Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World in War Nerd Reading List

Jul 21, 2023 Paul added it

Shelves: falun-jimmy

good book 👍

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Oct 31, 2021 Rashid Yasin rated it really liked it

Shelves: political-economy, history

It's hard to summarize such a broad-reaching book in a review. This is both to the credit and detriment of the book as a whole: there is no singular thesis because the world is complicated and history is multi-layered and geographically diverse. But despite or maybe because of its range, this is truly a marvelous and exceptional work that lays out some of the important historical factors that characterized the colonial era and set the foundation for the modern era and the division between poor t It's hard to summarize such a broad-reaching book in a review. This is both to the credit and detriment of the book as a whole: there is no singular thesis because the world is complicated and history is multi-layered and geographically diverse. But despite or maybe because of its range, this is truly a marvelous and exceptional work that lays out some of the important historical factors that characterized the colonial era and set the foundation for the modern era and the division between poor third world countries (the colonized) and rich first world countries (the colonizers).

In lieu of a summary, here are some vignettes that I found important/interesting:
The industrial revolution in Britain was largely financed by China. Due to the opium wars, gold was routed through India, draining Chinese coffers due to the massive trade deficit forced upon them. In turn, colonial India sent this wealth to Britain in exchange for the manufactured goods of the industrial revolution, not being allowed to move up the industrial ladder themselves due to the dynamics of colonialism. In the 18th century, both India and China were on par or surpassed Britain in terms of economic output/technological development, but in the following 200 years, there was no net growth due to the ravages of the colonial machine.

What does all that have to do with the title? Well, the weakness of the Chinese state and the implementation of British rule over India played a huge part in the deaths of tens of millions of colonized people across the globe during the eponymous "Victorian Holocausts" caused by drought and famine. While, as I'll go into a bit below, these drought-induced famines have a natural component, Davis makes the strong argument that their intensity and impact are crucially linked to colonialism and political decisions. Following in the analysis of Amartya Sen who noted the political nature of famine, Davis highlights how areas of India that had better connection to train networks suffered *more* during these famines and how the famines in the 18th century had their damages mitigated by effective governance and redistribution of grain whereas the 19th century, colonial famines were characterized by governmental indifference and exacerbation of natural drought cycles due to a prioritzation of cash crops and squeezing money in the short term at the expense of water infrastructure development and soil health. In varying patterns across the colonized world, the rent-seeking behavior of colonial regimes or local landlords paying taxes to colonial regimes required squeezing more and more money out of poor farmers. These farmers, pushed to the brink in good years, were forced off their lands and into debt in bad years, resulting in landless and desperate strata of people. These marginalized classes couldn't invest in long-term soil health and farming infrastructure and were often pushed out of subsistence farming as they were reduced to taking farms on marginal soil that wouldn't support them. So the only option left is to turn food-producing land into cash-crop land and selling those crops for money to then buy the food required to survive. Farming is meant to be conservative because there are good years and bad years and bad years require a buffer. But this buffer was erased by colonial logic.

The result of all these factors is a horrible case of dying off of tens of millions of people at the end of the 19th century. These holocausts are awe-inspiring in their scope and not events I was familiar with before reading this book. I found the first half of the book slow to get through because Davis is very clear-eyed about the horror of these events and the horrendous situations so many people found themselves in, unable to provide for themselves and their families. These famines, were also accompanied by migration, disease, and social unrest in various forms. Again, Davis highlights particular examples mainly from Brazil, India, and China.

At the end of the book, he spends a large section talking about the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) that is part of the root cause of many of these droughts. Ocean currents have various stable patterns, one of which is the El Nino pattern that, when "strong" causes excess rains in portions of the world and drought in others. La Nina patterns rest at the other end of the spectrum and have similar effects, but are often reversed in which ares of the world see more or less rain. Davis, as meticulous as he is elsewhere in the book, describes in detail the current understanding of the phenomenon as well as the history of how the scientific community was able to understand its intricacies over many decades and the correlation between this phenomenon and various droughts and floods. He also explains the interplay between macro climatic effects like ENSO and various smaller micro-climatic effects that may lead to local differences between the effects of a particular year inside a given country. The book didn't need to go into as much depth as it does, but it give a clearer foundation to everything happening elsewhere in the pages.

At the end, the reader is left with a tremendous amount of new information in surprising depth about famine and the colonial era. It's hard to feel the "shape" of it because there are so many details about events from different perspectives: political, social, religious, environmental, agricultural. I think some of this could be told in a clearer manner, which is really the only downside to this tome. I almost laughed at the end of the book since it has literally no conclusion. The last chapter is on Brazil, analyzing the events talked about earlier in the book from a higher level political lens than some of the earlier focus on specific events and then the book is just...over. The overall organization of the book is also hard to capture: it's important to set the scene with "what happened", but the book shifts back and forth between historical acccounts, analysis of historical trends, and specific histories of specific countries. The logical flow of all the information could be improved. But despite that, it's still an important and illuminating resource. ...more

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Nov 26, 2020 Ezra rated it it was amazing

Very informative. I had no idea of the extent of the excess deaths caused by (mostly) European empires in the 19th century. While the famines were a consequence of the El Niño droughts and their mirror, the La Niña floods, the number of deaths would have been orders of magnitude lower. A proper plan would have perhaps brought excess deaths to "only" 1% of the population instead of the 30, 50, or 70 percent death rates that happened in many areas. And that's not even going into the lack of prepar ...more

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