Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to address the centrality of statistics to famine relief practices in nineteenth and early twentieth century India.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will address the question of famine statistics in India as a site on which significant shifts in the culture and practice of colonial governance occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. The use of famine statistics during this period was not mere coincidence, but rather an integral part of a broader political effort to create an impartial state bureaucracy. I argue that statistics in the context of famine not only performed the work of ideological and political legitimation but also served to display the Empire. The colonial state ensured the public access of the numbers it produced by disseminating them through famine commission reports, blue books, imperial gazetteers, and multivolume commercial dictionaries and agricultural glossaries, which enabled people, for the first time, to assume an effective visual and conceptual map of the Empire.

I use the example of Florence Nightingale to reflect on how she made effective use of famine statistics by skillfully coloring it with moral overtones to mobilize public opinion in India and England. In particular, I provide insights into how Nightingale formulated prescriptive principles targeted not only at the relief of suffering, but at the moral and material improvement of distant subjects - principles which continue to inform more recent debates over humanitarianism and global ethics. My aim here is to historicize the global networks of exchange that not only pioneered the gathering of data on Indian famines but also enabled the convergence of colonial humanitarianism with the statistical movement in the nineteenth century.