2025/02/17 by Gregory Valdespino · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies #History of Science and Medicine #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/jsh/shaf016
From Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine, our world’s ongoing wars have often sparked debates about one term: famine. Pundits and reporters have argued about whether famines have arisen amid these tragedies, as well as about whom to blame. Yan Slobodkin’s fascinating new book The Starving Empire shows the history behind these debates. By explaining the history of famine relief in France’s former empire, Slobodkin provides a new lens on the history of colonial governance, decolonization and humanitarianism. Trained as an historian of modern Europe and France’s Empire, Slobodkin reveals the global history behind the “French” way of managing famine. Slobodkin argues that from the mid-nineteenth century through the Second World War, “the French imperial state and an emerging international community took increasing responsibility for managing famines, and ultimately failed to fulfill this responsibility” (2). This shift occurred as new explanations of the causes of food shortages produced new ideas about who should manage their consequences. Slobodkin grounds these evolving famine policies in evolving ideas about “foresight” that colonial officials infused with racialized readings of non-European environments and practices. Over several decades, colonists’ liberal view of famine, which blamed “improvident” natives, morphed into a collective social model that made sustenance a government responsibility. However, by taking on the burden of famine prevention, Slobodkin convincingly argues, French experts laid the groundwork for the imperial collapse they sought to prevent. Starving Empire begins by explain the development of a detached liberal approach to famines before the First World War. Chapter One presents the 1867 famine in Algeria as foundational to this history. Settlers blamed the famine on an Arabophilic military regime that protected Arab land rights. Allied with Catholic leaders hoping to lift conversion bans, settlers argued that dispossession in favor of European settlers would foster a market-based agricultural economy that would predict and prevent future disasters. Out of this crisis emerged a humanitarian imperialism rooted in Christian charity, free-market liberalism, and an emphasis on provident individualism. In Chapter Two, Slobodkin argues that the French state’s reliance on a precolonial Vietnamese imperial apparatus partially mitigated the official disregard seen in the Algerian famine. However, officials’ commitment to laissez-faire economics as well as racialized ideas of indigenous impropriety prevented them from enacting policies to actually prevent famines. Chapter Three on the 1913 Sahelian drought shows the discursive forms this disregard took in less monitored corners of the Empire. By presenting famine as the inevitable result of improvident races and harsh environments, French administrators absolved themselves of responsibility. Instead, they created a reactive mode of governance rooted in either bureaucratic rationality or humanitarian horror. After World War I, however, reluctance yielded to responsibility. Chapter Four explains how new nutrition sciences and internationalist organizations made managing famines seem both possible and necessary. New scientific ideas about nutrition, as well as the rise of internationalist organizations focused on well-being, convinced experts that states could and should prevent famines. While these authorities critiqued older notions of improvident races, they held onto racial difference to justify European government’s right to manage how entire populations ate. Chapter Five returns to the Sahel to show the consequences of this newfound responsibility. Journalists, humanitarians and experts blamed poor administrators for famine. However, they did not critique the colonial economic dynamics that caused this disaster. Instead, observers argued that Africans’ inability to plan ahead for life in their harsh environments necessitated further European intervention. The final chapters argue that this responsive approach rested on an unsustainable tension between colonialism and care. Chapter Six explains how leaders across the empire made sustenance a government priority by the end of the Depression. France’s left-wing Popular Front government reinforced a growing belief in France’s responsibility for its colonial subjects’ well-being. However, a series of famines across the empire in the late 1930s revealed the government’s inability to reconcile this responsibility with colonialism’s dependence on extractive economies and thread-bare administration. Within a few years, this tension became unmanageable. The final chapter explains how, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, France’s empire faced its largest ever famine in Indochina. While the exiled French government could not immediately provide famine relief, authorities created plans to rebuff Allied skepticism towards their claim to Indochina. Meanwhile, leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam claimed that the French government had failed in its self-appointed mission of preventing famine. In turn, they used their own mass food provisions to prove their legitimacy as Vietnam’s rightful ruler. Subsistence thus anchored competing sovereignty claims amidst decolonization. Slobodkin concludes by arguing that this French approach to famine fueled a postcolonial humanitarian governance without sovereignty that continues to occlude the structures determining who eats and who starves. Grounded in extensive archival work across the world, Slobodkin’s book reveals how responsibility, or its absence, fueled the rise and fall of European empires. Starving Empire connects intellectual debates with on the ground policies to show the linkages that produced changing, and ultimately unmanageable, burdens. Slobodkin thus challenges static histories of imperial rule by explaining when and why officials did or did not intervene. In doing so, he produces a new explanation of why Europe’s imperial regimes collapsed. To be sure, Slobodkin’s official and largely discursive approach has its limits. Above all, Slobodkin does not deal with non-elite colonized people. Did colonial rule change how Vietnamese peasants or Tuareg pastoralists viewed famines or whom they held responsible? Answering this question would do more than just expand the “voices” within this largely European colonial history. Combining Slobodkin’s empire-wide institutional analysis with the kind of on-the-ground focus taken by scholars like Laura Ann Twagira in Embodied Engineering would explain the role of popular responses to famine in conflicts over imperial and postimperial sovereignty. This comment reflects the rich questions Slobodkin powerfully provokes. In an era of growing resource scarcity and eroding faith in international or governmental agencies, Starving Empire shows how these institutions took on and failed to meet certain burdens. Tracing this history helps explain why unequal hunger continues to define our postcolonial present.