Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
By Mike Davis
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Book Description : Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of high imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants’ lives.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
While this book will not have the impact of Davis’s City of Quartz–a scathing indictment of L.A.’s environmental ravagement, economic disparity and racial divides–in a perfect world, it would. Its subject is nothing less than the creation of what we now call “The Third World,” through a complex series of seemingly disparate natural and market-related events beginning in the 1870s. Davis dives into the data and journalism of the period with a vengeance, showing that the seemingly unprecedented droughts across northern Africa, India and China in the 1870s and 1890s are consistent with what we now know to be El Ni¤o’s effects, and that it was political and market forces (which are never impersonal, Davis insists), and not a lack of potential stores and transportation, that kept grain from the more than 50 million people who starved to death. Chapters brilliantly reconstruct the political, economic, ecological and racial climate of the time, as well as the horrific deaths by hunger and thirst that besieged the peasantries of the afflicted c0untries. As in City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and Magical Urbanism, Davis’s synthetic powers, rendering mountains of data into an accessible and cogent form, are matched by his acid castigations of the murders and moral failings that have attended the advance of capitalism, and by cogent detours into the work of journalists and theorists who have come before him, decrying injustice and rallying the opposition. (Feb.)Forecast: Although this book’s historical subject seems vastly removed from contemporary American life, it may get some media attention for its El Ni¤o-based arguments. City of Quartz still guarantees review attention for any Davis project, which may draw history buffs who haven’t heard of him. His substantial core readership will seek out the book either way, and the book’s synthesis of hardcore data will also hold appeal for poli-sci syllabi and university libraries.
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The New York Times
Davis’ work is the cruel and perpetual folly of the ruling elites.
Times Literary Supplement
Wide ranging and compelling…a remarkable achievement.
Customer Reviews
Really interesting and surprising
As a resident of Australia and self-taught climate scientist, I am all too well aware of El Nino and La Nina - though its influence pales in comparison with the manner by which enhanced greenhouse gases have destroyed southern Australia’s winter rainfall since 1997. (The fact that agriculture never developed in Australia before the Industrial Revolution, however, reflects more on its extraordinarily ancient and low-phosphorus soils than El Nino influence).
In “Late Victorian Holocausts”, Mike Davis does an exceptionally original study of the impact during the nineteenth century of El Nino and La Nina upon more fertile regions of the world, including India, China, Brazil and East Africa. His focus is on three major waves of “drought famine” (ie. drought followed directly by famine) that occurred between 1876 and 1902 in many regions fo the world. Davis’ description and picture of the famines are incredibly graphic, even gruesomely horrific: we frequently see picures of people starved to the extent that their skeletons are easily visible. His descriptions of forest fires in Asia and Amazonia during earlier El Ninos are similarly explicit and it’s a pity that no pictures from 1877/1878 or 1925/1926 were available to him.
Davis does a very impressive job of explaining how El Nino and La Nina work and why they cause major changes in rainfall across the globe through shifting the location of what he calls, quite figuratively, “planetary heat engines”. His diagrams and decriptions of the magnitude of rainfall changes in some of the areas worst affected by famines during the late nineteenth century are done exceptionally well. Davis explains that droughts in North China, northwestern and central India and the Brazilian sertao are related to El Nino preventing the intertropical convergence zone moving as far poleward as it normally does. He also explains the origin of ENSO theory in the early meteorological work of Gilbert Walker, whose name I am extremely familiar with from studying Australia’s climate.
What is surprising even to someone familiar with Trotskyist theory is how Davis suggests that these famines, which allowed Europe to gain in population compared to China and India for a long period centred around the Victorian age, and that in fact before European colonisation periodic droughts never led to the level of mortality experienced during the late nineteenth-century famines in which in many places death rates rose to several hundred per thousand per year. He shows that the Qing dynasty had an elaborate system of what we in Australia call “drought subsidies” to protect North China against a very erratic climate, and that the increasing power of the West destroyed the effectiveness of this system and led to catatrophes during powerful El Nino (e.g. 1877) and La Nina (e.g. 1898) phases. In the process he explains some relatively little-known facts about the social structure of Qing China.
