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“Los Angeles will not, of course, collapse. Rather, it will stagger on with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts. Southern California’s golden age forever will be superseded. It is not simply its conjugation of earthquakes, wildfires, and floods, but it’s uniquely explosive mixture of natural hazards and social contradictions.”
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“Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries -- even sometimes creole elites, as in Brazil -- perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism.
From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to regional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world."
First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security...
Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade...
Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.”
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From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to regional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world."
First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security...
Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade...
Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.”
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“The decline of export competitiveness brutally pruned the foliage of the Nordeste's class structure. If successive southern-dominated governments assuaged the great northern oligarchs with regular political kickbacks (often in the guise of "drought aid"), more modest fazendeiros were left to the mercy of market forces. From about 1875, control over production began to pass into the hands of the owners (often foreign or foreign-born) of modernized usinas. "The capability of the usinas to handle a greater load of cane called for further monopolistic consolidation of land resources; in the wake of this process, small and middle landowners became uprooted." The fate of ex-slaves, of course, was unimaginably more difficult in an economic system that no longer required the same huge levies of labor-power. As the Nordeste's economy slumped into a coma, supernumerary labor was either pushed into the sertão's "black, barren fields of hunger" (Tavora) or induced to gamble with disease and exploitation in the rubber forests of Amazonas.
What did NOT happen in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was what neoclassical theory would have predicted as an automatic reflex: the emigration of northern labor to southeastern growth poles. Instead, beginning in the late Empire, national and local governments began to heavily subsidize mass immigration from Italy, Germany, and Portugal. Even the elites of the Nordeste fervidly embraced "Europeanization." An extraordinary example was Bahia during the terrible "Two Eights" drought-famine of 1888-89. While state authorities were roadblocking retirantes' route to the cities and forcibly interning them by the thousands in camps, they continued efforts to lure European immigrants with expensive subsidies (few were tempted).
Southeastern coffee planters, for their part, wanted only "white" overseas laborers after Emancipation, and soon made this federal policy in the new Republic (The racial preference was later amended to include Japanese as well as southern Europeans.) "Why were the coffee planters in the southeast more willing to finance immigration from Europe than from the northeast?" Leff believes that "part of the answer may have been the prevalent racial attitudes on the part of the coffee planters, which led them to prefer European to mulatto workers," while Deutsch points to "cultural biases on the part of Southeastern planters against native Brazilian workers."
Both underestimate racism as public policy. Gerald Greenfield has shown how Liberal discourse about drought and development in the late 1870s revolved around urban perceptions of the "dark, primitive world of the hinterland" and "retirante inferiority and aversion to labor." "To the extent that Brazil during the latter portion of the nineteenth century embraced the tenets of positivism, enlightenment notions of progress, and the concoction of scientific racism of thinkers like Buckle and Spencer, the backlanders became not merely curiosities from a bygone age, but detriments to the nation's progress. Evolving institutions of national culture, largely based in Rio and revealing marked influence from Western Europe and the United States, stressed the nation's greatest potential while lamenting the inadequacies, intellectual as well as moral, of much of the nation's population." The Brazilian Republic, moreover, was probably the first government anywhere explicitly committed to large-scale "positive Eugenics." Leading fin de siecle savants like the Bahian scientist Nina Rodrigues corroborated fears that "race mixing was responsible for all social deviance such as banditry, religious heresy, and the like." Whereas mass European immigration into the United States in the 1890s was conceived as simply providing human fuel for the economy, Brazil's elites also wanted to use immigration to radically transform the nation's racial physiognomy. They were obsessed with "de-Africanizing" and "whitening" Brazil.”
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What did NOT happen in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was what neoclassical theory would have predicted as an automatic reflex: the emigration of northern labor to southeastern growth poles. Instead, beginning in the late Empire, national and local governments began to heavily subsidize mass immigration from Italy, Germany, and Portugal. Even the elites of the Nordeste fervidly embraced "Europeanization." An extraordinary example was Bahia during the terrible "Two Eights" drought-famine of 1888-89. While state authorities were roadblocking retirantes' route to the cities and forcibly interning them by the thousands in camps, they continued efforts to lure European immigrants with expensive subsidies (few were tempted).
