This chapter lays out key questions and concepts in the book. It discusses the author’s concept, the atrocity of hunger, the intentional starvation of a group through the denial of access to food, and it includes more than just the embodied experience of starvation: the physical and mental suffering that humans undergo due to the physiological effects of starvation, as well as the transformation and breakdown of families, communities, and individuals whose lives and core beliefs are shaped by starvation. It is also the process as experienced by individuals, households, and communities as they move from food insecurity to a state of starvation. It outlines that the coping mechanisms employed by the Jews during this experience provide a window into their everyday life during the Holocaust. This chapter lays out the role of food access as a key factor of survival and frames this question squarely within the framework of genocidal famine. It lays out the differences between the three cities under consideration: Lodz, Warsaw, and Krakow.

This chapter discusses the conclusions of the book including examining the connection between surviving the Holocaust and food access in the ghettos. It discusses the challenges to core values that people in the ghetto faced as they sought adequate food for survival.

This chapter examines the neurobehavioural impacts in adults of both starvation (food restriction/cessation) and energy restriction for life extension. Section 8.2 covers animals, finding that restriction causes hippocampal damage and stress responses. Section 8.3 covers humans. Short-term fasting (<1 week) has limited cognitive effects, primarily increasing attention to food. Long-term fasting (weeks-to-years) has been studied naturalistically (e.g., famines, hunger strikes) and in the lab (e.g., Minnesota starvation study). Findings are convergent, with dramatic increases in appetite, low mood and egocentricity. The neural basis of these effects can be studied indirectly in people with anorexia nervosa, although this is complicated by pre-existing brain changes that may dispose to this disease. The impacts of cachexia and aging are also examined, alongside the longer-term impacts of food restriction post-recovery. Part three examines the animal and human energy restriction literature. While lifespan extension can occur in small mammals, the evidence in primates and humans for beneficial effects is equivocal.

In the autumn of 1845, as news of a potato blight came in from various parts of Great Britain and Ireland, the prospect of famine in the ‘second island’ began to loom. By December, Sir Robert Peel was convinced that his government would have to save Ireland by abolishing the Corn Laws, that shibboleth of the Tory landed class. Having failed to take his cabinet with him, he stepped aside, only to be reinstated by the queen when Lord John Russell failed to form a Whig ministry. Six months later the Corn Laws were abolished and the Tories were out of office. This chapter examines the private political letters exchanged between Peel and Sir James Graham, Richard Cobden and John Bright of the Anti–Corn Law League, and other leading players, on the brink of the ‘great hunger’ in Ireland and the eventual resignation of a prime minister.

We provide food for thought on some pressing questions about health inequalities – why some of us maintain good health into old age, and the inequity of infectious and Non-Communicable Diseases, both very relevant now to COVID-19. We use historical perspectives and modern examples to discuss the population explosion, social determinants of health and how development over the first 1,000 days influences later health. Some ideas are likely to be quite novel to the reader, such as the risk of disease being increased by ‘mismatch’ between our developmental environment and where and how we live later. This takes the story across the globe, from high- to low-income countries, where early development is often less healthy but economic progress is changing environments fast. Can young people in such settings escape, or has the anvil on which their bodies were forged in early life left them with unalterable inequalities? We ask who needs to ‘own’ these problems and why solutions to them have been slow to emerge. The wider, global perspective, sets the scene for the final chapter which focuses on what we can all do as individuals now that we know some of the secrets of our first 1,000 days.

This chapter serves as a companion to the previous one, focusing on the second main plank of eco-determinist climate and water security reasoning: drought. The chapter argues that the evidence on drought and conflict is weak and misleading; that today droughts have far more limited economic and political consequences than is usually imagined; and that we should not expect accelerating global climate change to fundamentally alter this. These arguments are developed via analysis of the first supposed ‘climate wars’ – the Darfur war of 2003–5, the ongoing Syrian civil war and the ongoing Lake Chad basin crisis – as well as consideration of the history of drought impacts and climate change projections. On each of these counts the chapter shows that the evidence, and thus the grounds for concluding that climate change–induced droughts will trigger ever-more conflict in future, is remarkably thin. Picking up on the previous chapter, the chapter also explores the politics of drought–conflict discourse, showing that ‘drought’ is often an exercise in deflecting state responsibility and obscuring political agency which does little for the security of the rural poor.

One of the most influential individuals of modern history is Mao Zedong – or Chairman Mao. He lived an extraordinary life. Influenced by the Marxist-Leninist ideology of communism while a student at Peking University, Mao was a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1927. He immediately led an insurrection – the Autumn Harvest Uprising – that initiated a civil war with the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party that then ruled China. It was a war that would last until 1949 (although interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945). When Mao’s CPC finally defeated the nationalists, the KMT and its followers retreated to Taiwan. This is the reason that China still does not recognise Taiwan as an independent country today.

