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

by Mike Davis

Examining a series of El Niño-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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Environment, India, World History

464 pages, Paperback

First published November 19, 2000

About the author

Mike Davis was a social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He was best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lived in San Diego.

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liberalism and Imperialism, 2 sides of the same Capitalist coin…

Preamble:
--2022 Update: with the author going into palliative care, it’s time to update this review and fill in some gaps (esp. political economy of imperialism).
--I am most interested in the materialist structures (political economy: production/distribution) behind “liberalism” rather than getting lost in the cultural spillover effects. What drives our notions of “progress”, “growth” and “cosmopolitanism” behind liberalism? Instead of merely dwelling in ideas (where we are a bundle of contradictions), what about the production/distribution of real-world capitalism (i.e. commodification of society for endless private accumulation) from the 1600 East India Company and 1694 Bank of England to today’s Amazon and Wall Street?
--Meanwhile, this critical examination of real-world history/political economy is buried. “History” starts with names and dates; names of the great men who won (and their perspectives) and dates of singular events (noisy surface phenomenon which barely reveal the underlying structures). Next, “economics” takes the winners, abstracts away interrelations (ex. imperialism), and builds a vulgar utopian (insert “free” to everything) model devoid of real-world application (power, class, contradictions, crises).
--What we are left with, once we remove the politically-correct facade, is enlightened (industrious + humane) Western liberalism burdened with bringing civilization to the backward, coloured continents.

The bones of history:
--On one side, the colonizers bask in their spoils while looking away from the ruins of the other side. Critical books like this one are not meant to simply cross to the other side and pick through the bones; they are meant to rebuild historical context.
--Consider: a common capitalist ploy to make socialism/communism scary is comparing “communist famines” with the mass consumerism of capitalism. On the surface this seems so obvious. Let’s first unpack “capitalist mass consumerism”, and then “communist famines”:

a) “Capitalist mass consumerism”: first, consider the decreases in living standards of the masses upon the introduction of capitalism. This initial capitalist accumulation in the real-world requires the violent enforcement of the land market (private “enclosures” of “Commons” common land), forcing the creation of the labour market of masses dispossessed and thus can only sell their labour (a crucial input for capitalist production). Introduced in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails.
…Thus, conditions for (domestic) masses only recovered (ex. English workers’ 300+ years of struggle 1500-1800s) after workers organized to struggle for proto-socialist/socialist reforms (social services esp. public sanitation/health, less atrocious working conditions, welfare, etc.). A summary of this decolonization perspective is found in Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and detailed in Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital.
…Capitalism's global relations have been tidal waves of dispossession during booms and busts (colonial loot/slave trade/drug trade workhouses/dark satanic mills of the Industrial revolution/military industrial complex). No doubt the real-world has many contradictions; capitalist property rights’ sheer abstraction ensures mass social consent required to mobilize and squeeze the masses to unleash vast productive powers.
...Capitalist technology is driven by private accumulation for the few; “mass consumerism” only reached the (domestic) masses after the 2 greatest wars in human history; WWI from the collision of imperialist rivalries; WWII from capitalism’s Great Crash and endless Great Depression that spawned fascism’s attempt to revive capitalist production.
…World destruction was the only excuse capitalists could tolerate for risking enough social planning which revolutionized production/technologies. The risk is the realization that we don’t need the absentee shareholders/bondholders and private bankers behind capitalist property rights (remember: management is a waged occupation; shareholding/capital gains/collecting interest is not work) and can instead plan our economy for social needs. War is tolerable because it is inherently hierarchical and driven by short-term pillaging, like a corporation: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.
…Capitalists were gifted with so much new technologies by the planned war economy, but the irrationality of a society driven by capitalist accumulation meant returning to the Great Depression when the war markets of WWII world destruction ended. This is when capitalists finally shifted to “mass consumerism” (and the welfare state compromise to catch up to the USSR on social services), but for many war industries (esp. the “near bankrupt aircraft industry”: Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation) this was not enough (while other industries quickly reached overproduction/market saturation, thus requiring built-in obsolescence (Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage) and a colossal advertising industry of dissatisfaction/social addiction (Captains Of Consciousness: Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture). Hence, the Cold War and the Military Industrial Complex war spending's continuous centrality to the US economy since WWII.

b) “Communist famines”: just what is the starting point of our comparison? How convenient it is to compare capitalist winners (and not the capitalist losers, i.e. the colonized!) who already went through industrialization over centuries, on the backs of slavery/dark satanic mills/colonialism/settler colonialism that (surprise!) include the communist countries. Meanwhile, 20th century revolutions started from feudal backwaters/colonized destitution (pre-revolution China was the "Sick Man of Asia" with a life expectancy in the 30's), going through rapid industrialization/urbanization/agrarian reforms in decades in a hostile capitalist world, i.e. economic sanctions (US’s total trade embargo on post-revolution China 1950-1972 and continuing embargo on post-revolution Cuba) and “war communism” of USSR being mutilated from Civil War’s imperialist invasion/direct Nazi invasion/Cold War arms race arms chase more accurately, see: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
…Next, let's take the biggest bogeyman: China’s Mao-era famines. More honest liberals (not surprisingly originating in the Global South, i.e. not the imperialist winners) like Amartya Sen are willing to make non-ludicrous comparisons: post-independence China under a communist party/“socialism with Chinese characteristics” vs. post-independence India under liberalism (parliamentary “democracy” + driven by capitalist markets). The results are something you just do not hear in our “free marketplace of ideas”, which I summarize at the bottom of this review: Capitalism: A Ghost Story
…For more, see:
1) Vijay Prashad on imperialist ideological censorship: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74
2) ...on comparing countries ("the world's largest democracy" India and "authoritarian" China): https://youtu.be/4hz5sXYiBo8
3) Michael Parenti on comparing countries: https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc
4) Global South decolonization and self-determination: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...

