Empire of Hunger

Download or read book Empire of Hunger written by Yan Slobodkin and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on archival research in Europe, Africa, and Asia, "Empire of Hunger: Famine and the French Colonial State, 1867-1945, " traces changing conceptions of famine in the French Empire. Though French administrators once dismissed famine as an act of god or a misfortune of nature, developments in nutrition science, social engineering, and notions of race and gender suggested new tools for managing food and bodies in the colonies. At the same time, an emerging sense of the French Empire as a participant in an international humanitarian project, largely centered around the League of Nations, profoundly altered ideas of what colonialism was supposed to accomplish. In the interwar period, the high modernist confidence in the ability to mitigate hunger, coupled with the acknowledgement of the political obligation to do so, marked a turning point in the French Empire's relationship to its subjects and to nature itself. Increasingly sophisticated understandings of famine saddled the French colonial state with commitments that they were unable and unwilling to fulfill, undermining the ideological justifications of empire. This study shows how modern liberal ethics and norms of governance emerged from a contested history of imperialism.