Event

Bengal famine of 1770

Famine in Bengal in 1770; the number of deaths is estimated, not counted, and the estimates differ widely.

4 links, 0 backed by primary records. 1 more in open data

Connections 4

East India Company its Bengal government went on collecting the land revenue; its letter of 1772 reports the figures Scholarship & press 1

Bengal According to Warren Hastings Scholarship & press 1
Hastings and his Council wrote of the loss of "at least one-third" of the inhabitants of the province. It is an estimate in a letter, not a count.

Timeline 1 date

Proof 2 sources

The Annals of Rural Bengal, vol. 1 (W. W. Hunter), with the Bengal government's letter of 3 November 1772 in Appendix A, Smith, Elder & Co. (scan on the Internet Archive), 1868. Scholarship & press
the loss of at least one-third of the Inhabitants of the Province, and the consequent decrease of the Cultivation, the nett collections of the year 1771 exceeded even those of 1768
That it did not, was owing to its being violently kept up to its former Standard.
not five per cent, of the land-tax was remitted, and ten per cent, was added to it for the ensuing year
In a year when thirty-five per cent, of the whole population and fifty per cent, of the cultivators perished
1,52,54,856:9:4:3
amounted for last year to sicca rupees 1,57,26,576
1,53,33,660:14:9:2
1,31,49,148 : 6 : 3 : 2
The effects of the dreadful Famine which visited these
Mughal Decline to Early British Rule, in A Population History of India (Tim Dyson), chapter abstract, Oxford University Press, 2018. Scholarship & press
the number of deaths associated with the 1769–70 famine in Bengal has almost certainly been overstated

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