Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Bruce Lockhart, Department of History, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This talk will provide a quantitative analysis of Vietnam’s 1944-1945 great famine. Although the famine claimed the lives of a million or more Vietnamese in Tonkin and North Annam, explanations for it and attribution of responsibility remain unclear. I argue that famine, although made worse by wartime events, resulted from successive typhoons that struck coastal areas. Analysis reveals the famine’s highly unequal impact: the landless and those lacking access to external labour markets had by far the greatest probability of dying. Famine led to widespread, violent popular action and, moreover, was central to the historical watershed of Vietnam’s August 1945 revolution.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gregg Huff is Senior Research Fellow, Pembroke College, University of Oxford. His main research interests are the economics of war, finance, urbanization, migration and economic development and Southeast Asia. Prof Huff teaches the graduate Southeast Asia option in Economic and Social History at Oxford and is currently engaged in a project on the Economics of War in Southeast Asia. Some of his recent publications include, “Financing Japan’s World War II Occupation of Southeast Asia”, with Shinobu Majima, Journal of Economic History, 73, 4 (2013), “Finance for War in Asia and Its Aftermath”, in Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze, eds, The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), “The Challenge of Finance in World War II Southeast Asia”, with Shinobu Majima, War in History, 22, 2 (2015), and “Urban Growth and Change in 1940s Southeast Asia”, with Gillian Huff, Economic History Review, 69, 2 (2015).

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.