nature of the company's investments, its export of 
currency, and most of all, its connivance at the pitiless exactions of 
native functionaries that had intensified the crisis ... "

Sudipta Sen: Ganges --- The Many Pasts of an Indian River. New Haven & 
London 2019: Yale University Press Academic, pp. 325-326.


Am 01.06.20 um 12:20 schrieb Thomas Eckhardt:
> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/british-pillage-of-india/
>
> I didn't know that Clive of India committed suicide:
>
> 'He had, Samuel Johnson wrote, “acquired his fortune by such crimes 
> that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat.”'
> -- 
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l