For William in Calcutta, 1754.
A view of Fort William in Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1754, the headquarters of the East India Company in Bengal, in the days when the Company chiefly contented itself with trade and trying to get its own man in as Nawab. Ten years later, victory at the Battle of Buxar won them the right to set tax and agricultural policy. As Smith explains, they allowed greed and incompetence to dictate, and turned a natural disaster into a humanitarian catastrophe.
IN rice countries, where the crop not only requires a very moist soil, but where, in a certain period of its growing, it must be laid under water, the effects of a drought are much more dismal. Even in such countries, however, the drought is, perhaps, scarce ever so universal as necessarily to occasion a famine, if the government would allow a free trade.
The drought in Bengal, a few years ago, might probably have occasioned a very great dearth. Some improper regulations, some injudicious restraints, imposed by the servants of the East India Company upon the rice trade, contributed, perhaps, to turn that dearth into a famine.
When the government, in order to remedy the inconveniencies of a dearth, orders all the dealers to sell their corn at what it supposes a reasonable price, it either hinders them from bringing it to market, which may sometimes produce a famine even in the beginning of the season; or, if they bring it thither, it enables the people, and thereby encourages them to consume it so fast as must necessarily produce a famine before the end of the season.
Précis
Shortly after the Bengal famine of 1769, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith wrote that although a drought had made a food shortage inevitable, the subsequent famine was a consequence of interference from the East India Company, imposing unwise restrictions on farmers. Allowing free trade, he concluded, would prevent such disasters happening in the future. (52 / 60 words)