Ebook: Profit Inflation, Keynes, and the Holocaust in Bengal, 1943-44

The year 2018 marks the 75th anniversary of the Bengal
famine, 1943–44. This paper argues that the famine
arose from an engineered “profit inflation,” described by
John Maynard Keynes in general terms as a necessary
measure for “forced transferences of purchasing power”
from the mass of working people, entailing reduction of
their consumption in order to finance abnormal wartime
expenditure. Keynes had a long connection with Indian
financial affairs and, in 1940, became an advisor with
special authority on Indian financial and monetary
policy to the British Chancellor of the Exchequer and the
Prime Minister. Facing trade union opposition in Britain
to the highly regressive policy of profit inflation, he gave
it up in favour of taxation. But, in India, extreme and
deliberate profit inflation was implemented to finance
war spending by the Allied forces, leading to the death
by starvation of three million persons in Bengal.