In April 1816 eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin travelled to Geneva with her lover, the poet Percy Shelley. (They had eloped and were to marry later in the year.) They stayed in Geneva for the summer with her half-sister, Claire, and another of England’s great poets, Lord Byron. But the weather was terrible. Instead of rowing on a calm and pleasant Lake Geneva, Mary wrote of a ‘wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain [that] often confined us for days to the house’. It was during one such dark and stormy evening that a member of the travelling party suggested a game: each should write a ghost story. After several days of toying with different ideas, Mary Shelley conjured up the story of Victor Frankenstein, who creates a monster in a scientific experiment. Published in 1818, Frankenstein changed literary history and is today considered one of the first science fiction books. It still sells approximately 40,000 copies per year.

Displacement and genocide, rather than fully eliminating the Haitian presence in Dominican territory, fomented new forms of contestation, tension, and conflict. Refugees’ prolonged patterns of contestation and resistance contributed to tense relations along the border throughout the 1940s. This chapter details ethnic Haitians’ methods of irregular resistance, which included secret farms, livestock-theft, the right of return, and in some rare cases, arson and vandalism. These incidents provide a window into some refugees’ political consciousness surrounding genocide, displacement, lost citizenship, and lost homeland. The chapter argues that ethnic Haitians challenged Trujillo’s territorial sovereignty and Dominicanization through land contestation, arson, and clandestine farming. Of these phenomena, clandestine farming was the most enduring and widespread form of resistance because it was the least dangerous and also functioned as a desperate survival strategy. The genocide continued throughout the 1940s in the form of isolated killings by which Trujillo’s government enforced the parallel policies of a closed border and Dominicanization. This chapter considers the ways in which desperate, irregular social contestation through nighttime farming and cross-border livestock-theft represented disturbing, latter-day echoes of colonial marronage.

As reports of mass famine turned from a trickle to a flood in 1960, the leadership slowly realized that the party had made a mistake of historical proportion. According to Ministry of Public Security data, 675 counties and cities had death rates exceeding 2 percent of population in the early 1960s, compared to the normal 1 percent or so. In forty counties, mainly in Anhui, Sichuan, Henan, Guizhou, and Qinghai, the death rates exceeded 10 percent of the population (Yang et al. 2012: 395). Economists and demographers estimate that the Great Leap Forward caused sixteen to thirty million unnatural deaths in the early 1960s (Kung and Lin 2003). The policy of using confiscated grain to finance a rapid buildup of industrial capacity championed by Mao and his colleagues had led to one of the greatest man-made disasters in the twentieth century.

This chapter explores why, in the wake of similar exposure to drought in the 2010s, Somalia experienced a famine but Ethiopia did not. I also use within-case analysis to explain why Ethiopia experienced a famine in the mid-1980s but not in the 2010s.

This chapter addresses the contention that ICL practice focuses myopically on horrific spectacles because all, or at least the most serious, international crimes necessarily involve the production of such spectacles. It does so by demonstrating that ICL, in its current form, appears capable of addressing forms of harm causation significantly different in nature and aesthetic familiarity than those it has overwhelmingly been applied to in the past. It does so in two parts. First, it considers scholarship that examines how genocide, atrocity, and mass violence actually manifest themselves and unfold. This scholarship highlights the dynamic, causally multifaceted nature of most atrocity commission processes. Second, it examines the degree to which the doctrinal substance of ICL could account for the causal heterogeneity and complexity of atrocities. Through this analysis, this chapter demonstrates that, in theory, ICL could be applied to a variety of harm causation modalities failing to conform to the atrocity aesthetic.

This chapter considers ICL’s applicability to a variety of real-world situations involving the production of mass suffering and/or death through relatively slow, unspectacular forms of harm causation. It identifies various examples of situations that, upon careful analysis, appear to have involved the commission of one or more international crimes, yet failed to conform to the atrocity aesthetic. These potential crimes have also been afforded comparatively scant attention, especially in comparison to more spectacular forms of atrocity, despite often being massive in scale and gravity, suggesting that their aesthetic unfamiliarity has contributed to, or at least facilitated their relative invisibility, socially and legally, as potential international crimes.

Chapter 6 traces the intellectual consequences of the unravelling of Ireland’s grain export boom at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For British political economists such as Malthus and James Ramsay McCulloch, the path towards Irish recovery could only lie through the assimilation of Ireland to what they took to be an English model of large-scale tenant farming and concentrated land ownership. For European thinkers, however, the parlous condition of the Irish countryside was proof not of Ireland’s divergence from, but its identity with, the monstrous and unsustainable condition of Britain’s ‘aristocratic’ social order. Their critiques were taken up in Britain by a new generation of liberal economists led by John Stuart Mill, and in Ireland by a group of Francophile nationalist intellectuals, Young Ireland. These thinkers re-cast the problem of Irish improvement anew, tying it not to the integration of Ireland into British or imperial markets, but on the creation of a stable class of peasant proprietors to match those that had been created in large parts of continental Europe through French, or French-inspired, land reforms.