Highlights:
--My apologies if the above is already obvious; in the spirit of uncensored histories, I felt the preamble was necessary. Finally, onto the book (note: I've filled in gaps in political economy, with sources):

1) History of the Visible Fist:
--Civilizations of China and India were non-capitalist: these were “societies with markets”, not “market societies” (as mentioned earlier, capitalism = driven by endless private accumulation from the commodification of society via land market/labour market, and increasingly stock/financial markets + private investment banking). China/India were also global leaders in traded goods and were only overtaken by violent conquest (instead of utopic “free trade”/”free market” competition), where Britain’s superior violence (no doubt refined from centuries of European religious wars) smashed Indian manufacturers and turned them into growing opium to force-sell to China (after superior violence in the Opium Wars). Finally, Britain could fix its trade imbalance with Asia, as prior to this Britain’s only worthwhile traded commodity to offer was silver/gold from settler colonial pillaging.
--Of course, on the back of the tidal waves of violence, Britain could establish more abstract (once again: social consent, long-term) economic imperialism. Britain’s industrialization policy contradicted “free trade” propaganda because domestic “infant industries” in manufacturing must be protected (protectionism) and nurtured against global competition of superior foreign manufacturing. Once British manufacturing became dominant, Britain could preach “free trade” to prevent competitors from the same tactic of “infant industry protection” and keep them as cheap raw materials exporters to feed British manufacturing. This is popularized to the liberal mainstream in Ha-Joon Chang’s “kicking away the ladder” Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, but we can bypass Chang's US enlightenment lens with The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, and related: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry.
--The book’s last quarter maps out British imperialism amidst imperialist competition, where British free trade policy (including opening its domestic market to industrial imports i.e. US/German) eventually led to second-rate technology compared to US and German tariff-protected state-subsidized innovations. The crucial point here is British imperialism's pillaging of India/China allowed the British Empire to sustain such deficits with rising US/Germany during the Late Victorian era, thus a triangular colonial arrangement that indirectly subsidized US/German industrialization. See the dense but essential Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present which compares this “triangular colonial arrangement” with the other major phases of capitalism.

2) Politics of Capitalist Famines:
--Tens of millions died of famines during the Late Victorian era (1876-1902). Are we to believe the ancient civilizations of China and India are destined for “overpopulation” and starvation? Davis details the political nature of mass famines. China and India had numerous adaptations (price control, grain surplus granaries/redistribution mechanisms, hydraulic infrastructure to handle floods/irrigation) but these all collapsed as British imperialism forced both countries to become cheap exporters to feed global capitalism.
--Capitalist famines resulted not from absolute food scarcity, but from high food prices of laissez-faire market, as State famine relief and ecological regulation were demolished. The dispossessed died next to railroads that shipped food away for export. Profit (and racism) over people. See “The Divide” mentioned earlier, as global capitalism continues to kill millions annually due not to lack of resources/overpopulation (Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis) but due to maldistribution of imperialist trade pillaging via capitalist markets/property rights.

3) Non-capitalist Famine Relief:
--Details of China and India’s prior famine relief infrastructure was fascinating. While European peasants had no guarantee of subsistence as a human right despite European liberalism’s “Age of Reason”, French Physiocrats (precursors of Classical political economy) marveled at China’s mobilization for famine relief. Never believe “there is no alternative”.
--I’m curious to read more on Classical political economy Adam Smith’s perspectives on China (Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Despite being vulgarized to just the “Invisible Hand” bringing the best social outcome from selfish individuals, moral philosopher Smith wrote an entire book (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) on his moral assumptions prior to his “The Wealth of Nations”.

4) Political Ecology:
--The divide between physical sciences vs. social sciences/humanities is slowly being filled by syntheses like this book. The book’s organization was tricky, and much of the climatology details went over my head on my first read; I’ve since been prioritizing the synthesis of the environment with critical political economy:
-Degrowth as decolonization: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-Ecosocialist intro to Earth Systems Science: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mike Davis focuses on the last quarter of the nineteenth century, looking at the extreme climatic conditions of the times which led to droughts, floods and famines. He looks at the El Nino events and there is a good deal of meteorology in the book. Davis focuses on India, China and Brazil in particular, but also partially on Southern Africa, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Sudan. The death tolls are immense 12 million in China and 6 million in India in 1876-8 alone. Davis provides a detailed analysis which shows that the real problem was the way the Imperial powers managed the problem, sticking to the principles of free trade leading to hikes in grain prices and very little famine relief. The European powers (particularly Britain) are the main culprits, but also to a lesser extent the US and Japan. Davis concludes that the imposition of free market economics was cultural genocide and it’s difficult to argue with that conclusion.
Davis points out that there was no increase in India’s per capita income between 1757 and 1947 and the British systematically dismantled the Indian manufacturing sector. In the mid eighteenth century the average European standard of living was slightly lower than the rest of the world and India actually produced a quarter of the world’s manufactures. The Raj soon changed all that!
There is a political history and a scientific history contained within this book and Davis has done his research. The total death toll due to famine in India, China and Brazil 1876-1902 was around sixty million. Two points stand out:
“They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed many were murdered... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.”
And
“Although crop failures and water shortages were of epic proportion.. there were almost always surpluses elsewhere in the nation or empire that could have potentially rescued drought victims.”
Of course the railroads were a possible solution, but:
“The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends.”
The pictures of famine victims look similar to those of people in later concentration camps. This completely blows any illusion that Empire was in any way “good” for colonized peoples and should dispel any nostalgia for a lost imperial past. One small niggle: a chapter to round it all up at the end would have been helpful.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947.

This is a harrowing tome, one dense with statistics and cutting with testimonial. The first section details the effects of drought and famine on India, China and Brazil in the late 19C. Their are accounts from notables of the time. The second section examines the science of El Nino. The final section surveys the global economies of the period, citing all the requisite authorities, the conclusion is despairing. Economic and technological advances clearly set the table for despair and calamity. Racism and corruption maximized the effect.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is devastating and beautiful. Davis explains world-wide mass famines as not just acts of God, but as political decisions made by colonialists who did not see the starving people as humans. This is an excellent companion to books like Orientalism and recently Hickel's The Divide and How to hide an empire--poverty in developing countries has a lot more to do with the actions of the developed world than their own actions.

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I agree with other reviewers that Davis is at his best when discussing India, the sections on Brazil, China, and numerous other places (to which he pays insufficient attention, truly) are generally informative. Perhaps it's fair to say that he establishes his argument on the basis of the British genocides in India, and then produces schematic outlines of varying depths for the imperial genocides in China, Brazil, Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and so on. That slight flaw noted, this text has very high quality--fine documentation and a well reasoned, committed perspective. Overall, this text is probably the first step in rationally countering the trash that is *The Black Book of Communism*--call this chapter one of *The Black Book of Capitalism* (perhaps Blum's *Killing Hope* can be chapter 2--and, yes, there is in fact a *Black Book of Capitalism* in German, which is actually about capitalism; I am unaware of any translation yet to English--no surprise there!)

Some reviewers have pooh-poohed the text on the basis that it sets up typical marxist hierarchies of villainy in its attempt to define famines as political events. This complaint is of course a straw man: though proper marxists will point out that there is a politics to everything--including the weather--it is unlikely that marxism traditionally attempts to blame someone for everything.

Some have also carped against the text for suggesting simply that some deadly virus of capitalism infected China, resulting in the famines there. In fact, Davis' reading of the Manchu Qing dynasty and its policies is much more nuanced than that, and considers a host of issues--including ENSO, the Taiping and other rebellions, surely the Opium Wars, the catastrophic shift of the Yellow River in 1855, and numerous others--including indigenous Chinese corruption, and, yes, some of the more familiar brutalities of the capitalist system.

Critics tend likewise to have a dismissive attitude toward Davis' thesis regarding the integration of India, China, and Brazil into the world capitalist system--not a useful intellectual response to a serious historical debate. I for one would appreciate an actual refutation, by means of proofs that the genocides indeed were not caused, exacerbated, or otherwise enabled by British capitalism & imperialism. Instead, for the moment, all the rightwing offers is "two cheers for colonialism," like a pack of dirtbag fascists.

Critics have otherwise attempted to critique Davis on the basis of a perceived turn in his analysis of the big 20th century famines, under Stalin and Mao, which are said to be unrelated to ENSO, both in fact and in Davis. Such statements are fairly dishonest and perplexing. Davis does in fact make a case for such developments continuing into the 20th century--and he does in fact furthermore consider, briefly albeit, both the Ukranian and Chinese famines mentioned above. Though his treatment overall of Russia is one of the most schematic in the text, he does note that the Volga basin seems to feature a correlation of ENSO to drought/famine, and moreover records the 1930 El Nino as correlated to the 1931 drought crisis (269). This undoubtedly does not explain the fullness of the Ukranian famine, but it certainly will contribute to an explanation that otherwise focuses on Stalinist criminality and commie bungling. The same goes for the Maoist case, where Davis correlates the famines associated with the Great Leap Forward very specifically to ENSO, an argument certainly to be ignored by unreconstructed Cold Warriors and crypto-mccarthyites (248-251).

One of the most assinine criticism of the text from the rightwing regards Davis' thesis that the maoist famine was attributable to the inability of the countryside to communicate effectively with the bureaucracy, the purported lack of socialist democracy, which is summarily dismissed as a fantasy. It is incredibly obtusely dishonest to make this kind of criticism. Davis does attempt to explain the Chinese famine as a result of a complex of factors, including human decisions, meteorology, and the weight of the aggregate of history (the suggestion that Chiang, a victorious Japanese invasion, or an outright US occupation of China would've performed better is quite simply laughable, given the circumstances).

Also, critics respond to Davis by heaping adoration on Robert Conquest and western Cold War Sovietologists; these folks would have us believe that, say, Stalin killed 50 million people in the USSR, but still managed to defeat the Nazis, losing 20 million more in the process-such claims make little sense--indeed, the only people who accept Conquest's exaggerations are pathological anti-communists who don't need any evidence at all for anything.

The anti-communist will further criticize Davis by suggesting that the lack of "socialist democracy" in China is axiomatic, sniping that socialist democracy has never existed. This more or less vapid point is both puerile and a red herring, evading Davis' thesis--which was that the lack of two way communication between Beijing and the Chinese peasant allowed for the true extent of the famine to remain releatively unknown to the state planners. (The rightwing response is of course that the maoists wanted the peasants to die off--which is about as plausible as Bush wanting to blow up Manhattan--but, what the hell, they're evil commies!)

It is likewise disingenuous, as any attempts to pair a socialist economy with a political democracy have been destroyed by the Western powers--consider the destruction of Allende's regime in Chile (1973), to take the most famous example, the sabotage of the Vietnamese general elections in 1955, the low intensity warfare carried out against any number of regimes in Latin America or Africa (Nicaragua? Angola?), resulting in their degeneration and destruction, and the crushing of dozens of movements that struggled against autocratic capitalist regimes all over the world (El Salvador? South Africa? Philippines? Indonesia? everywhere in the Middle East?)--all crimes committed by the US precisely to destroy any potential "socialist democracy" from coming into existence and thereby providing a model of development that counters western militarism and economic hegemony, i.e., the friendly fascism of the US and its allies.

Very highly recommended. Would be perfect if the rigor of the Indian sections were carried through to the rest (including the 20th century items aforesaid).

[David M · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies toward 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.

This book helps to put looming climate catastrophe in perspective. The apocalypse has already happened, many times over, and we're hardly even aware of the fact.

When you consider that a combination of European imperial policies and extreme climate disturbances in the late 19th century led to tens of millions of deaths from famine (and the system of global stratification that is still with us), and that then inter-European imperial rivalry led to a world war in 1914, which, unresolved, would lead to another world war in 1939, and that another 60 million or so would die in these wars...

The 1878-80 Famine Commission statistics revealed a surprisingly perverse relationship between modernization and mortality that challenged the British belief in 'life-saving' railroads and markets. In both the Bombay and Madras Deccan, as Digby pointed out in an acerbic commentary, 'the population decreased more rapidly where the districts were served by railways [23%] than where there were no railways [21%]. This is a protection against famine entirely in the wrong direction.' - pp 111

***

Overall an extremely depressing book, but then there is this inspiring moment:

Indeed, Hyndman's feisty little Marxist party, the Social Democratic Federation, was the only British political organization that never wavered in its attention to India's famine victims... Typical of the SDF's courageous anti-imperialism was the response of one Scottish branch to the otherwise delirious celebration of the British victory in South Africa in 1902: 'While on all sides of the street the harlot, Capitalism, was decked in horrible array of all possible and impossible colours, there was projected from the windows of the SDF a transparency of five feet, giving the statistics of deaths in war, deaths in concentration camps, the numbers of paupers, the number of unemployed in Britain, the famine deaths in India, and the famine deaths, emigration and evictions in Ireland.' - pp 165

The British empire was just massive machine for inducing famine, and they more or less completely got away with it. Grateful for these Scottish comrades from 1902.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Empire laid bare

[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].

Mike Davis attacks the reader with a firestorm of brutal epiphanies, and even if you're not so smart, or have a degree in economics, you get to grasp the idea. But after discharging his bombs, as in an air strike, the Red Baron veers off, leaving you on the ground, lost amidst smoke and debris. There's no conclusion to the sequence of blows, no further readings, no wrapping up.

The book trains the reader in the unpleasant discipline of Empire Pattern Recognition (EPR), and implicitly, after 400 pages spent analysing the most extreme examples of nation states exploiting other nations and their peoples, the reader is expected to continue by themselves, moving from India, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Brazil between the 1870s and 1900s, to any place in the present day. Do not think - not even for a second - that the holocausts are over. Millions died of hunger because of market ideology in bad faith under Queen Victoria, millions continue to die from market ideology in bad faith today.

What resistence is possible? The book's main lesson is that empire first and foremost reengineers societies to make them more vulnerable to volatility (of climate, purchasing power, health conditions). Any attempt at dismantling those institutions that for a given society represent solidarity, i.e. security of livelihood for all, has to be counteracted.

The perfect companion to Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

[Javier · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most depressing books I've ever read--highly recommended.

[Maia · Rating 5 out of 5]

explains how the Victorian Empire created the Third World, using mass starvation as a tool

[Kyrah · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the Most Horrifying and eye-opening books you can read. Especially for People who might be enchanted (or Brainwashed) by "The West" and "Western Values".

[Atila Iamarino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uma história que nunca havia lido em outros livros, pelo que lembro, pelo menos. Mike Davis conta um pouco do que aconteceu no terceiro mundo (pelo menos na época) enquanto a colonização inglesa avançava. O livro traz uma discussão grande sobre o que acontece quando Governos e economia se fortalecendo entram em conflito com subsistência e quem não é interessante para economia ou votos. Com direito a uma passagem pelo Nordeste brasileiro no fim do século XIX.

Estou bem acostumado com a narrativa do capitalismo trazendo a prosperidade (de The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World aO otimista racional: Por que o mundo melhora), mas nunca tinha lido sobre o que pode dar errado. Quando o capitalismo traz fome. Até ver o que acontece quando a Inglaterra estende vias de comércio e linhas de trem para a Índia e ingleses podem pagar mais pelo trigo do que os indianos. Só ingleses comem e a Índia passar por uma Fome enorme.

[Jim Collins · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author divides his book into three sections. The first section comes off as an overheated tabloid expose a la "The Untold Story of El Nino's Global Impacts." That writing style backfires in the context of a scholarly monograph, which this book purports to be, because an expository essay's thesis is supposed to be developed by the evidence, not the temperature of the analysis. Scholarly research should be balanced, contemplative, and it should seek complexity. And while Dr. Davis tones down his hyperbole in the other two sections by discarding the eardrum-shattering verbiage of the earlier section and adopting a more discursive tone, his analysis is anything but balanced, contemplative, and complex. It's too bad because that mediocre analysis compromised his strong integration of some complex material and and the development of a research purpose that was driven by an ingenious hypothesis. Yes, I know, the book won a lot of awards. I am not convinced. Sorry.

[Raghu Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the late 19th century, in the years 1876-79, 1889-91 and 1896-1902, severe drought and famines lashed across Asia, Africa, and South America. An estimated 12-29 million people died in India, 20-30 million in China, 2 million in Brazil and about one-third of the population in Ethiopia and Sudan. Apart from this, drought and famine were reported to have severely affected people in Java, Phillippines, New Caledonia, Korea, southern Africa and the Maghreb. In India, nearly half of all the deaths occurred in Madras. As I read the book, I was shocked that I, who grew up and went to high-school and University in Madras, had never been aware of this part of our history till I came across this book now. No history book in all my years of education in Madras even mentioned anything about this. I thought that this is one more instance of independent India’s callous attitude in the way they teach us our history. However, author Mike Davis says that these great famines are the missing pages from every Victorian era chronicle as well. The Irish potato famine of 1845-49 and the Russian famine of 1891-92 are well documented but not the late Victorian era famines in India. Davis estimates that between 32 and 61 million people died from these famines in China, India, Egypt, and Brazil.

The research in this book shows that all the drought had an origin in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon as a climatic cause. Rapid warming of the eastern Pacific (called El Niño events) is associated with a weak monsoon and synchronous drought in vast parts of Asia, Africa, and north-eastern South America. When the eastern Pacific is unusually cool, the pattern reverses (called La Niña events), and abnormal precipitation and flooding occur in the same region. The extraordinary droughts of 1876, 1896-97, 1899-1900 and 1902 correlate firmly with El Niño events. However, Nature causes only droughts. Man and society cause famines and the vast number of deaths.

