POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BRITISH SOUTH INDIA 97 exchange rate was also enornaously increasing the burden of the ^Home Charges". All this natttpally compelled the national and provincial governments to increase their single roost important source of revenue., namely land revenue, and raise such regressive taxes as the salt tax. The increase in the effective incidence of land revenue was particularly striking in Madras. Decentralization was intended partly to make the increased taxes acceptable to the landlords and other actual or potential collaborators with government and thus arose directly from the compulsions of the imperial system. This aspect is not given adequate attention in Washbrook^s book. Famines and Colonial Rule Because Washbrook docs not take sufficient account of the outward orientation of the polity and economy fashioned by the British, hi^ analysis remains bound by internal geography. His distinction between the so-called dry zone, the Gauvery delta and Malabar, and the Kistna and Godavari deltas h illuminating. But he Allows tim localized illumination to obscure the broader perspective. Ht writes, for example, of the Great Famine of 1874-76: After a series of fairly good years, between 20 and 25 percent of the population of the Ceded Districts was wiped out by the failure of just two seasons' crops ... The only way that it is possible to reconcile this startling human catastrophe with what we know of economic organisation is to suppose either that the peasant cultivators of these districts were extraordinarily indigent and careless of the threat of famine under which they lived; or, more reasonably, that they were not peasant cultivators at all but dependents and workers of a smaB rural elite which treated some of them as exi>endable. If we accept the likely hypothesis of the dominant decision-making role of the larger landholder in dry Madras, we must also abandon the terminology of the peasant ccoaomy. In the rest of this book, the rich peaiant of the It would be reasonable to argue that the famines were aggravated by the actions of these ^rural-local bosses'^ but it would not do to put the major blame on their actions. For famines in British India occurred all over the country and not just in dry regions. The latter had the distinction of being only loosely connected with the export outlets, and of being dominated by a few rural or small-town magnates, because competition from export-orientated interests was at best a remote phenomenon. Even in such localities the British empire was very much present^ not only as the arbiter of law and order, but also as the Collector of land revenue, on which the whole imperial edifice of Fort §^ George rested. The years in which the Ceded Districts were laid waste by the Great