“Can Openness Mitigate the Effects of Weather Shocks? Evidence from India’s Famine Era”, 2010-05 (; similar):
…In this paper we employ a colonial era Indian district level database for the period 1875–441919105ya to provide some preliminary insights into how trade changes the weather-to-death relationship. This time period contained one of the worst strings of famines in recorded history, with an estimated death toll of 15–30 million people (1983). It also covers the period when the bulk of the railroad network was built in British India. And just as railroads were, by 1919, reaching into every last corner of the country, India (see Figure 1) saw the end of peacetime famine (many decades before democracy came with independence in 1947).
Our district panel regression results suggest that the arrival of railroads in Indian districts dramatically constrained the ability of rainfall shocks to cause famines in colonial India. On average, before the arrival of railroads, local rainfall shortages led to a statistically-significant rise in our index of famine intensity. But after a district gained railroad access the effect of local rainfall shortages on famine intensity was statistically-significantly muted.