240090 SE VM5 / VM2 - 'Eating People is Wrong' (2019S)

The title of this seminar is a reference to a recently published collection of essays by Cormac Ó Gráda (2015), who has made numerous important contributions to our understanding of the nature and causes of famines. Famine research has long been a lively academic field and has attracted scholars from numerous disciplines, such as economics, history, development studies, demography, political science or anthropology.
Famines are extremely complex events that are shaped by a large number of factors, both natural and human. To understand what causes those extreme events, we will examine famines globally from ca. 1800 to ca. 2000. Our readings will include economists like Thomas Malthus, Robert Fogel and Amartya Sen, historians like Cormac Ó Gráda and Frank Dikötter and scholars from the field of development studies, like Stephen Devereux.