The Blood Sea

Nobel Prize winning Indian (Bengali) economist Amartya Sen describes it as a man-made famine, noting that no previous famine had occurred in Bengal that century, and the region under the Muslim rule was one of the world's major economic powers and signalled the advent of proto-industrialisation. Historian William Dalrymple held that the deindustrialisation of Bengal and the policies of the East India Company were the reasons for the mass famine and widespread chaos. From 1876 to 1878, the Great Famine killed between 30 and 60 million people around the world. Drought enveloped much of the planet, causing food shortages all the way from Brazil to India and China, and wiping out approximately three percent of the global population. Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin.