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

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

4.01 of 5 stars 4.01 · rating details · 341 ratings · 48 reviews

Examining a
series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned
around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis
discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance
and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst
tragedies in human history.

Late Victorian Holocausts
focuses on three zones of drought and subseq...more

Paperback, 464 pages

Published June 17th 2002 by Verso (first published November 19th 2000)

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Dec 28, 2007 Jessica rated it 5 of 5 stars

Mike Davis actually muscled his way into a scientific conference in Denver for this one, to get the facts concerning El Niño right. Those I know who were there remember him as the intense outsider dude who kept asking questions. Since my dissertation is on tropical climate dynamics, you can imagine that I seriously like this book. In this work, Mike Davis outlines how climate and colonialism work together to make history, to give rise the modern condition that we know as "the third world." This...more

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Jan 08, 2009 Cheryl Klein rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

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...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Dan Allosso rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

This is a scary book. The genocidal imperialists in this story are the British (and briefly, the Americans in the Philippines), but dial the clock ahead a hundred years and it’s all us. Seriously. Davis begins his story with a description of ex-president Ulysses Grant’s “family vacation” around the world. As the hero of the Civil War sailed from feast to banquet, a copy of Innocent’s Abroad in his lap (I wonder if this is documented, or if it was just an anecdote that was too ironic to pass up?)...more This is a scary book. The genocidal imperialists in this story are the British (and briefly, the Americans in the Philippines), but dial the clock ahead a hundred years and it’s all us. Seriously. Davis begins his story with a description of ex-president Ulysses Grant’s “family vacation” around the world. As the hero of the Civil War sailed from feast to banquet, a copy of Innocent’s Abroad in his lap (I wonder if this is documented, or if it was just an anecdote that was too ironic to pass up?), the world was in the grip of a climatic event of global proportions. The late-1870s famine was the first of a series of three that together killed more than 50 million people. Davis argues that these deaths, however, were not due to natural disaster, but to political choices made before, during, and after the droughts and crop failures occurred.

One of the main points Davis makes in Late Victorian Holocausts is that “We are not dealing…with ‘lands of famine’ becalmed in the stagnant backwaters of world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment (1870-1914) when its labor and products were being…forcibly incorporated into [the British Empire’s] economic and political structures.” (9) This is an important point, because even today well-meaning writers publish sympathetic articles that perpetuate the myth that “Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India’s ancient story.” Actually, says Davis, “India and China…did not enter modern history as the helpless ‘lands of famine’ so universally enshrined in the Western imagination.” (287) An 1878 study in the Journal of the Statistical Society “contrasted thirty-one serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia.” Similarly, China had a ridiculously long history of successful state and local famine relief. And the two nations were economically competitive. “The looms of India and China,” Davis says “were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium, and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs.” Although it has been forgotten by history, “The use of force to configure a ‘liberal’ world economy…is what Pax Britannica was really about.” (295)

And it really does seem to be the fault of history (that is, historians). Because a lot of this was known at the time, at least among radicals and socialists who opposed the British government’s imperial policies. Davis refers several times to Henry Hyndman’s speeches and articles, and to radical journalist William Digby’s chronicle of the 1876 Madras famine. “If Kipling’s verse exalted colonizing optimism and scientific racism, Conrad’s troubling stories warned that Europe itself was being barbarized by its complicity in secret tropical holocausts.” (140) Even “Cosmopolitan pointedly published photographs of famine victims from the Central Provinces next to an illustration of a great monument erected to Queen Victoria.” (157) It was clear that at least some contemporaries saw “mass starvation as avoidable political tragedy, not ‘natural’ disaster.” The elimination of these perspectives from history supports Davis’ claim that “the great famines are the missing pages — the absent defining moments, if you prefer — in virtually every overview of the Victorian era.” (8)

Throughout his story of these horrific famines (in which parents regularly sold and sometimes ate their children), Davis calls attention to the fact that food surpluses existed close at hand, and that previous systems of social organization had been much more effective at mobilizing these surpluses to avert starvation. The difference under British rule was the “theology” of capitalism, which idealized free markets even while it encouraged speculation and hoarding. “Millions die,” Davis concludes, “was ultimately a policy choice.” (11)