In the author’s research, the chief culprits of this holocaust were the European imperialist empires, with Japan and the US playing smaller, but similar roles. He lays the blame on the forced imposition of free-market economics on their colonies, the destruction, and decline of indigenous irrigation, methods of colonial revenue settlements and the new Gold Standard as contributing to the famines in these times. Imperialism also saw each drought as an opportunity to grab more land. Lord Carnarvon used the 1877 southern African drought to strike against the Zulus, Francesco Crispi advanced Italian interests in the Horn of Africa during the 1889-91 Ethiopian famine, Wilhelmine Germany exploited the floods and drought in Shandong in the 1890s to expand Germany’s hold in northern China and the US crushed Emilio Aguinaldo’s Phillippines Republic using famine-drought in the same period. Japan preyed upon a weakened Korea in the famines of 1876 and exacted favorable terms in its rice trade which resulted in the export of rice from Korea to Japan even as Korea was reeling under drought and famine.

In India, the British administration exploited starvation in Madras to recruit huge armies of hungry, indentured coolies. They hired over 480000 from Madras alone, in 1876-79 for semi-slave labor on British plantations in Ceylon, Mauritius, Guyana, and Natal. Similar migrations happened in 1896-97 also. At the same time, after installing the railroad, the British created national level grain markets in India. The unitary market caused price inflation to the rural poor in grain surplus districts. The perverse consequence of this was the export of food grains from famine-stricken areas to more prosperous markets by rail and the import of famine to the rural poor. Added to this was the British Raj’s punitive taxation of irrigation, agriculture, and neglect of traditional wells and reservoirs.

Author Mike Davis contrasts this with the earlier Moghul administration. The British routinely castigated the Moghul rulers as despots and called Moghul India as full of depravity. Davis says that Moghul India till the 1770s was mostly free of famines. In pre- British India, markets were caste-based and local, and the road infrastructure was inadequate. These caused transport bottlenecks and made it difficult for the state to intervene too much in peasant life. As a result, village-level food reserves were more substantial, patrimonial welfare more widespread and grain prices in surplus areas were better insulated against speculation. The author writes that recent research by Ashok Desai shows that the average standard of food consumption in emperor Akbar’s empire was appreciably higher than the India of 1960s. The Moghul state regarded the protection of the peasant as an essential obligation. Akbar, Shahjehan, and Aurangzeb relied on four fundamental policies - embargoes on food exports, anti-speculative price regulation, tax relief and distribution of free food without a forced labor counterpart. The Famine Commission report of 1880 cites Aurangzeb’s extraordinary relief campaign during the drought-famine of 1661. It says that Emperor Aurangzeb opened his treasury and granted money without stint. He gave every encouragement to the import of corn and either sold it at reduced prices or distributed it gratuitously among those who were too impoverished to pay. He acknowledged the need for remitting the rents of cultivators and relieving them temporarily of taxes. His strenuous efforts were credited to have saved millions of lives.

So, are we to think that pre-British India was free of hunger and famines? Are self-contained village communities the solution for India, just as Mahatma Gandhi wanted? Should we opt for a patrimonial monarchy instead of a democratic republic? It is easy for Indians to be carried away by all this indictment of the British and start believing in such a romantic notion. Mike Davis even encourages such an idea by quoting the Hungarian-American political economist Karl Polanyi’s work of 1944 approvingly as follows: “...the actual source of famines in the last fifty years was the free marketing of grain combined with local failure of incomes; Indians died because the Indian village community was destroyed in favor of market capitalism by the British…”. The book also documents how the railroad infrastructure was used to export grains for profit away from famine-stricken villages. Grains went to Britain in search of higher profits, especially during famines.

It is important to remember that transport infrastructure enables access to larger markets by rural producers. Such access allows them to better their material life during good times in a way that helps them save up for leaner times. The problem was not the railways or roads or even the markets. It was the way these were used by the ruling British dictatorship detrimentally. If we look at the same region today, in Tamilnadu and Kerala, there is an integrated road and rail network, but coupled with democracy and political and economic freedoms. These two states also happen to be the two with high Human Development Indexes in India today. In this context, it is crucial to precisely understand what Prof. Amartya Sen had said about famines and democracy. Mostly, we attribute the saying ‘Famines do not occur in democracies’ to him. I think this is somewhat misquoted and out of context. It is true that India has not had a famine since independence and democracy in 1947. However, that does not mean that democracy solves the problem of hunger and starvation automatically. India still has farmers committing suicides in their thousands due to the burden of debt and poverty. Democracy needs to be combined not only with political and economic freedoms but equal economic opportunities as well. Employment and welfare measures must be given to support the bottom rung of society so that they can get a leg up in fighting hunger and malnutrition. Indian democracy forces the ruling elite in preventing outlier events like famines. However, it does not force them to act with alacrity in combating hunger and malnutrition in a similar vein. Unless we banish hunger, we cannot rest on the laurels of ‘democracy and famines cannot co-exist.’

Mike Davis' book is a scholarly work, with much scientific discussion on the ENSO phenomenon and a lot of meticulously researched data on colonial history and its effects on countries like India and China. It draws on diverse disciplines like history, political economy, meteorological science, and the environment. In this review, I have mostly focused on the Indian experience of the late Victorian famines. The book, however, has chapters devoted to the Chinese and the African experience as well. A Marxian view of history inspires the author's outlook. It is evident in his passionate language in support of the ‘third world’ and the denunciation of High Imperialism. The book endeavors to show that imperial policies towards starving subjects were the exact equivalents of bombs dropped from 18000 feet in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden. A ‘veritable Black Book of liberal capitalism’ as Tariq Ali has eloquently endorsed it.

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the years 1876-1879 and 1896-1902 between 12.2 and 29.3 million died of famine in India. In the years 1876-1879 and 1896-1900 between 19.5 and 30 million died of famine in China. In the same period, an estimated 2 million died in Brazil. Famine hit these three nations the hardest, but many other nations were also affected. In the US, churches organized to send relief to hungry farmers in the Dakotas and western Kansas.

Mike Davis wrote about these famines in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. The famines occurred in regions slammed by severe drought. The droughts have been linked to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a major factor in global weather patterns.

