From British academic Vernon, a dense social history of hunger in
Britain from the mid 19th century to the 1940s. Less than 200 years
ago, Vernon notes, people dying of hunger were considered to be
something less than human: "Their vulnerability to acts of nature
or providence, illustrated only their lack of industry and moral
fiber." The classical political economy of Adam Smith and Thomas
Malthus had established hunger as an avoidable man-made phenomenon.
However, by the 1840s, the humanitarian reaction against the New
Poor Law and the famine in Ireland put a face to those dying of
starvation. A new generation of crusading journalists such as
Vaughan Nash, Henry Nevinson and Henry Brailsford published
shocking exposes, and famine in Ireland and India became identified
with the failure of British colonial rule. May 1905 saw the first
Hunger March, as hungry unemployed boot-workers marched from Raund
(Leicestershire) to London, aiming to refute the claim that the
unemployed were degenerate. Hunger strikes spread from suffragettes
to Irish republicans, and Indians used their deep tradition of
fasting and hunger striking to dramatize the illegality of colonial
rule. After identifying the humanitarian concern and the advent of
the modern welfare state, Vernon moves to the science of nutrition,
or dietetics, which measured a minimum nutritional standard and was
used to calculate the social costs of hunger in terms of
productivity, efficiency and social stability. By the 1920s, hunger
was redefined in terms of quality of diet. The World Wars saw the
introduction of "collective feeding," i.e., factory canteens and
school meals, and the 1940s saw the rise of domestic science and
the efficient kitchen. Throughout the book, Vernon focuses in close
academic detail on the precarious achievements of the British
welfare state and the United Nations.From starvation to
malnutrition to dieting, the knotty, slippery struggle to define
and regulate hunger in the modern world. (Kirkus Reviews)
Hunger is as old as history itself. Indeed, it appears to be a
timeless and inescapable biological condition. And yet perceptions
of hunger and of the hungry have changed over time and differed
from place to place. Hunger has a history, which can now be told.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, hunger was viewed as
an unavoidable natural phenomenon or as the fault of its lazy and
morally flawed victims. By the middle of the twentieth century, a
new understanding of hunger had taken root. Across the British
Empire and beyond, humanitarian groups, political activists, social
reformers, and nutritional scientists established that the hungry
were innocent victims of political and economic forces outside
their control. Hunger was now seen as a global social problem
requiring government intervention in the form of welfare to aid the
hungry at home and abroad. James Vernon captures this momentous
shift as it occurred in imperial Britain over the past two
centuries.
Rigorously researched, "Hunger: A Modern History" draws
together social, cultural, and political history in a novel way, to
show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social
responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how
many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their
history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements
of the welfare state in Britain, as well as with the development of
international institutions, such as the United Nations, committed
to the conquest of world hunger. All those moved by the plight of
the hungry will want to read this compelling book.
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