Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World Paperback – June 17, 2002

A sui generis history of mysterious meteorological cycles, the impact of international market integration on agrarian societies, and the tragedy of 30 to 60 million starved dead whose absence as an accumulated population from collective memory belies their importance in the scope of Europe's imperial ambitions. Harrowing, terrifying, important, and I hope not a harbinger of climate change impacts on global food security.

So much of the history of the third world just presents the desperate living conditions as something that has always existed in that part of the world and always will. It is so well know and described that it is just assumed that there is nothing that can be done about it and that it is the fault of the tropical environment and the backwards people that live in it. Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts shows that this is not the case at all. Yes there have been devastating long-term droughts and excessive rainfall that has made farming and life in general very difficult in these areas. But it is not acts of God that deserve the blame for the wide spread deaths in these areas. As Davis argues very clearly these societies have dealt with droughts and monsoons for centuries and had an infrastructure set up to deal with it. This infrastructure was dismantled (more often than not deliberately) by imperial forces that set up a system for maximum wealth extraction from these regions. As Davis demonstrates especially in the case of India, the development that was done was not done for the benefit of the people but rather for the extraction of wealth. Late Victorian Holocausts also does a very good job of debunking assumptions that China and India are burdened by their excessive populations and that this is to blame for most of their economic underdevelopment. But the fact is these countries have dealt with these issues for a long time and had the infrastructure to deal with it.
Davis does an excellent job of opening the book with an interesting and relevant antecedent of former president Grant's travels thorough some of the drought stricken areas. And while the book is an academic book, it is well written and is not a bad read for the general reader either. If there was one complaint that I had about the book it is that the 3rd part dealing with deciphering El Nino climate patterns was way too much and really not relevant to the rest of the book. If the author's main argument is that the main source of the famine problems was manmade policy decisions rather than climate, why bother spending 40 pages on an exhaustively detailed description of how El Nino was discovered. In fact, after discussing it in those sections it is only referred to in passing thorough out the rest of the book. I would recommend that unless you are just fascinated with climate science you just skim this section it will not take away from the overall argument of the book. This one shortcoming aside this is a fascinating and well written book and I definitely recommend it.

Late Victorian Holocausts is a double investigation, first of the role played by ENSO, the El Nino Southern Oscillation which affects much of the world's weather in the devastating famines which marked the late nineteenth century, and secondly of the role European (primarily British) imperialism took in deepening those famines. Thus part of the book is a scientific study of ENSO, while the rest is a chronicle of the horrendous suffering in India, China, and Brazil. Even if you are familiar with the typical nineteenth century European Social Darwinist free trader ideology, the callousness of the attitudes of British viceroys and plentipotentiaries towards the suffering Indian and Chinese peasants is breathtaking. Similarly, the arrogant disregard of the sufferings of the Brazilians by their government is beyond belief.
In contrast with the insouciance of the Europeans when faced with disaster, Davis provides some fascinating information proving that earlier famines in India and China before imperialism weakened their societies were dealt with swiftly and humanely, with a fine regard for easing suffering and preserving human life.
The most important message of this book is that much of today's Third World is the direct result of natural disaster augmented by human indifference.

As described and prompt arrival

Marx wrote about capital's destruction of the old social organizations of the societies it enters into, either originally or by force, that "the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire". Mike Davis demonstrates that this is, indeed, the case, and not just for Western Europe either. Focusing on the case examples of Brazil, India and China, Davis shows irrefutably how weather fluctuations, known as El Ninõ phenomena, combined with free traderism, colonialism and capitalist organization to create a series of harvest failures, famines, epidemics and regressions compared to which the Biblical plagues are child's play.

The first part of the book describes the various mass famines that occurred in northeastern Brazil, central and northern India, and central and northern China in the period of the apogee of colonialism, namely roughly 1870-1910. This matter is certainly not for the light of heart: the scale of the famines is such that they far exceed anything ever experienced under Mao or Stalin combined, and the indifference and repression of the the British and other colonialist elites in the face of so much suffering is staggering, evoking parallels with nazism. Of course Mike Davis' usual ill-chosen title attempts to make precisely this comparison, which rather weakens instead of reinforcing the effect of his book, but the facts speak for themselves regardless. Nothing can describe the effect it must have had on the Indian population to be forced to pay for British wars in Afghanistan and South Africa as well as a tremendously grand Jubilee for Queen Victoria, while in the meantime tens of millions of peasants were dying, in some district leading to reductions in population of almost two-thirds. Such is the effect of Whiggish history still that these facts are almost not known at all, and are never taught in high school history books. But everywhere capitalism goes, it leaves behind such corpses.

The second part of the book is a rather technical discussion of weather patterns, especially the oscillation known as ENSO, leading to the El Niño phenomena. Davis also delves into the scientific discussions of these phenomena both during the period of capitalist famines and in contemporary meteorology. This part of the book is furnished with strong statistical data, which will primarily be of interest to people engaged in studying weather patterns, as well as agriculturists because of the importance of these patterns for monsoons etc.

The third and final part of the book picks up where the first one left off, and goes into more detail about the social organizations of Brazil, India and China both before the colonialist period and during it. Davis produces interesting evidence to the account that not only was the average standard of living for the majority of the people quite higher in India and China than in Europe during the 18th Century, their degree of productivity in terms of manufacturing was higher as well. This to directly contradict the many Whiggish histories, like Landes and others, who posit the societies of India and China as stagnant and unproductive from the start. Instead, Mike Davis hypothesizes that the real reason for the sudden collapse in effectivity and productivity of India and China is the military involvement of (mainly) the British in these regions. Subjugating India entirely to a system of hyper-exploitation for the sole benefit of paying for the huge British military and for the interests of the factory manufacturers and traders in Manchester and London (whose direct influence over Indian Raj policy is shockingly large); and in China forcing the government into such large-scale wars and interventions against the British as to make the Qing dynasty go entirely bankrupt and unable to pay for the vast infrastructure and reserve funds, as well as destroying the most effective administation the world had ever seen, the Imperial magistrature system, from the inside via opium trade corruption. Davis makes plausible, if not quite proven, therefore that the downfall of India and China as powers in the 19th Century was exogenous rather than endogenous to these societies.

But what is most important about this book is the enormity of what it describes: the incredibly large-scale death of the subjugated and exploited peoples of what would later form the 'Third' or developing world. By even modest estimates the various preventable famines in China during 1850-1900 alone must have killed some 30-60 million people, and in India probably again anywhere between 30 and 85 million. Then if we add to that the deaths in Brazil (not exploited by foreign powers this time, but by their own capitalist plutocracy), of various African nations, as well as the costs of rebellion and civil war caused by the social disintegration resulting from invasion and colonialism, we get quite a pretty picture: indeed the 20th Century can hardly be considered bloodier than the 19th was. And this is called, by historians, the "Belle Époque"! One wonders if those who write so-called "Black Books of Communism" etc. are even aware of the lethality of capital.