“Although crop failures and water shortages were of epic proportion…there were almost always grain surpluses elsewhere in the nation or empire that could have potentially rescued drought victims.” Sound familiar? But it wasn’t just ignorance or lack of concern for the colonized people, Davis suggests. “Each global drought,” he says, “was the green light for an imperialist landrush.” (12) Although Late Victorian Holocausts includes a detailed scientific account of our emerging understanding of ENSO cycles, the real power of the book is in Davis’ identification of the link between “social vulnerability” and “climate variability.” (288) “There is compelling evidence,” Davis quotes Prasannan Parthasarathi, “that South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the eighteenth century and lived lives of greater financial security…enjoyed better diets…possessed superior rights of contract and exercised more economic power.” (292) The changes over time that eliminated these eastern advantages need to be examined. And not just for the British—Americans benefited. “Opium shipments from India [to China] reached a peak of 87,000 chests in 1879, the biggest drug transaction in world history.” (300) The deliberate addiction of millions of Chinese to opiates by the British not only impoverished the Chinese economy (and coincidentally, even darling of the Neoliberals, Hans Rosling, admits a causal connection between social insecurity and high birth rates that might help explain the Chinese population boom), but “enabled Britain to sustain her deficits with the United States and Europe on which those countries depended for export stimulus and, in the case of the United States, capital inflow.” (Quoting A.J.H. Latham 1978, 359)(less)

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Dec 24, 2010 Hafsa rated it 4 of 5 stars

In Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, Mike Davis casts a wide net by doing a cross-global history of the devastating famines and natural disasters that effected significant portions of the world in the late 19th century. In doing so, he places the blame on the European powers in using these famines to strengthen their colonial rule, eventually leading to underdevelopment which caused the creation of the Third World. I was impressed with the amount of wo...more

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Jun 10, 2009 Lara rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: climate-change-study-group, earth, heart-breaking, politics

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,...more

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Jun 07, 2012 Marci rated it 5 of 5 stars

Late Victorian Holocausts is a disturbing but fascinating slice of environmental history during the late 1800s. If you can get through the very descriptive first half about famines and the exploitations of colonialism in India, China, and Brazil, Davis' theoretical contributions on the co-production of globalization and environmental degradation are thought-provoking. He argues that while El Nino climatic cycles in the late 1800s were the proximate cause of agricultural losses, that long-term so...more

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Aug 07, 2009 Jim Collins rated it 1 of 5 stars

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 h...more

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Jan 10, 2011 Jacob Russell rated it 5 of 5 stars

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.

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Nov 11, 2010 John rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is filled with interesting information, but it is sort of schizophrenic. It could be an environmental history, or an economic history, or a history of colonialism, or a history of famine. It seems like an environmental history, and Davis spends a lot of time explaining El Nino and how it works, and why it caused these worldwide droughts and food shortages, but really that doesn't have a lot to do with his main point, which is that Britain played a major role in causing these famines an...more

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Mar 17, 2010 Evan Fraser rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone interested in how climate shapes society.

As the other reviewers note, this is an extrodinary book that shows how murderous colonial policy and climate variability unleashed a tide of suffering across what we sometimes call the developing world.

What is also worth highlighting is that the late Victorian period may be a parable for the modern world. Both then and today share a number of striking similarities: (1) the rapid expansion of global markets; (2) the rapid expansion of shipping / communications technology; (3) lopsided trade agr...more

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Feb 12, 2013 Samantha rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was a thorough and illuminating book, illustrating what many of us already know: that famines do not "just" happen. They are not caused by natural disasters alone. There is much here about El Nino itself, the weather system that changes weather patterns across much of the world but can cause devastating anomalies in monsoon-dependent areas, as in India. But the crucial focus is on the human causes of the famines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in India, China, and Br...more

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Oct 16, 2011 sologdin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

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 not...more 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).(less)

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Jan 27, 2010 AJ rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: do-not-own, nonfiction, 2010

2.5 stars

Some books I've read have great messages and would be absolutely wonderful if they were distilled down to about half the number of pages that they actually are. This is one of those books. Not only does the author repeat himself endlessly, his language is nearly inaccessible and I found myself reading this like a textbook... getting through a paragraph and then realizing I was daydreaming, and then re-reading the paragraph, over and over again. Not exactly a fun read. I entirely skipped...more

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May 09, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

Examining a
series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned
around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis
discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance
and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst
tragedies in human history.

