The century, laid out where argument can’t reach it — counted, dated, sourced. Numbers first; the stories grow out of these.
| Year | Where | The toll, in Dutt’s own ledger |
|---|---|---|
| 1860 | Northern India | 200,000+ |
| 1866 | Orissa | ~1,000,000 — a third of the province |
| 1869 | Northern India | 1,200,000 |
| 1874 | Bengal | No loss of life |
| 1877 | Madras | Five millions perished |
| 1878 | Northern India | 1,250,000 |
| 1889 | Madras & Orissa | — |
| 1892 | Four provinces | — |
| 1897 | Wide tracts | 3,000,000 on relief |
| 1900 | "Most wide-spread ever known" | 6,000,000 relieved; "died like flies" |
Read the two coloured rows twice. 1874 Bengal: light, permanently-settled land tax — no loss of life. 1877 Madras: heavy, ever-enhanced land tax — five million dead. Same kind of drought. Opposite outcomes. Dutt — an insider who ran famine relief himself — printed both rows on one page in 1901 and left them there, where the empire could read them. The Bose Boys reading: when the same sky produces no deaths under a fixed tax and five million under a rising one, the tax is not a background condition. It is the instrument.
Open the full famine timeline plate →The landing plate. Every nation-builder is an element, placed by the course they ran — the forts, the field, industry, capital, science, defence, the embassy, the kinetic arm — and by the generation that ran it. Rows are eras; columns are courses; the current flows down a hundred years.
The play. Hover any element and its story record tooltip rises — era, course, emblems, the horse he rode. Click, and the full story record opens: the arc of the life, the geography of it on the globe, the duotone portrait, the course he handed on. Fly the table by course or by generation with the controls, or stand back on Home and watch the whole farm relay at once.
It also anchors the landing page — The Relay section opens it without leaving the library.
Open the table →Spin the earth and read the years the way the people inside them read them — dispatch by dispatch from 1858, no hindsight allowed.
Start the History Machine →| Number | What it counts |
|---|---|
| ~½ of net revenues | Taken out of India every year — “a drain unexampled in any country on earth” |
| ~15,000,000 dead | Dutt’s count of famine deaths in the 42 years since the Crown took direct rule |
| 1,600 oz of gold a day | “Distress gold” leaving Bombay, 1931 — families selling ornaments to pay a tax that would not bend to a world Depression |
“If England had to send half her revenue to Germany or France, there would be famines in England before long.” His sentence, not ours. We just kept the receipt.
See what these curves did to ordinary life →Listen