Of empires and famines

Key Markets report for Monday, 25 August 2025

The unbearable and incomprehensible, yet persisting situation in the world today is the deliberate starvation of the two million Palestinian people in Gaza, or however many are still left alive. The figure is probably closer to 1.5 million. It may seem like the worst thing humanity has witnessed since who knows when, except that, unfortunately, it’s only the most recent and most widely reported example of the monstrous misdeeds of the Western empire.

Many of us recall the famines in Somalia, Sudan or Ethiopia but those seemed like accidents of nature or consequences of civil wars that raged between camps dominated by cruel, barbarous warlords who couldn’t or wouldn’t settle their differences by any civilized means. Any involvement by Western powers in such atrocities was strictly the domain of unhinged conspiracy theories and little more.

However, the more we learn about the true nature of the Western empire, which has been carefully concealed behind the glossy façade of the Western “civilization,” the more one learns about the empire’s ends and its methods, the more one suspects that many, if not most, of the famines recorded in history weren’t accidents of nature or consequences of civil wars. They were results of deliberate policy aimed at subjugating populations and forcing them to accept colonial subjugation and slavery.

This may seem like an exaggeration, but British statesman and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli explicitly said as much himself, explaining that the objective of the British Empire was to “Gain and hold territories that possess the largest supplies of the basic raw materials. Establish naval bases around the world to control the sea and commerce lanes. Blockade and starve into submission any nation or group of nations that opposes this empire control program.”

Disraeli wasn’t just speaking words to intimidate the Empire’s opponents. There’s much evidence that the Empire really did use starvation as a weapon of war against disobedient groups and nations and that they did so relatively frequently. Take the example of India: during the 120 year period between 1757 and 1878 when she was under direct British rule, India experienced 31 serious famines. In fact, even in the absence of outright famines, much of India’s population lived in chronic food insecurity. Even though this was concealed from the British public, Britain’s ruling establishment was well aware of it.

According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen, during the 19th century, while famines became more frequent and more deadly and extreme poverty increased from 23% in 1810 to more than 50% in the mid-20th century. The period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India. By the 1910s, life expectancy in India collapsed to 21.9 years. In 1939, George Orwell wrote as follows:

“One gets some idea of the real relationship of England and India when one reflects that the per capita income in England is something over £80, and in India £7. It is quite common for an Indian [worker’s] leg to be thinner than the average Englishman’s arm. … it is due to simple starvation. This is the system which we all live on.”

Was India’s chronic food insecurity somehow the result of the inadequacy of its agricultural practices, violent Monsoon rainstorms, or other coincidental causes? It doesn’t appear so: colonial rule seems to be the key causal factor behind India’s famines. Since she gained independence in 1947, India experienced zero famines, and in the 2,000 year period before 1757, only 17 serious famines were recorded, one every 118 years. Contrast that with one every four years (31 famines in 120 years) under British rule!

Correlation may not imply causation but then we also had the suspicious case of the Irish “potato” famine (1845–1852) when at least a million Irish people starved to death, supposedly because potato crops failed. For an island nation that consists of lush, green pastures and is surrounded by fish, the conventional potato narrative makes no sense whatsoever, but the correlation between famines and British rule did hold true.

Are things any better today?

It’s certainly hard to believe that anyone could be as unscrupulous and as cruel as that, but history suggests that the moneyed oligarchies behind the British (and Dutch, and French, and Spanish, and Portuguese) empire were. Are things any better today? One might think that such things couldn’t possibly happen in this day and age (except for Gaza, of course, but this is only because Hamas bad), but I believe one might be wrong about that.

In April 1974, Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's Secretary of State and National Security Adviser sent out a classified memo to select cabinet officials. The title of the memo was, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests," and it was commissioned on the recommendation of John D. Rockefeller III and came to be called, more famously, NSSM 200, for National Security Study Memorandum 200.

In it, Kissinger addressed the difficulty of controlling resource rich areas of the world against the social pressures borne of growing world populations and went on to suggest the kinds of coercive measures the US should consider. He bluntly stated that food aid should be considered as "an instrument of national power," and that the US should ration food aid to "help people who can't or won't control their population growth."

The NSSM 200 made depopulation in foreign developing countries an explicit, if secret, national security priority of the United States for the first time. In that, the policy of the British Empire was simply grafted onto the US foreign policy. If anything changed between Disraeli and Kissinger, it's the slick framing of policy goals as "help." But such help amounted to recommending genocide, at least as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.

Lazy natives discovering Kipling’s “dignity of labour”

In addition to destroying an uppity population as and when needed, starvation is very useful as a means of motivation. If they’re well fed and comfortable, they tend to get lazy and complacent, not the most conducive state from which to discover what Rudyard Kipling called, “the dignity of labour.” If they’re insecure, anxious and hungry, they’ll be at their best, at least from their employers’ point of view, perhaps in the same way as Mr. Rockefeller’s priorities became US foreign policy priorities as delegated to Mr. Kissinger. In this way, the ruling establishment’s point of view spills over into the governing institutions. The wording may be more refined, but the policies chase after the same incentives.

In July of 2022, the UN published an article titled, “The Benefits of World Hunger,” by one George Kent. Kent is a university professor, of course. He argued that, “hunger has great positive value to many people,” which might be correct. In particular, it would have great positive value to people like John D. Rockefeller III and whoever pays Mr. Kent’s tenure at the University of Hawaii.

Kent explained why hunger is so very beneficial: “… it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there’s need for manual labour.”

Are western populations in danger?

This might be the last worry for most westerners today. Of course, famines tend to occur in far away lands. But for some reason, Western nations have themselves been more and more aggressively targeted with policies that destroy or disincentivize food production. We’ve seen the war on farmers engulf the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, and many other nations. We’ve also seen many schemes where governments pay farmers not to plant crops or give them nearly irresistible incentives to sell their farms.

We really should ask, why, because the fight against carbon or nitrogen, or whatever other nonsense the likes of George Kent might contrive, the carbon they are trying to reduce could be us, our children and their children. This could well be the last thing in the world we should be complacent about.

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TrendCompass Key Markets report for 25 August 2025

Best regards,

Alex Krainer