The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 The Company's Deadliest Harvest

In 1770, the richest province in India was reduced to a charnel house. By the time the rains returned, an estimated ten million people—about a third of Bengal's population—had died. This episode of The Hidden History of Bengal reconstructs the catastrophe: how two years of drought turned into a famine of biblical proportions, and how the East India Company's policies turned scarcity into mass death. We walk through the fields of Birbhum and Nadia, where the Company's revenue collectors refused to lower taxes even as villages emptied. We examine the role of speculators who hoarded grain for higher prices, and the Company's own directors who later admitted that the 'waste of the country' was 'not an unnatural consequence.' And we ask a hard question: could the famine of 1769–1770 have been prevented? Lucas and Luna explore the economic and moral failures that turned a drought into a demographic disaster—one that shaped Bengal's history long after the bodies were buried. #BengalFamine1770 #GreatBengalFamine #EastIndiaCompany #MughalBengal #Drought #FamineHistory #BritishColonialism #SubsistenceCrisis #AgriculturalCollapse #RevenuePolicy #Birbhum #Nadia #Calcutta #Murshidabad #18thCentury #FexingoHistory #SouthAsia #HumanCost Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo