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Late Victorian Holocausts

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The Annual Book Award Committee of the World History Association is pleased to announce that Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts has won its 2002 prize, because it synthesizes scientific and historical data into a highly readable, well-documented and well-researched study of the interplay between the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and global political and economic imperialism in the late 19th century. It thus makes a very significant contribution to transregional history in a way that will and should reach a wider audience than academic historians.

Marxists are routinely (and not surprisingly) confronted with the effects of their acts and theories. Yet the market system is never confronted with the facts of the case, nor are these allowed to impinge with any critique of ideology. Anyone with reveries intact here should read this book, a very well done account of the interaction of global climate (the El Nino phenomenon in action, by hypothesis), colonialism, and imperialism. A sort of Black Book of capitalism. Add fifty million to King Leopold's ten and we are not far short of the Bolshevik world record. The vignettes and detail here are excellent, a gripping tour into archival amnesia.

Late Victorian Holocausts is a double investigation, first of the role played by ENSO, the El Nino Southern Oscillation which affects much of the world's weather in the devastating famines which marked the late nineteenth century, and secondly of the role European (primarily British) imperialism took in deepening those famines. Thus part of the book is a scientific study of ENSO, while the rest is a chronicle of the horrendous suffering in India, China, and Brazil. Even if you are familiar with the typical nineteenth century European Social Darwinist free trader ideology, the callousness of the attitudes of British viceroys and plentipotentiaries towards the suffering Indian and Chinese peasants is breathtaking. Similarly, the arrogant disregard of the sufferings of the Brazilians by their government is beyond belief.

In contrast with the insouciance of the Europeans when faced with disaster, Davis provides some fascinating information proving that earlier famines in India and China before imperialism weakened their societies were dealt with swiftly and humanely, with a fine regard for easing suffering and preserving human life.

The most important message of this book is that much of today's Third World is the direct result of natural disaster augmented by human indifference.

There have been droughts and other major agricultural
failures in China, India, and Africa for millennium,
but the accompanying mass starvations and ecological
catastrophes that we tend to associate with these
regions did not start occurring in earnest until
the British Empire imposed its 'free' market discipline
on these societies using the end of the barrel of
a gun as their means of persuasion.

Who shaped the glass through which most of us
unconsciously consider India, China, and Africa?
19th century Brits. Their strategy was simple:
paint them as ignorant, progress-resisting savages,
then rob them blind and, when they starve by the millions,
as they also did in conquered Ireland, tell the
world it can't be helped.

The episodes Davis writes about are in many ways still ongoing
because the pattern of ecological mismanagement and social
disintegration set off by the British in these regions has become the 'modern' norm. We're just one shift in the weather from even larger catastrophes.

Mike Davis has fired the opening shot of the 21st century: imperialists stand accused of murdering tens of millions. In one magnificent book Davis blasts to pieces the notion that "free trade" existed or will liberate the 3rd World. Far more serious, though, is Davis' charge that imperialists __made__ the 3rd World.

Indeed, Davis documents the extraction of wealth from India, China, Brazil, and Egypt; showing how each was reduced to a mere skeleton, and how even their marrows were sucked dry.

In times of drought, Britain actually _increased_ taxation and food exports from famine stricken India. He then proves that British imperialists were well aware of the famine, and allowed the policies to continue. Worse still, they offered food relief only in exchange for hard labor, at a caloric ratio slightly worse than that of the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald. By British estimates roughly 20 million Indians died, while their colonial masters spouted racist mantras.

In other measures the British merely fostered a devasting blight of globalization, unaware of its cruel consequences. Yet Davis shows that the British mission to "civilize" India curtailed Indian economic growth: Indian incomes were frozen for 300 years, while the British boasted about railroads, telegraphs, and other trinkets of technology ('gifts' which helped the Empire rule and rob India).

The book is weakest in its discussions of China and Brazil. One might be served well by reading just his chapters on India.

Davis' book shatters the currently relentless propaganda about growth, development, and free trade, and raises serious questions for the 21st century. The book is nothing short of a masterpiece, and deserves a suitably large audience.

The author makes a good argument that millions of people from India and China died as a result of uncaring policies developed by the British during El Ninos in the nineteenth century. I would have preferred that the author spend less time on British policies and more time on the nature of El Ninos.

