Product Description

Examining a series of El Nino-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 and to sow the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the third world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #158046 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Review
"Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance as well as great historical interest." -- Amartya Sen, New York Times "A masterly account of climactic, economic and colonial history." - New Scientist "Generations of historians largely ignored the implications [of the great famines of the nineteenth century] and until recently dismissed them as 'climactic accidents'... Late Victorian Holocausts proves them wrong." - LA Times Best Books of 2001 "David, a brilliant, maverick scholar, sets the triumph of late-nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the context of the catastrophic El Nino weather patterns at that time ... This is groundbreaking, mind-stretching stuff." - The Independent "Wide Ranging and compelling ... a remarkable achievement." - Times Literary Supplement

From the Back Cover
Winner of the World History Association Book Award for 2002

Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the nineteenth 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 and to sow the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World.

Late Victorian Holocausts, focuses on the three zones of draught and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of draught were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by differing ruling elites, policies that in effect were crimes against humanity.

In this his black book of liberal capitalism, Davis exposes the human costs of globalization; arguing 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 and millions of peasants' lives.

Late Victorian Holocausts is the first serious examination of El Nino's imprint on modern history. As globalization continues, seemingly unchecked, and we pass silently through the centenary of the 1899-1902 famines in India, Davis presents a shocking indictment of the costs of imperialism and ignorance, arrogance and sloth.

'Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance as well as great historical interest.' Amartya Sen

'A masterly account of climatic, economic and colonial history.' New Scientist

'Generations of historians largely ignored the implications [of the great famines of the late nineteenth century] and until recently dismissed them as 'climatic accidents' ... Late Victorian Holocausts proves them wrong.' LA Times Best Books of 2001

'Davis, a brilliant maverick scholar, sets the triumph of late-nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the context of the catastrophic El Nino weather patterns at that time ... This is groundbreaking, mind-stretching stuff.' The Independent

'Wide ranging and compelling ... a remarkable achievement.' Times Literary Supplement

About the Author
Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and Magical Urbanism. He lives in Papa'aloa, Hawaii

Customer Reviews

History to make you think.
This is first-rate history. Meticulously researched and documented, with numerous illustrations and case studies, and wide-ranging citation sacross the relevant literature, LATE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUSTS shows conclusively that the wealth of the "First World" is almost exclusively based on lopsided trading and imperialist conditions in the late 19th century, coupled with the devastating effects of El Ninyo famines - and at the same time points up the utter myth of "free trade" put about by the liberal establishment (why, for instance, do all the commodities from tropical countries drop in price in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while all those goods from temperate climates rise?)

Only 4-stars, though, because the criticism of the previous reviewer has some weight. The historical implications of the El Ninyo episodes could also have been considered with relation to the 1879 War of the Pacific between Chile and Peru/Bolivia, in which the war was triggered by the imposition of a port tax in the north by Bolivia on Chile following the economic slowdown of the early 1870s and the effect of the El ninyo on Peru (floods) and Bolivia (drought). Also, Davis could have expanded the thread of his argument with comparisons with French colonialism in Africa in the 1910s/1920s, when exactly the same movements of cash crops led to famine and desperate hunger (as in India/China in Davis' book).

Still, Davis' book is important, timely and excellent. If you want to understand why "economic migrants" have every right to come to the rich countries of the world, read this book.

Excellent and ground breaking work
This new work by Mike Davis is an exemplary piece of scholarship and one that forces the reader to consider the world around them afresh. After his earlier ground breaking 'City of Quartz', where Davis challenged how we collectively view urban areas he has equally audaciously attempted to track the dividing point between the first and the third worlds. Few but the persistent readers of the Journal Capital, Nature, Socialism could have predicted that Davis would write such a book. His revisitation of urban themes in 'Ecology of Fear' did not signal this sudden change.

