The mass starvation of roughly two to three million people in British-ruled Bengal during 1943 and 1944, in one of the most economically important — yet deeply unequal — provinces of the British Empire, in the middle of the Second World War. No single drought explains it. Its causes were a tangle of wartime disruption, the Japanese conquest of Burma, scorched-earth defense measures, inflation, market collapse, and slow colonial relief — and the question of British and Churchill-era responsibility remains fiercely debated.
There was no great drought. The rice fields of Bengal had not turned to dust. Yet between two and three million people starved to death there in 1943 and 1944, in one of the most economically important provinces of the British Empire, in the middle of a world war. They did not die because Bengal had emptied of food. Supply was strained — but the catastrophe came because they could no longer buy what there was, because the war had wrecked the systems that fed them, and because help came late and small. Who bears the blame is argued to this day.