3rd Session (5 May): Winston Churchill — Empire Personified

Please inform yourselves about Tariq Ali's biography and his works. 

1. Please watch the Good Morning Britain discussion and explain how it can serve as an example of why another book on Churchill was deemed necessary, and what it reveals about the "Churchill cult". Ali's book is sometimes described as a polemic. What does this imply?
2. In his book "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World", Mike Davis writes:
   "Thus the Radical journalist William Digby, principal chronicler of the 1876 Madras famine, prophesized on the eve of Queen Victoria’s death that when 'the part played by the British Empire in the nineteenth century is regarded by the historian fifty years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument'." What bitter irony lies in this prophecy, and what role does Churchill play?
3. How would you explain to upper-secondary school pupils the British Empire’s — and particularly Winston Churchill’s — role in the famines that occurred in India during the British Raj?
4. India was not the only colony devastated by famines under British rule. Which other colony’s trajectory was forever changed by a severe famine, and what parallels can you draw with the Indian case?
5. What was the Holodomor and why could this be relevant to our course?