Drought warning reaches Fort William
- When
- 18 September 1769
- Where
- Bengal, under East India Company revenue administration
- Part of
- Onset of Bengal Drought
On 18 September 1769 the Naib Nazim of Dhaka reported seasonal dryness to the Company's council, marking the drought's onset.
With rains having been usual earlier in 1769, conditions had eased enough that grains were exported to Madras Presidency, though prices were already higher than usual in early 1769 after the partial 1768 shortfall. The situation then deteriorated: on 18 September 1769, Mohammed Reza Khan, Naib Nazim of Dhaka, informed Harry Verelst, President of the Council at Fort William, about the "dryness of the season". This report came amid crop failure in autumn 1768 and summer 1769 and an accompanying smallpox epidemic, later cited as the manifest reasons for the famine that followed. By the end of 1769 rice prices had risen two-fold.
Sources
- Great Bengal famine of 1770 Wikipedia, revision of 2026-08-11
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.