Southeastern coffee planters, for their part, wanted only "white" overseas laborers after Emancipation, and soon made this federal policy in the new Republic (The racial preference was later amended to include Japanese as well as southern Europeans.) "Why were the coffee planters in the southeast more willing to finance immigration from Europe than from the northeast?" Leff believes that "part of the answer may have been the prevalent racial attitudes on the part of the coffee planters, which led them to prefer European to mulatto workers," while Deutsch points to "cultural biases on the part of Southeastern planters against native Brazilian workers."
Both underestimate racism as public policy. Gerald Greenfield has shown how Liberal discourse about drought and development in the late 1870s revolved around urban perceptions of the "dark, primitive world of the hinterland" and "retirante inferiority and aversion to labor." "To the extent that Brazil during the latter portion of the nineteenth century embraced the tenets of positivism, enlightenment notions of progress, and the concoction of scientific racism of thinkers like Buckle and Spencer, the backlanders became not merely curiosities from a bygone age, but detriments to the nation's progress. Evolving institutions of national culture, largely based in Rio and revealing marked influence from Western Europe and the United States, stressed the nation's greatest potential while lamenting the inadequacies, intellectual as well as moral, of much of the nation's population." The Brazilian Republic, moreover, was probably the first government anywhere explicitly committed to large-scale "positive Eugenics." Leading fin de siecle savants like the Bahian scientist Nina Rodrigues corroborated fears that "race mixing was responsible for all social deviance such as banditry, religious heresy, and the like." Whereas mass European immigration into the United States in the 1890s was conceived as simply providing human fuel for the economy, Brazil's elites also wanted to use immigration to radically transform the nation's racial physiognomy. They were obsessed with "de-Africanizing" and "whitening" Brazil.”
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“In contrast to the rigidity and dogmatism of British land-and-revenue settlements, both the Moguls and Marathas flexibly tailored their rule to take account of the crucial ecological relationships and unpredictable climate fluctuations of the subcontinent's drought-prone regions. The Moguls had "laws of leather," wrote journalist Vaughan Nash during the famine of 1899, in contrast to the British "laws of iron." Moreover, traditional Indian elites, like the great Bengali zamindars, seldom shared Utilitarian obsessions with welfare cheating and labor discipline. "Requiring the poor to work for relief, a practice begun in 1866 in Bengal under the influence of the Victorian Poor Law, was in flat contradiction to the Bengali premise that food should be given ungrudgingly, as a father gives food to his children." Although the British insisted that they had rescued India from "timeless hunger," more than one official was jolted when Indian nationalists quoted from an 1878 study published in the prestigious Journal of the Statistical Society that contrasted thirty-one serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia.
India and China, in other words, did not enter modern history as the helpless "lands of famine" so universally enshrined in the Western imagination. Certainly the intensity of the ENSO cycle in the late nineteenth century, perhaps only equaled on three or four other occasions in the last century, perhaps only equaled on three or four other occasions in the last millennium, most loom large in any explanation of the catastrophes of the 1870s and 1890s. But it is scarcely the only independent variable. Equal causal weight, or more, must be accorded to the growing social vulnerability to climate variability that became so evident in south Asia, north China, northeast Brazil and southern Africa in late Victorian times. As Michael Watts has eloquently argued in his history of the "silent violence" of drought-famine in colonial Nigeria: "Climate risk...is not given by nature but...by 'negotiated settlement' since each society has institutional, social, and technical means for coping with risk... Famines [thus] are social crises that represent the failures of particular economic and political systems”
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India and China, in other words, did not enter modern history as the helpless "lands of famine" so universally enshrined in the Western imagination. Certainly the intensity of the ENSO cycle in the late nineteenth century, perhaps only equaled on three or four other occasions in the last century, perhaps only equaled on three or four other occasions in the last millennium, most loom large in any explanation of the catastrophes of the 1870s and 1890s. But it is scarcely the only independent variable. Equal causal weight, or more, must be accorded to the growing social vulnerability to climate variability that became so evident in south Asia, north China, northeast Brazil and southern Africa in late Victorian times. As Michael Watts has eloquently argued in his history of the "silent violence" of drought-famine in colonial Nigeria: "Climate risk...is not given by nature but...by 'negotiated settlement' since each society has institutional, social, and technical means for coping with risk... Famines [thus] are social crises that represent the failures of particular economic and political systems”
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“In her somberly measured reflections, Reading the Holocaust, Inga Glendinnen ventures this opinion about the slaughter of innocents: "If we grant that 'Holocaust,' the total consumption of offerings by fire, is sinisterly appropriate for the murder of those millions who found their only graves in the air, it is equally appropriate for the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden." Without using her capitalization (which implies too complete an equation between the Shoah and other carnages), it is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies towards starving "subjects" were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet. The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations, not illustrations.”
