ABSTRACT Historical research on the ‘Great Bengal famine’ has recently grown more diverse, but is still almost exclusively limited to political and economic dynamics that took place within the province and, at times, wider India. This article provides a fresh perspective on the unfolding disaster by reconstructing the emerging demands for food aid in Britain, arguing that to examine the famine through this lens can enrich the understanding of how (anti-) imperialism, colonialism and humanitarianism converged. It reveals that the responses to the famine, rather than being a seemingly natural expression of compassion and empathy, were conditioned by representations of the famine manufactured by Indian nationalists, anti-imperialists, and apologists of the empire. As information on the deteriorating food crisis in Bengal began to filter through to the metropole in January 1943, both Indian nationalists and the British left merged demands for food relief and claims for Indian self-rule in their anti-famine campaigns. Whereas anti-imperialists used literary and visual representations of the famine to illustrate the British Empire’s failure to care for its colonial subjects, conservatives lapsed into nineteenth-century rhetoric that framed the famine as proof of India’s unpreparedness for self-government. The mobilisation of food aid in Britain, thus, is illustrative of ideological and political contestations that accompanied the last years of the British Raj and the start of the age of decolonisation. At the same time, the delay and the very nature of public debates and responses to the Bengal famine in Britain illustrate the crucial role of the media in raising awareness for distant crises and point to the problematic relationship of mediated representations of humanitarian disasters and the successful mobilisation of aid.

中文翻译：

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英国的孟加拉大饥荒：大都会的粮食救济运动和帝国的终结，1943-44

摘要 “孟加拉大饥荒”的历史研究最近变得更加多样化，但仍然几乎完全限于发生在该省内，有时甚至是更广泛的印度的政治和经济动态。本文通过重构英国新出现的粮食援助需求，为正在发生的灾难提供了一个全新的视角，认为从这个角度审视饥荒可以丰富对（反）帝国主义、殖民主义和人道主义如何融合的理解。它揭示了对饥荒的反应，而不是看似自然的同情和同情的表达，是由印度民族主义者、反帝国主义者和帝国的辩护者制造的饥荒表征所制约的。1943 年 1 月，随着有关孟加拉日益恶化的粮食危机的信息开始渗透到大都市，印度民族主义者和英国左翼在反饥荒运动中合并了对粮食救济的要求和对印度自治的要求。反帝国主义者使用饥荒的文学和视觉表现来说明大英帝国未能照顾其殖民臣民，而保守派则陷入了 19 世纪的言论，将饥荒视为印度没有准备好自治的证据。因此，在英国动员粮食援助是伴随英国统治的最后几年和非殖民化时代开始的意识形态和政治争论的例证。同时，