Droughts have been common throughout history, and agricultural societies have commonly prepared for them by creating emergency reserves of stored grain. Because of political shifts in many regions, these safety nets were in poor condition during the late Victorian droughts. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution came a new mode of economic thinking that frowned on setting aside significant wealth for insurance against disaster. It was more profitable to sell the grain today, pocket the cash, and worry about tomorrow’s problems tomorrow. Peasants were expendable.

The Qing dynasty in China believed that subsistence was a human right, and it had relief management systems in place to reduce the toll of famines during drought years or floods. By the late Victorian era, conflicts with colonial powers had drained the wealth of the Qing government, so it was incapable of effectively responding to the catastrophic droughts.

Prior to the British colonization of India, the Moguls had a similar system for responding to famine. The British, on the other hand, were cruel masters (as they had been during the 1845 famine in Ireland). Food was widely available, but few could afford the inflated prices. While millions were starving, they exported Indian wheat. They outlawed donations of private relief. They forbid the Pariahs from foraging for forest foods, leading to 155,000 deaths. They created relief camps where the starving received inadequate rations, and 94 percent died. Very civilized chaps, eh?

The hungry hordes in Brazil were the victims of their own corrupt government, which had disposed of grain reserves. Brazil was not a colony of Britain, but English investors and creditors played a powerful role in the economy, turning Brazil into an “informal colony” that was kept permanently in debt.

Davis argued that the millions of deaths were largely a deliberate “holocaust” rather than a spell of bad luck, because political actions were a primary factor behind the high mortality rates. He also argued that this holocaust played a role in the creation of the Third World. In the eighteenth century, Europe did not have the highest standard of living. The biggest manufacturing districts were in India and China. Their workers ate better, had lower unemployment, and often earned more than workers in Europe. Literacy rates were higher, including women.

One of Davis’s primary objectives was to spank capitalism, colonialism, and the hideous overseers of the British Empire. There has been lively discussion in the reader feedback at Amazon, and a number of critics have questioned the way in which Davis assigned blame for the massive famines. For me, the book had important messages: (1) Droughts happen. (2) Agricultural societies are highly vulnerable to droughts. (3) Famines commonly follow droughts. (4) Famines can be horrific.

When rains ended an Indian drought in 1878, the mosquito population exploded, and hundreds of thousands of malnourished survivors died of malaria. Meanwhile, locusts gobbled up the growing young plants. Hungry peasants murdered many creditors who threatened foreclosure. Then came gangs of armed tax collectors. Hungry wild animals became very aggressive, dragging away the weak, screaming. In the Madras Deccan, “the only well-fed part of the local population were the pariah dogs, ‘fat as sheep,’ that feasted on the bodies of dead children.”

In China, the flesh of the starved was sold at markets for four cents a pound. People sold their children to buy food. Husbands ate their wives. Parents ate their children. Children ate their parents. Thousands of thieves were executed. At refugee camps, many perished from disease. If too many refugees accumulated, they were simply massacred. In some regions, relief took more than a year to arrive.

Davis’s vivid and extensive descriptions of famine times remind an increasingly obese society that we are living in a temporary and abnormal bubble of cheap and abundant calories. Importantly, he puts a human face on the consequences of climate change, a subject usually presented in purely abstract form: parts per million, degrees Celsius, and colorful computer-generated charts, graphs, and maps.

Near the end of the book, Davis gives us a big, fat, juicy discussion on the history of agriculture and ecological catastrophe in China. People who remain in denial about the inherent destructiveness of agriculture typically point to China as a glowing example of 4,000 years of happy sustainable low-impact organic farming. Wrong, wrong, wrong! This chapter provides a powerful cure for those who suffer from such embarrassing naughty fantasies.

The late Victorian droughts happened at a time when the world population was less than 1.4 billion. Today, it’s over 7 billion, and growing by 70 million per year. Cropland area per capita is shrinking, and soil health is diminishing. Energy prices are rising, and water usage for irrigation is foolishly unsustainable. We’re getting close to Peak Food. World grain production per capita peaked in 1984, at 342 kilograms per person. World grain stocks (stored grain) peaked in 1986, and have been declining since then.

On 24 July 2012, the venerable Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute published a warning in The Guardian. “The world is in serious trouble on the food front.” World grain stocks are currently “dangerously low.” “Time is running out. The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage — replete with soaring food prices, spreading food unrest, and ultimately political instability — than most people realize.”

For me, the main message of this book was a powerful warning about the huge risks of agriculture, and its insanely destructive companion, overpopulation. The famines discussed in this book were not a freak event in history. Famine has been a common, normal, periodic occurrence in virtually all agricultural societies, from the Cradle of Civilization to today.

As the collapse of industrial civilization proceeds and life slows down, opportunities to live more in balance with nature will emerge. Clever societies will carefully limit population size, and phase out their dependence on farming. Un-clever societies will continue to breed like there’s no tomorrow, beat their ecosystems to death, and hippity-hop down the Dinosaur Trail.

[Andrew]

Previous Mike Davis books showed a brilliant polemical imagination, but this is a book that manages to combine that polemical fire with a rigorous academic discourse, reinforced with reams of quantitative, demographic, and meteorological data. Certainly, Davis presents a compelling argument for how colonialism and liberal capitalism starved certain regions in particular, stoked social unrest, exacerbated social disparities, and destroyed native techniques for dealing with climactic extremes. I would like if he had drawn out how his "late Victorian holocausts" continue to impact the third world, but it's a good starting point.

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find a quote Davis includes in his preface to this book to be a good summation of the liberal worldview

"In capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms."

All liberals will eventually default to this argument if you press them hard enough.

This line of thought has always struck me as a kind of existential self preservation. Those who feel the need to slavishly defend capitalism can never truly reckon with its historical impact. Doing so would mean coming to terms with the fact you share the same ideology as the people who colonized and brutalized the world over.