An extraordinary exercise in erudition. The breadth of Davis's scholarship to put this picture together is amazing. From his synthesis of meteorological science, historical geography and history over five continents Davis prosecutes the case of mass murder against the British ruling class. The callousness of the British rulers of India, (& the racism which underpinned it) extracting their surplus to keep themselves supreme in world finance which sentenced 10s of millions to death from famine and its aftermath are horrifying. British rule in India and the great powers' intervention in China, Davis argues are the origins of third world underdevelopment and mass poverty.
Davis's account is overwhelmingly convincing but the real sting is the similarity of the behaviour he depicts to the ruthlessness of the G8 and their determination to impose their "free trade" on the rest of the world through the WTO. Today's great powers care no more about mass starvation, death from disease and institutionalised poverty resulting from their detemrination to dominate world trade than the Bristish in India. And they will raise the same arguments about the poor's lack of initiative and self reliance and the demoralising effect of welfare as the British in India. Read this book and know how the future will unfold if we do not resist it.

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

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

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

In this extraordinary book, Davis studies the effects of the 1876-79, 1889-91 and 1896-1902 famines on the southern hemisphere, particularly India, China and Brazil. He estimates that the famines killed perhaps 50 million people in Asia alone. The causes were disruptions - El Ninos - of the global climatic system, which have occurred throughout history. The trend is towards more frequent and more destructive events.

Responding to famines in pre-British India, its Moghul rulers embargoed food exports, regulated prices, distributed food for free, and relaxed tax collection. Similarly in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Chinese state managed effective famine relief and flood control systems. But the British state's occupation of India and its Opium and Arrow wars against China destroyed all these systems.

Britain's rulers took advantage of the disasters to fasten their grip even more tightly on both their formal and informal empires. They used the Indian Famine Fund to pay for their imperial wars. During the famines, they allowed merchants to export grain reserves, ended free food distribution, and maintained, or even increased, tax collection.

Viceroy Curzon said, "any Government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralised the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime." The 1901 Famine Commission Report ludicrously said, "the relief distributed was excessive." The Irish called it 'famine political economy'. But there was no such parsimony in raising a War Fund for the attack on the Boers, nor in the millions spent on Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee ceremonies.

From 1757 to 1947, India's per capita income failed to improve. In the last half of the 19th century, India's income fell by 50%; life expectancy fell by 20% between 1872 and 1921; the population hardly grew. There were 17 serious famines in the 2000 years before British rule, but 31 in the 120 years of British rule. Empire, not Asia's 'immemorial' traditions, or overpopulation, kept India poor. Today, different imperial powers, the USA and the EU, seek to take advantage of the disasters that recent El Ninos have caused.

From the substantive topics of LATE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUSTS, namely El Nino induced droughts and famines that brought on agricultural collapse and socioeconomic disintegration in the tropics, there can be no doubting that the real subject of this book is misery. It's presented here in such a well reasoned, thought provoking, and professional way that we don't notice how deeply we've dived into the miasma before we are too far gone and by then we can't put the book down.

To put misery into context consider that between 1876 and 1900 there were a series of El Nino events that Mr Davis estimates caused between 32 to 61 million deaths in China, India and Brazil. It was not all climatalogical (i.e floods and droughts), but also diseases such as malaria, smallpox, dysentry, and cholera. Mr Davis, in building the theoretical underpinnings for his book posits two explanations:

(1) These societies had pre-existing agricultural and social systems that were capable of ameliorating the effects of the natural disasters. To the extent that the systems were now failing in the late Victorian era, Mr Davis traces this to the policies adopted by the governments of imperial China, colonial India, and Brazil. In short the trade, finance and economic practices of Europe, Britain and America, had, - long before it became a buzz-word - effectively achieved globalization.

(2) This is not to say that Third World poverty is solely a result of imperialism. It is not, and that isn't Mr Davis' argument. It is instead, he says, an issue of "political ecology." This concept as developed by Mr Davis interestingly shows how individual actions are ultimately the principal causes but also how intricately they are linked to geopolitical factors.

In summary Mr Davis seems to be saying that neither the market (or the lack thereof), nor government influence, are solely sufficient in explaining the Third World. Political ecology offers a holistic approach and sees the individual as responsible, but with a nod to the influence of geopolitics. The political element of the equation is all the more important when you realize that in the the Third World, poor also means, poor in power.