How the cheap availability of food lead to imperialism
Answers
Explanation:
Food, Imperialism, and the World SystemHumanity is part of the Earth’s constantly changing ecological system. Settled agricul-ture has involved an attempt to subordinate ‘nature’ to human needs and wants in order to supply us with food, raw materials (espe-cially for clothing), and fuel. But through-out recorded history some people have gone hungry while others have feasted. Even today, perhaps +/-15 per cent of the world’s popula-tion suffers from hunger-related malnutri-tion. This finds expression in their reduced life expectancies, susceptibility to illness and diseases, and an abject quality of life. Famine has involved a more intense and periodic worsening of this situation leading to mass starvation, epidemic disease, a large rise in mortality, a fall in the birth rate, and mass migration in search of food and security. Crises of subsistence, dearth, and famine have also existed throughout recorded his-tory. Thomas Malthus famously argued that famines are a natural check on population growth; they are ‘the last, the most dread-ful resource of nature … [which] … levels the population with the food of the world’. (Malthus 1992/1798: 42) Neo-Malthusianism was a dominant way of thinking about fam-ines in the 19th and early 20th centuries and it is still found in popular discussions. But in historical and scientific analysis it has been displaced. Malthus and his followers tended to overestimate the rate of population growth and underestimated the expansion of the food supply within modern capitalism. Beyond this there is now widespread recognition that the growth of population, the growth of the food supply, and food distribution are all moulded by how society is organised, whether on a local or global scale.If the food supply has seemed to be a prob-lem, this has been partly because of what we eat and how we eat it; partly because of how we produce food; and partly because of how we distribute it. This has been analysed in terms of a succession of food regimes based on structures of production and consumption built around the changing forms of power of the advanced states. A focus on socio-economic forms, modes of production, and their different priorities is also necessary for a real understanding of famine dynamics when there is a catastrophic failure in a system.