The Great Bengal Famine of 1770

The great bengall famine was made a lot worse by the fact that in the years leading up to it, the company had kind of sort of gutted the local economy and shipped all their silver away to merry old england. So the company was taking taxes, making a shipload of money, using it to buy products indian people needed. And then it would sell those products back to them for a profit and ship the hard currency, the silver and gold, back to england and out of india. The two primary impacts of this on england were, number one, a few people got very, very,very, very, very rich. It's always a