Quite simply Davis explains the divergence of the first and third world's as stemming from the Political Ecology of a series of 'El Nino' events at the end of the nineteenth century. A catastrophic collision of severe droughts with the aggressive imperialism of the Western powers, led to famine of the peoples of the South. Millions of lives were lost as the Western powers took the opportunity to tighten or extend their grip over the resources of countries such as India and China. Davis demonstrates how the previous pre-imperial arrangements warded off the worst of famine, the very arrangements that the new global market had undermined. Time and again, revolts of peasant peoples against the imperial tyranny were broken by the combined might of superior military technology and hunger. Davis does not just recount the statistics, these accounts are of a passion and moral force rarely found in academic writing. Instead of the faceless millions so typical of planetary histories Davis provides a feel for the millions of individual tragedies represent by such calamities.

Shifting from environmental history, to agricultural history and back again Davis is never dull, navigating complex terrain with aplomb. The height of his erudition is the account of the development of the science of El Nino events. Deftly he moves through the complex physics, the shifting paradigms and scientific projects that have formed the account of weather systems that are in use today. Only after this tour de force does he return to the topics in hand to illustrate how it was not the lack of rain but a militarised enforcement of the free market that divided humanity so starkly.

Davis is not only writing a compelling history, it is hard not to see an analogy behind such an example. The conjoining of rampant market forces with severe climate events robbed millions of their lives and their descendants of the chance of a better life. Davis is not issuing guarantees such events could not be repeated. This is a passionate, urgent book that hums with verve and indignation. It is what scholarly books should be informed, educated but profoundly accessible. Do not wait for the paperback.

A relentlessly one-dimensional polemic
I've read and enjoyed Mike Davis' work before, but with this I'd lost sympathy way before the end. This is not to deny his main thesis, which is hardly new or even particularly controversial - that what we currently refer to as third world countries were systematically under-developed at the expense of their colonial masters. This after all is still happening, and is what the whole globalisation controversy is about. Davis concentrates on the the massive famines at the end of the nineteenth century in India China and Brazil, and argues that they were a result of El Nino conditions. Well, actually he doesn't, because he goes to great lengths, in good Marxist tradition, to set up a definition of a famine as a political event - ie they're always someone's fault. So in the case of India the late nineteenth century famines were the fault of the British administration. Well certainly the attitude of the British, of complacency mixed with racism and backed by a laissez-faire ideology which believed it best not to interfere in these situations - a complex of attitudes seen fifty years earlier in the Irish famine - exarcebated the situation. But the same catastrophe, with comparable death tolls, hit China as well. Ah well, the Opium wars, you know.....China had already been affected by the deadly virus of Western capitalism, so even if China wasn't a colony, it was still all down to the British. And Brazil? More catastrophe, more megadeaths. No problem - Brazil was already part of the London-based capitalist system. Enough said.

So as we turn to the 20th century we should see these trends continue? Well, bit of a problem there actually: the two greatest 20th century famines were unconnected to El Nino, and were in Russia/Ukraine in the thirties, and China during the Great Leap Forward at the start of the sixties. Davis mentions the latter: "the scale of this holocaust is stupefying, and for many sympathisers with the Chinese revolution, inexplicable". He doesn't declare himself to be such a sympathiser - it would have been more honest for him to do so - but quite clearly he is. He sneers at Jasper Becker's "Hungry Ghosts" on this episode as a "Robert Conquest-like expose". Ah yes, Robert Conquest - isn't he the guy who insisted that the actual victims of Stalinist excesses, in the famines and the gulags, was much higher than previously thought? And is it not now generally accepted that he was, um, right? So the nineteenth century famines were the result of the inexorable logic of imperialism, while the thirties famine in Russia goes unmentioned and the famine in Maoist China is perhaps down to Mao's personal inflexibility. The problem, declares Davis, was the lack of socialist democracy. Good old socialist democracy, eh.....as practiced where, exactly?

OK, it's his book, he can write a polemic if he wants, but as a reader I can then decide if I think that someone is so ideologically driven as to be an unreliable guide. I have no problem with criticism of British or any other Western imperialism, but the sheer relentless one-sidedness of it for me in the end proved counter-productive.