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“Village economy in India, as elsewhere in monsoonal Asia, augmented crops and handicrafts with stores of free goods from common lands: dry grass for fodder, shrub grass for rope, wood and dung for fuel, dung, leaves and forest debris for fertilizer, clay for plastering houses, and, above all, clean water. All classes utilized these common property resources, but for poorer households they constituted the very margin of survival. In an outstanding study of a contemporary Gujarati village struggling with seasonality and drought, Martha Chen has shown how decisive nonmarket resources and entitlements remain for laborers and small farmers. "Standard definitions of work, worker and income," she writes, "do not capture how poor households generate livelihoods." In the village of Maatisar, (which she visited during the severe drought of 1985-87) fully 70 percent of the fuel and 55 percent of the fodder requirements of the poor are provided from free sources. The forest and pasture commons, which altogether generate thirty-five different useful products, "not only serve as a buffer against seasonal shortages, but also contribute to rural equity."
The British consolidated their rule in India by transferring control of these strategic resources from the village community to the state. "Among all the interventions into village society that nurtured the Anglo-Indian empire," David Ludden argues, "dividing public from private land stands out as the most important." Common lands - or "waste" in the symptomatic vocabulary of the Raj - were either transformed into taxable private property or state monopolies. Free goods, in consequence, became either commodities or contraband. Even cow dung was turned into a revenue source for Queen Victoria.”
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The British consolidated their rule in India by transferring control of these strategic resources from the village community to the state. "Among all the interventions into village society that nurtured the Anglo-Indian empire," David Ludden argues, "dividing public from private land stands out as the most important." Common lands - or "waste" in the symptomatic vocabulary of the Raj - were either transformed into taxable private property or state monopolies. Free goods, in consequence, became either commodities or contraband. Even cow dung was turned into a revenue source for Queen Victoria.”
―
“Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries -- even sometimes creole elites, as in Brazil -- perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness ere typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism.
From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to ergional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world."
First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security...
Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade...
Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.”
―
From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to ergional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world."
First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security...
Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade...
Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.”
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“In addition to being at the losing end of the imperialism of free trade, the Indian and Chinese economies were also throttled by military expenditures and the gold standard. In the Victorian era, no other major countries were forced to devote such excessive portions of their national income to war. India, already saddled with a huge public debt that included reimbursing the stockholders of the East India Company and paying the costs of the 1857 revolt, also had to finance British military supremacy in Asia. In addition to incessant proxy warfare with Russia on the Afghan frontier, ordinary Indians also paid for such far-flung adventures of the Indian Army as the sacking of Beijing (1860), the invasion of Ethiopia (1868), the occupation of Egypt (1882), and the conquest of the Sudan (1896-98). As a result, military expenditures were never less than 25 percent (or 34 percent including police) of India's annual budget, and viceroys were constantly searching for creative ways to purloin monies for the army from other parts of the budget, even from the Famine Fund. Victorian England, on the other hand, never expended more than 3 percent of its net national product on its army and navy, a serendipitous situation that considerably diminished domestic tensions over imperialism.”
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