Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

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.

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 manufacturi

Mike Davis' Victorian Holocausts was to me a real eye opener. This in spite of the fact that I have read about the history of British India, one of the areas treated in the book. It is really an indictment of the way history is presented by mainstream historians and an indictment of journalists, who perpetuate the myth of the beneficial effects of British domination in various parts of the world. Just recently, Niall Ferguson, the noted British historian was quoted as saying that on the whole, British rule has been good for the countries affected. It is probably fair to say that Davis' book makes it clear that any beneficial effects of British rule, in India for example, were accidental. The book is admirably written and researched. It is especially noteworthy that there is no exaggerated language used, such as in more well-known holocaust literature, in describing the horrendous occurences in the various parts of what we now know as the third world. Finally, throughout my reading of the book, I could not help recall the fact that Queen Victoria, the icon of beneficial, benign British rule was presiding over much of these horrific happenings. This book has been long overdue. I highly recommend this book to all who are interested in "real history" rather than national mythologies.

Mike Davis' new book is a work of singular importance, offering a valuable new perspective on a disaster of horrifying magnitude. In the late 1870s and the late 1890s somewhere between 30 to 60 million people died in famine in India, China and Brazil. This does not count the many more who died from the Philippines to Angola, from Morocco to Indonesia. To the extent that people remember these famines it has been assumed that they were the result of an unfavorable climate. To the extent that larger social factors were involved, they were a classic Malthusian crisis, too many people on too little land, and they represented the failure of the Third World to adapt the industrial revolution. Davis shows very clearly that the third world was ravaged by the El Nino phenomenon. But that is the only the beginning. They were also ravaged by the new regimes of imperialism and the world market. Had the responsible authorities distributed what food existed, most of the victims would have survived. Davis is well aware of Nobel laureate A. Sen's argument that they key problem with famine is not scarcity but maldistribution. He also point out that whether under the American occupation of the Philippines or the ravages of Mao's Great Leap Forward, the real problem was the lack of democracy and lack of influence of the very poor. Davis starts off with a fascinating and horrific description of the famines, filled with damning facts. For example Lord Lytton and his bureaucrats in 1876 India were obssessed with the idea that relief would just encourage Indian shirking. Readers will not soon forget that the calorie/work regimen that Lytton did impose was worse than that of Buchenwald. Nor will they forget the judgment of the Famine inquiries in the 1880s whom, Davis notes, concluded that with millions of famine dead the main flaw was that too much money was spent on relief. Davis goes into how the famines sparked millenarian movements and political resistance from the Boxer rebellion to the extermination of the Catholic movement at Canudos discussed, inaccurately, in Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World. He also brings a discussion of how scientists found the El Nino phenomenon, and gives a thorough technical account of how it works. He then discusses how the famines solidified European hegemony over the Third World leading to their stagnation and decline.Based on such scholars as Bairroch, Parthsarathi, Gura and Pomeranz, Davis brings forth many facts that shore up his argument. 1) In 1800 India's share of the world manufactured product was four times that of Britain, and China's share was even higher. By 1900 India was fully under British control and the ration was 8-1 in England's favor. 2) In 1789 the living standards of China and Western Europe were roughly comparable and it appeared that China was making even better progress with its ecological problems. Naturally, a century later Europeans and Americans were much better off.