Urbanisation, famines and movements

Colonial urbanisation, famine and popular movements belong together: new cities drew migrants, famines pushed them, and movements gave their grievances a political language. Calcutta, Bombay and Madras grew as ports and capitals, while older towns shrank, and famine repeatedly exposed the limits of a market-driven food system. A concrete example is the Bengal famine of 1943, in which wartime policy, speculation and the breakdown of supply, not an absolute absence of food in India as a whole, contributed to mass death — a point Amartya Sen later framed as failure of entitlement, not only of supply.