[Garret Giblin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first hand accounts of catastrophic famine are truly horrifying. Davis masterfully weaves together the history of extreme el nino weather events with the age of high imperialism as intense drought and disastrous flooding combined with racist imperial policies and free market fundamentalism to create what became known as the third world. He shows that food shortages may frequently occur due to natural factors but famines represent the failures of particular economic and political systems. He lays the blame for tens of millions of deaths squarely at the feet of the great empires of the day and those who collaborated with them. As Davis sets out in the introduction: "the contemporary photographs used in this book are intended as accusations not illustrations."

[Naeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind blowing.

For example: his use of the methods of science. Drought turns into famine under British rule; drought does not turn into famine during home rule in India and China. Question: why? Answer? well read it and find out.

For example: makes you wonder if the Nazis had anything on the Brits. Why then do I celebrate London?

For example: why didn't I know about the policy driven famines in India and China?

Yes of course, we have been fed lies; lie upon lie upon lie. But we have been fed systematically. There is balance in the world, is there not? While others are starved of food, and culture, and, dignity we are fed lies and lies and lies.

[Cheryl Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Davis is a classic muckraker who does an admirable job of combining social and ecological history while debunking many Western myths about how poor countries got so poor.

He’s also an academic who includes more obtuse shout-outs to other historians and economists than I care to read. I have to admit that I skipped 13 pages of the middle section on El Niño patterns and at times wished I was reading a New Yorker-article version of this book. Still, Late Victorian Holocausts is a great counterpoint to pretty much everything you thought you knew about world history.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between 1889 to 1891, in Ethiopia and the Sudan, “perhaps one third of the population died” from famine. In the 1800’s, 12.2 to 29.3 million people in India perished during just two droughts due to starvation. All these famines were avoidable and there were grain surpluses nearby at the same time but as this book amply shows, for Britain, business spoke louder than basic moral qualms. Imagine Americans being taught that China’s Taiping Revolution of 1851-1864 was the bloodiest civil war in history and not our own and that it claimed 20 to 30 million lives. This book was great for telling you about neglected holocausts - but, maybe because of its timeline, Mike does not mention the just as important British made great famine and genocide in Persia 1917-1919, (Mohammad Gholi Majd) which forced alone on Persia (and not any western power) the greatest casualties of WWI (ten million Persians dead). Mike’s book posits that it was the exploitation of the last quarter of the 19th century that forced the Third World into its present state while Majd’s book suggests the truth might be more complex.

This book shows how markets often accelerate, rather than alleviate, famine, pain, and suffering. Picture Britons eating the bread of starving Indians during a famine, unaware of their government’s policies. Lytton puts on a feast in India for 68,000 – “the most expensive meal in world history” - while 100,000 of the Queen’s subjects brutally starved to death in nearby Mysore and Madras. Disraeli, Salisbury, and both sides of the House of Commons saw India first as a moneymaker and so the famine proceeded. There had been a British relief effort in the Nineteenth Century, but the Economist blasted the life-saving move an attempt to keep Indians lazy, as dependent of hand-outs to stay alive. Those dead by famine were recast as “parasitic mendicants who had essentially committed suicide.” This is a story of paupers in India ruthlessly and chronically getting their pockets picked by Her Majesties Government. 78% of collections were “coercive” – ah, so much for the myth of the refined British.

Picture Indian farmers scratching hardened soil with sticks, no one can pay for the food or fuel to transport anything anywhere, and humans have replaced dead draft animals in carrying goods or by hooking themselves to a remaining plow. If you saw that and started relief work in India back then, you were reprimanded and shut down. But in 1878, the famine story finally started to get out. This was now 20 years after the British tied Indians to cannons to blow them apart (the Sepoy Mutiny). Indians were taxed at double the rate of an Englishman even though they produced 1/15 the income. The rule of India was not about civilizing; it was about empire. It was about following the Benthamite principle that aid to the poor must be “bitterly” punitive to discourage dependence. The Irish Famine kills one million whites and all U.S. elementary schools mention it – the Indian Famine of 1877 wiped out a non-white population equivalent to the ENTIRE Irish population and no one ever talks about it. 5.5 million to 12 million people died in an easily preventable famine with nearby railroads and grain. Adawa (1898) was Europe’s greatest defeat in Africa. In 1888, Kodak releases a camera that any missionary could use and that changes India’s photo documentation big time.

Britain had a problem, Queen Victoria’s $$$ Diamond Jubilee was coming up and to finance it they had turn grain to cash forcing many people in India starve to get the last bits of money to pay for it. Luckily, the British at the time had no moral qualms as long as they couldn’t hear all that blasted screaming and/or moaning on a different continent and so the Jubilee was the huge success. 12 to 16 million died in what the Press called the famine of the century, but Mike says, there was a bigger famine in 1899-1902. Lytton and Curzon were famine architects. Think of Fabians as hardcore imperialists. The Lancet in 1901 said India’s Famine Death Toll under British rule was 19 million. See how well Britain treats its “possessions”? To be fair, in Xian in China, famine caused ground corpses to be sold for “the equivalent of about four cents per pound” by real life “flesh peddlers” and became an actual staple sold in meatball form. Beginning in 1899, the Americans closed off the ports of the Philippines and manipulated disease and hunger as well as their prior masters, the Brits, had done. Destroying the Philippine food economy and a nation’s basic self-sufficiency – such a laudable Christian goal was achieved there, as well as setting up the first surveillance state (Alfred McCoy). The Americans, who love freedom and liberty so much, killed off 1 out of 7 Philippine residents and began immediately surveilling the other six million (McCoy).

In the 18th century, weavers and artisans in India had better diets than their British counterparts. See how Britain ripped $ from not only India, but China and others to create the British Empire. India was forced to buy Britain’s old crap that it didn’t want any more in order to subsidize Britain’s growth. It’s called putting your capital where it has the great rate of return (of course, under the threat of violence). Britain controlled China’s domestic commerce and shipping. Opium sales paid for the “cost of imperial expansion in India”. From 1757 to 1947, under British rule, Indians saw zero increase in income, but during this books time frame, many saw an income decline of 50%. The average person in India thought English officials were there only to tax, kill or imprison them. Ah, winning hearts and minds, London-Style. Picture China as a land that developed its water transport but had long ignored its roads. Overland transport was crazy expensive, and shall we say inefficient? US War Hawks forget that the Communists won against the Nationalists partly because the Communists had long emphasized rural road building. By 1939, Africa had lost its economic independence to the world market. Another great book by Mike Davis that should be read by every British citizen, or moral carbon-based lifeform.