Linking these together in Davis’ hypothesis that ENSO-related disasters were an important and overlooked factor in the hegemony of the West that evolved during the late nineteenth century. A large number of interesting movements that aimed to maintain local power in Africa, Asia and the Pacific collapsed under the sheer weight of pressure and by the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of these remind me of religious movements I have read via such authors as Susan Starr Sered and Bill Kauffmann and would certainly be worthy of more detailed study than Davis can give them. However, his ability to show that living standards in the West were actually lower than those in Asia until well into the eighteenth century is most surprising, though as a student of cultural studies I am extremely loathe to measure a society’s health by its wealth and living standards and believe other more psychological factors are crucial. Davis shows skilfully that the areas most affected by the late nineteenth century famines were actually once quite rich and that the influence of rich British businessmen was what impoverished these regions through forced devaluation of their commodities.
Some have said “Late Victorian Holocausts” is too influenced by Marxist doctrine and that Divis whitewashes the famines of the Great Leap Forward under Mao Zedong. It is true that he could have done a btter job than he has about these famines, but though drought famines they were unrelated any ENSO influence as weather in the Pacific Dry Zone conclusively demonstrates. Davis also might have looked at Mao’s regime from a Marxist perspective like Tony Cliff did, but the book’s length makes this a minor quibble.
All in all, “Late Victorian Holocausts” is a most original and unique synthesis of history and climate that far surpasses anything by more famous authors like Tim Flannery. It’s illustration of how climate combined wiht other social factors to produce catastrophes both social and economic is most refreshing and the excellent sourcing gives plenty of opportunity for further research.
Imperialism, famine and the weather
It has been known since the 1920′ies that the surface temperatures of the Eastern Pacific influences the rainfall in many parts of the world.
In this book the author describes this phenomena and also tells the story of the important famines caused by these weather patterns. In addition it is described how the famines were made worse rather than better by English imperialist and the “free market”. Railways were of no use here because the colonial administrators and the grain merchants saw no reason to have the grain transported to where it was needed the most. It is a good read though the meteorological parts are heavy going for a layman.
Why so many are poor…
One of the major perennial topics of research in the social sciences is “Why are some nations rich and others poor?” Tackled from the time of Plato onwards, many texts have been written on this subject, from many points of view. Like the other sciences, the huge advances in metrology, analytical techniques, and data collection, manipulation and visualization using computers in the 20th century has helped scientists connect dots that once were thought unlinked. And so answers to this question have become more comprehensive, more factual-based, and more pressing in the amount of evidence brought to bear. This book attempts to answer this question by examining the economic divergence of the world’s major civilizations in the approximate period of 1860 - 1920 AD. The civilizations examined include Brazil, Indonesia, France, England, the USA, Philippines, India, China, Ethiopia, and Russia. Specifically, England, France and the USA underwent huge economic growth and subsequent improvements in the standard of living, while China, India and many other parts of the world descended into Third World status that have lasted until the late 20th century.
The author examines data for these countries such as suspot cycles, birth and death tolls, annual rainfall, sea temperatures, acres farmed and acres abandoned by farmers, and economic transaction data such as trade volume between specific agents (i.e. countries). Looking at all of this, the author puts forth the theory that abrupt weather patterns due to El Nino and La Nina occurrences in this time period substantially weakened the agricultural sectors of numerous countries. This occurred as technological progress in transportation and communication was creating the global economy with humans (slaves), clothing, precious metals, and food produce (crops) being the primary objects of trade. The weakened countries, nearly all of which were centralized monarchies, were colonized by the First World democracies. Within specific nations like the USA and Brazil, one region might rise in prominence vis-a-vis a decline in another region. The results included gradual but radical changes in power structures that lead to famines in times of poor agricultural output. The poor agricultural output was due to bad weather and the forced transitions to cash crops; the famines was caused by evil colonial policies. The final tragedy was tens of millions of dead peasants across the world in what is now known as the Third World.
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