About the exhibition

This is a part of the virtual exhibition “Famines in Late Nineteenth-Century India: Politics, Culture, and Environmental Justice”—written and curated by sociologist Naresh Chandra Sourabh and economic historian Timo Myllyntaus.

Famines in Late Nineteenth-Century India: Politics, Culture, and Environmental Justice

Between 1850 and 1899, India suffered 24 major famines, a number higher than in any other recorded 50-year period, resulting in millions of deaths. This exhibition—written by sociologist Naresh Chandra Sourabh and economic historian Timo Myllyntaus—describes the environmental and social factors that contributed to these cataclysmic events, situating their causes and costs within the complex natural and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century colonial India.

Naresh Chandra Sourabh and Timo Myllyntaus

About the author

Myllyntaus, Timo

University of Turku, Finland

Timo Myllyntaus is Professor of Finnish history at Turku University. He earned his first two degrees at Helsinki University and a Ph.D. in economic history at the London School of Economics. His research interests stretch from economic and social history to environmental history. His edited volumes include Thinking through the Environment: Green Approaches to Global History (2011) and Invisible Bicycle. New Insights in Bicycle History (co-edited with Tiina Männistö-Funk, forthcoming in 2016). He has also published around one hundred scientific articles and fifty popular articles. Myllyntaus has directed more than a dozen research projects, participated in activities of various scientific organizations including the European Society for Environmental History, and acted as a peer-reviewer for several journals.

Sourabh , Naresh Chandra

Institute of Social Research and Development, India

Naresh Chandra Sourabh is professor and founder Director at the Institute of Social Research and Development, Patna, India. He received his M.A. degree in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 1982 and his Ph.D. also in Sociology from the University of Helsinki in 2008. He is the author of the socio-ethnographic work The Culture of Women’s Housework. Previously, Dr. Sourabh lectured “Food in Indian History- Production, Consumption and Culture from the Colonial Times to the Present” at Turku University, where he was a fellow with the project Finnish Harvest Failures and Famines in the International Context, funded by the Academy of Finland.

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British Views on the Indian and Ottoman Famines: Politics, Culture, and Morality

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Perspectives Issue 2015/2

British perceptions of the 1874 famines in India and the Ottoman Empire were shaped by discourses that defined these regions as spaces of absence, scarcity, wilderness, or empty land in desperate need of colonial investment and opportunity.

The Ukrainian Famine "Holodomor": Natural Disaster or Genocide?

In 1932, the Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin enacts policies in Ukraine that seek to decimate nationalist aspirations for independence and force collectivization on the peasantry. These measures amplified into a grand famine and led to the death of an estimated 3.5 million people.

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The Dutch Hunger Winter 1944-45

The Hongerwinter was a major famine that occurred in the Netherlands, particularly in the Nazi-occupied western part of the country. Twenty-two thousand people died and 4.5 million were affected by the direct and indirect consequences of the famine.

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“A huge variety of possibilities”: Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen on his life, his career in research, and his views on the Anthropocene idea

This interview with Paul Crutzen is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands”—written and curated by historian Nina Möllers.

Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands

Together with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the Deutsches Museum hosted a major special exhibition on the Anthropocene from December 2014 – September 2016, which was curated by Nina Möllers. Coined by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul J. Crutzen, the term “Anthropocene” describes the idea of a new geological era shaped by deep interventions into nature by humans as biological and geological agents.

Nina Möllers

About the author

Möllers, Nina

Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich, Germany

Dr. Nina Möllers is head curator and project manager of the special exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands.” She studied in Palo Alto, Tübingen, and Nashville, Tennessee and received her PhD in 2007 with a dissertation on “Creoles of Color in New Orleans.”

As part of a post-doc project at the Deutsches Museum she curated a special exhibition on the history of energy consumption in private households. Her publications include the exhibition catalogs Kabelsalat: Energiekonsum im Haushalt (2012) and Willkommen im Anthropozän: Unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Erde (2015).

She is grateful to Josephine Musil-Gutsch, Vanessa Osganian, Brenda Black, Helmuth Trischler, Iris Trautmann, Eliza Encheva, and Dorothea Föcking for their collaboration on this digital companion exhibition.

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The Irish Potato Famine

The failure of the potato crop in Ireland, aided by harsh British land ownership policies, caused a period of mass starvation, disease, and emigration.

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“The Irish Famine of 1740–1741: Famine Vulnerability and ‘Climate Migration’”

The authors regard migration as a form of adaptation and argue that Irish migration in 1740–1741 should be considered as a case of climate-induced migration.

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Harvesting Hunger

This exploration of the deepening crisis of food security in India looks at four case studies, dealing respectively with Punjab, Warangal, Kalahandi, and Bellary. These are interspersed by insights into a movement in the Himalayas that may offer alternatives in the form of sustainable agricultural systems, which revive traditional agricultural practices (Beej Bachao Andolan).