[Jacob Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is the historical background of the "global economy" and the distribution of wealth and power. A snapshot of who is going to suffer as global warming and rising seas bring us ever greater not-so-natural disasters. A book I wish I could persuade everyone to read.

[Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the changes in global capitalism in the late 19th century that led to the new imperialist era. Don't just read Lenin and Luxemburg, read this too. You'll want to take breaks though, it's a pretty brutal read.

[Lara Messersmith-Glavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a stellar (and readable) example of interdisciplinary historical research, Davis lays bare the skeleton underlying many of the popular conceptions regarding the nature of the "Third World" and its economies. Drawing from sources as diverse as scientific accounts of El Nino and La Nina cycles at the turn of the last century, missionary writings, accountancy notes, travelers' journals, newspaper clippings, and other exhaustive primary and secondary works, Davis describes how the British empire, along with other colonial forces, took advantage of periods of what would have been survivable drought in India, China, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Brazil, and used the circumstances of need to crush the local structures of governance and food-sharing networks and create a horror show of poverty, disease, and the starvation deaths of millions upon millions of people, while simultaneously setting the stage for a further century of economic privation and authoritarian control.

[Meiqimichelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't able to give this book a thorough read because I only had it on ILL for a few weeks, but here's my two cents:

1) The points Davis brings up about climate as an influence on history are important BUT
2) his links between cultures are weak at best. It is clear he is not a historian of China, which makes me think that the other country's sections are also weak (although without background in those other regions I can't say for sure). Additionally, there is at least one example of 'same used to prove opposite points:' he says railroads in India allowed capitalists to move grain to areas paying highest prices, thereby starving people in certain regions, yet flips this argument in China, saying that the Qing Empire caused famine because they had NOT developed a rail system! Which is it, Mr. Davis? Are railroads good or bad for capitalist roaders?

Still, I would like to get it again when I can and give it a better read.

[Peter van de Pas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars and those only because the subject matter is important. Amazingly, many people seem to be unaware of the dark sides of imperialist capitalism in the 19th century and view this book as an eye opener. In the circle I grew up in this was more or less taken for granted so this book for me is stating the obvious, in a very detailed and I must say annoying way.
What bothers me most is the writing style. Mud slinging and overblown language or not for me in the context of a non-fiction book on serious subject matter. The tendency to point at the ideological adversary for everything that is wrong in the world is all too clear here. As Amartya Sen nicely points out in his review of this book, the great famines of the 20th century took place in communist countries and this fact should give every Marxist writer some pause when pointing at Capitalism as the source of all evil.

[Jimmy Ding · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm extremely biased against non-fiction books so this isn't exactly going to be a fair review. Some of the ideas presented in the book are extremely interesting, and there are hints of the authors capability of writing something cohesive and compelling - but ultimately Late Victorian Holocausts reads like a disorganized bundle of repetitive facts.

I think the lessons made available by this book are extremely valuable but they were presented extremely suboptimally.

Endless paragraphs describing suffering, a sprinkle of interesting historical anecdotes, and some understated insights into the consequences of economic systems that remain in place today. What a waste.

[Mac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very informative, both about climate cycles and the politics of famine. Glad to know more about El Nino and La Nina, as well the huge differences between famine/drought/flood/crop failure and hunger. Davis makes a very convincing argument that Britian and capitalist ideology were behind some of the largest famines in history. That said, defending Mao's incompetence in the great famine of the 50s is a little uncalled for...

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

In case you've been wondering why the Indians wanted to boot out the British...A fascinating read, would have finished it but I was only a houseguest for the weekend, plus Davis's writing is a bit dense and academic.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most difficult, yet enlightening books I’ve ever read.

[Kaleb Wulf · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

The first Mike Davis book I've read and the sheer amount of research and sources in this was daunting. One minor gripe about the structure before getting into some takeaways. It frustrated me to no end that he began with the events of the major droughts before explaining the El Nino climate cycle and the political ecology of the regions. I understand beginning with the gravity and seriousness of these events, but jumping around in the timeline just kept messing with me.

This work is jam packed with analysis of late 1800's famines in India, China, and Brazil with a focus on the economic dogma enforced that led to mass death. I'll spare the grisly detail, but an estimated 45 million died. The Malthusian interpretation at the time was that the populations of the global South had overextended to unsustainable levels. David points to a relatively stable population growth in the regions in the preceding 200 years that would lead us to look elsewhere. The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) that leads to relatively predictable drought seasons had been managed effectively in both India and China for 100s of years before, either by the Qing developing whole infrastructures for grain stores to be systematically distributed in the event of drought, or in India where water and manure being freely distributed goods which the poorest of society depended upon.

The colonial causes of the famines are different depending on the region effected, but they can all be explained under the umbrella of slow advancing economies into the developing worlds. In the British Raj, grains were sold out of the country at low cost, draining reserves for years before each famine. When grain prices skyrocket in response to economic conditions (and the Panic of 1873 crashed the European economy) peasants producing the grain had no money to pay for anything in return. In the Qing Empire, years of colonial and civil war (Opium Wars, Taiping Rebellion, Muslim Rebellion) left the government sclerotic and focused on military rule over infrastructure management. Mass clearing of forests to grow cash crops led to central and northern China suffering SEVENTEEN consecutive years of flooding, killing a million people alone, an event so cataclysmic the route of the Yellow River permanently redirected from south to east, where it lays today.

This is only a small portion of the book, but holy shit is there so much in here. Political ecology is only going to become a more prevalent study in the coming years and scientists believe climate change is only going to intensify ENSO climate patterns. Highly recommended reading in order to understand that climate casualties are just as much a result of poor planning and political choices than any environmental anomaly