From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Fri Dec 31 2004 - 13:16:11 EST
Building on accounts from the first part of the book, Davis
addresses this question by pointing to Silent Violence by Michael
Watts and planting himself firmly in the political ecology camp. "I
argue that ecological poverty-defined as the depletion or loss of
entitlement to the natural resource base of traditional
agriculture-constituted a casual triangle with increasing household
poverty and state decapitation in explaining both the emergence of a
'third-world' and its vulnerability to extreme climate events."
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/14.4/br_11.html
From the Journal of World History Vol. 14, Issue 4.
Viewed December 31, 2004 12:15 EST
Presented online in association with the History Cooperative.
http://www.historycooperative.org
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Book Review
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Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the
Third World. By MIKE DAVIS. London: Verso Books, 2001. x + 464 pp.
$27.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).
While writing Ecology of Fear about natural and political
disasters in Los Angeles, maverick historian Mike Davis stumbled
across a reference to famines in Asia that were related to El Niño
(ENSO) weather patterns. Researching further in both scientific and
humanities literature, Davis began to unravel a relationship between
the El Niño phenomenon, climate change, capitalism, imperialism, and
global famines during the last thirty years of the nineteenth
century. Following the footprints of concomitant famines in India and
China, Davis began searching for other food shortages during this
time. The results were staggering. As the body count of famine
victims mounted into the tens of millions in India, China, Brazil,
Egypt, South Africa, Korea, New Caledonia, and so on, Davis knew that
he was on to one of the "darkest secrets of the Victorian Age."
Between thirty and fifty million people perished and a new,
disturbing division of wealth was created: the so-called "developed"
and "undeveloped" or "third" worlds. 1
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of
the Third World paints a haunting and sweeping portrait of these
human-made famines and the making of these global class divisions.
The book begins with a colorful narrative about Ulysses S. Grant's
bobbling and glutinous sojourn around the world in 1877. Citing
reports of the New York Herald's journalist John Russell Young, Davis
notes that from the Nile to Bombay to Beijing, everywhere the Grants
"supped" they stumbled upon famines. 2
From there Davis launches into the first two quarters of the
book and spotlights famines in India, China, and Brazil. In each
case, he illustrates how laissez-faire capitalists, colonial
officers, and corrupt local administrators often took advantage of El
Niño-induced droughts and floods by using maxim guns, railroads, the
telegraph, and policies of the New Imperialism to wrench what they
could from the producing populations of the Deccan, Yellow River
Basin, and Sertao, most notably. Armed with an eye for paradox and a
penchant for hard-hitting accounts, Davis delivers a gruesome and
compelling rendering of three separate but interrelated global
famines in 1877-1878, 1888-1891, and 1896-1902. Skeletanization sets
in on human bodies, but dogs and wolves fatten up on the corpses;
women and children are sold and served in markets for their flesh;
cannibalism and suicide are commonplace. Among the most egregious
atrocities committed during these famines were the actions of Lord
Lytton, one of Queen Victoria's favorite poets and later viceroy of
India. From Calcutta, Lytton went out of his way to ensure that
famine relief programs were effectively curbed and sabotaged, for
example, because they interfered with the "economic laws" of Adam
Smith. Lytton graces the front cover of the book with Indian servants
at his side. Beneath Lytton, emaciated famine victims from India pose
for an awkward photo shoot. Why the grim juxtaposition? Davis writes
that the "photographs used in this book are accusations [of
capitalist market induced holocausts] and not illustrations." Local
populations were not mere victims, however. He takes painstaking care
to show how populations resisted these "London-centered" market
policies, from local food and medical relief efforts to small riots
to "millenarian revolutions," such as the 1897 War of Canudos in
Brazil where "tens of thousands of humble followers of Antonio
Conselheiro" were massacred. 3
Following the "standard" historical narrative, Davis then
progresses into the third section: an elaborate discussion of the
scientific understanding of ENSO, monsoons, meteorology, and climate
change. Charting the intellectual history of how scientists came to
understand this weather pattern with sections such as "Sunspots
versus Socialists," Davis argues that nature should not be "blamed"
for these disasters; to do so would echo "the official line of the
British in Victorian India as recapitulated in every famine
commission report and vice-regal allocution: millions were killed by
extreme weather, not imperialism. Was this true?" 4
Building on accounts from the first part of the book, Davis
addresses this question by pointing to Silent Violence by Michael
Watts and planting himself firmly in the political ecology camp. "I
argue that ecological poverty-defined as the depletion or loss of
entitlement to the natural resource base of traditional
agriculture-constituted a casual triangle with increasing household
poverty and state decapitation in explaining both the emergence of a
'third-world' and its vulnerability to extreme climate events." The
last three closing chapters return to India, China, and Brazil and
highlight how strong-arm tactics were used to secure land to grow
cotton and wheat, for example, and how localized production power was
slowly eroded. "The looms of India and China 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."
Both population pressures and displacement from export crops pushed
increasing numbers of people onto less productive soils that were
vulnerable to ENSO climate cycles -improvements in irrigation,
drainage, or reforestation were not implanted to ensure
sustainability. 5
Trained in American history at UCLA and labor history at
Edinburgh University, Davis considers himself a
"Marxist-Environmentalist, not an Environmentalist-Marxist." This
work embodies his passion to bring together the intellectual concepts
of Rosa Luxembourg, the French Regulationist School, Ferdinand
Braudel, and Kenneth Pomeranz, Davis told me in a personal
conversation. He humbly added, "I didn't get it right." Historians of
China, India, and Brazil and elsewhere may find much to quibble about
and point out what Davis "did not get right." However, there is no
dismissing the importance of this work in terms of its refreshing and
brilliant synthesis and explanation of global climate and global
politics. Given the scope and synthesis of this book and the
contemporary tenor of globalization, Late Victorian Holocausts may
come to serve as a mantle work for graduate education in world and
environmental history as well as a host of other holistic disciplines
for decades to come. 6
CHRISTOPHER COTTRELL
University of Hawai'i at Mnoa
------------------------------------------------------------------------
©2003 The University of Hawaii Press
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