Late Victorian Holocausts
focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India,
Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same
global climatic factors that caused...more

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Jan 25, 2010 Meiqimichelle rated it 2 of 5 stars

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...more

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Apr 28, 2009 Andrew rated it 3 of 5 stars

I can't really say I "liked" this book, since it is terrifying and depressing. This book gives pretty graphic historical description of famines from the end of the 19th century. Davis argues pretty well, in my opinion, that famines are not caused by natural disasters but are economic and political problems that can be prevented. The book is a taxing read emotionally, but is a serious eye opener in how the "third world" got the way it is.

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May 08, 2012 Missclark REteacher rated it 4 of 5 stars

Brilliant book combining issues related to climate and culture. The Chapter about Canudos, a city in the State of Bahia, NE of Brazil, is absolutely great, explains how the messianic charismatic religious leader Antonio Conselheiro became a fundamental player on the local struggle for survival and how it was transformed in a major political movement in Brazil in the beginning of the 20th century. A must-read!

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Aug 18, 2012 Sarah Beth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Sarah Beth by: Heems

Shelves: nonfiction

Steaming up the Nile, with a well-thumbed copy of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad on his lap, [Ulysses S.] Grant was bemused to be welcomed in village after village as the "King of America." He spent quiet afternoons on the river reminiscing about the bloody road from Vicksburg to Appomattox

I knew colonialism was hell. But I didn't know the extent of the hellishness. Capitalists really do get you when you're down.

Note: I recommend parts I and II to everyone, but III and IV can be mind-numbingly bo...more

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Jun 02, 2007 Jawrsh rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"City of Quartz" was wonderful, dense and disturbing; "Late Victorian Holocausts" is profoundly fucked up. Davis essentially maps out the casualties caused by various colonial states during the latter half of the nineteenth century, specifically comparing living conditions in various areas before and after the establishment of colonial rule. Most of the man's books are polemical, and this is no exception, but as usual there are reasons to be pissed, and Davis's impeccable writing, research and u...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Jason rated it 5 of 5 stars

An utterly satisfying Marxish multidisciplinary history of famines, drought, and the capitalistic system which doomed millions to their death during the late 19th century. Cheery stuff with lots of harrowing photographs.

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Oct 15, 2010 Ross rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: economics, history, india, did-not-finish, 19th-century

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.

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Sep 29, 2011 Daniel Burton-Rose rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is an ambitious book, but it's also the first one where Davis' limits became evident to me (i.e., he can't know the whole world with the intimacy he knows the West Coast, though he's certainly tried!).

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Apr 10, 2009 Carol rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you, like most people, have never heard of the enormous famines that struck India and China in the late 1800's you owe it to yourself to read this. It's not pretty, but essential history reading.

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Jul 13, 2008 Tara rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: more

This is the 19th century prelude to Planet of Slums. Davis disrupts the specter of Asian or Third World poverty as that which always has been and always will be, with a hard historical analysis of British Imperialism and market economics and culture. Though Davis looks at the Philippines, China and Brazil, he spends a lot of time on India and British policies that created massive famine and caused millions of deaths. Food produced for the market and not local consumption meant that many had no f...more

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Aug 05, 2007 Naeem rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 system...more

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Nov 29, 2010 lyell bark rated it 5 of 5 stars

i knew some of the historical stuff in this book but not all of it + all the cool climatology facts made for a nice package. riyl sweating, shallow breathing, feeling bad.

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May 14, 2008 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is essential reading for understanding the true nature of colonial regimes that pushed the development model that holds sway on most of the planet (i.e. steal everything that's not nailed down and blame the locals for all the problems which ensue).

Davis's range of references is staggering, as is his command of too many disciplines. This book is packed with incredible historical information (and more data than you can shake a large tree at) and well worth reading.

It's an important book...more

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Jul 30, 2011 Cora rated it 3 of 5 stars

You cannot disagree with his arguments.
Makes you wanna go on hungerstrike.
"The conquest of the earth ... is not a pretty thing ... " truth to that.

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Mar 25, 2007 Adrian rated it 3 of 5 stars

A massively informed but quite boring book about an aspect of colonial history that has received little attention. The author documents how changing weather patterns combined with human incompetence, racism and indifference lead to the deaths of millions of people. The book drags quite a lot in those sections where the author goes into the technical details of how El Nino works and how it created famine conditions. The story of the famines and the suffering they engendered are horrifying and hea...more

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May 27, 2011 Ian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: environmental-history

Lacks some depth, but makes several important and controversial arguments about the nature of "natural" disasters.

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