The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 The Company's Deadliest Harvest

The Hidden History of Bengal: Kingdoms, Empires, and Revolution — Fexingo History · Jul 30, 2026 · 6m · transcript

In 1770, the richest province in India was reduced to a charnel house. By the time the rains returned, an estimated ten million people—about a third of Bengal's population—had died. This episode of The Hidden History of Bengal reconstructs the catastrophe: how two years of drought turned into a famine of biblical proportions, and how the East India Company's policies turned scarcity into mass death. We walk through the fields of Birbhum and Nadia, where the Company's revenue collectors refused to lower taxes even as villages emptied. We examine the role of speculators who…