Ordering British Famine Relief Efforts in India, Ottoman Anatolia, and Qing China, 1873–1879

This dissertation analyses the discursive process through which British famine relief advocates weighed competing claims to humanitarian assistance from famine-affected communities in different regions of the world in the 1870s: namely, during the famines in Bihar (1873–1874), Asia Minor (1873–1875), Madras (1876–1878), and Shanxi (1876–1879). In doing so, I argue that these Britons’ decisions about which famine sufferers ‘deserved’ humanitarian aid took shape through a universalising hierarchical logic of triage, which I call their ‘hierarchy of sympathy’. The term ‘hierarchy of sympathy’ is my own coinage, which I define as a comparative heuristic framework used to prioritise which famine sufferers’ lives ‘mattered’ as well as to dictate how those lives should best be saved and ‘improved’. The hierarchy of sympathy is, therefore, a framework for explaining not only how relief advocates prioritised specific recipients in their allocation of humanitarian aid but why they organised famine relief in distinct ways according to the specific geopolitical conditions of a given famine relief campaign. I contend that this heuristic broadly functioned in four interrelated ways in each of the four famines. Firstly, relief advocates used the hierarchy of sympathy to channel aid towards specific famine-affected communities whilst avoiding overlap between state relief and private charity. Secondly, this heuristic directed British famine relief efforts towards remedying the perceived causes of both individual famine sufferers’ bodily distress and famines themselves. Although relief advocates placed varying emphases on climate, misgovernment, and character in causing each famine, they identified and sought to remedy the same ultimate ‘evil’ in all four cases: namely, the perceived failure of each society to adopt Britain’s own standards of ‘civilisation’. Thirdly, it functioned to naturalise the hierarchical model of triage as the only legitimate and necessary procedure to allocate ‘scarce’ aid resources. Lastly, this framework channelled British famine relief efforts towards ‘managing’ the human costs of famine whilst upholding (and, where possible, expanding) the hierarchical structural relations that made famines possible in the first place. The hierarchy of sympathy, in sum, was at once a normative vehicle for effecting the ‘civilisation’ of famine-affected societies in Britain’s image and facilitating Britain’s global exercise of power.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Wordsworth, Emma Kate

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sen, Samita

• famine
• humanitarianism
• Britain
• nineteenth century
• India
• British Empire
• Turkey
• China
• Ottoman Empire
• Qing Empire
• food security
• globalisation

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/24fac066-f583-4e59-971b-5c1f528f72da/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.124036

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/393897