A disturbing and painful portrayal of the 'high-noon' of Victorian imperialism.

It's insane that these famines are (still!) not treated as key parts of 19th-century world history. An absolutely essential counterpoint to basically all histories of the British Empire, most of which retain a jarring and delusional optimism about John Bull's role in the world.

An excellent book on a part of colonial English history that is rarely discussed. It describes how a combination of free market economics and what can only be described as Imperial neglect led to the deaths of millions in India (China and Brazil), after the occurrence of droughts triggered by the El Nino effect. A depressing but eye opening read.

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.

This was a very dense read, though for me that's prob attributable to a lack of familiarity with the 19th century histories of the regions featured (E,S, SE Asia + Brazil). Davis does an incredible job of weaving together the history of European imperialism in these areas with the impact of El Niño and La Ninã on their respective climates in the last quarter of the 19th century/the Victorian era, as well as the discovery of those climate phenomena as a result of the British empire's standardization of simultaneous climate readings across regions. I found it really informative re: political forces involved in climate catastrophe and seemingly 'natural' causes of mass death, and especially as a refutation of common clearly racist historical narratives tying it to intrinsic inferiority of societies we associate with the 'third world'.

The first like, half? of the book is just a brutal march of back-to-back tragedies generally structured like this:

1. Pre-colonization: local and regional infrastructure is somewhat successful at supporting the basic needs of the population in times of climate stress; centralized government plans for drought relief with stored resources, region A diverts resources to region B if region B suffers disaster, etc.

2. enter European colonization, decoupling of agricultural infrastructure from the needs of the immediate population in favor of Entering and Responding To the World Market, focus on cash crops, investment in further colonial expansion and war

3. El Niño hits and Cartoonishly, Horrifically high numbers of people die because like 50% of their country's budget is going to Imperial Military Activities and 80% of their food is going to Europe/ basic needs have become ridiculously expensive on the global market (dramatically simplified); mass starvation occurs and begets violent social instability as well as disease and predation by wildlife. Davis includes a number of photographs with each story which he describes as accusations, not illustrations

"During the terrible winter of 1900-01, an army of more than 300,000 starving refugees had been encamped outside the city walls. The provincial governor, frightened by the bread riots and other omens of a peasant uprising, had locked the gates. Reduced to rags and without fuel for fires, the desperate refugees tried to escape the icy Siberian winds by burrowing deep into the loess embankments and hillsides. With the imperial granaries long emptied, this human rodent colony subsisted for a short time on coarse grass, weeds and roof thatch. Before long, however, the survivors were living off the bodies of the dead. By-and-by human flesh began to be sold in the suburbs of Sian. At first the traffic was carried on clandestinely, but after a time a horrible kind of meat ball, made from the bodies of human beings who had died of hunger, became a staple of food, that was sold for the equivalent of about four American cents a pound. The festival of death and cannibalism outside the walls of Xian, related to Nichols by officials who had been powerless to relive the calamity, was the macabre culmination of the crisis that had begun in 1897 with drought in North China and the German occupation of Jiaozhou Bay on the Shangdon Peninsula."

4. European colonizers refuse aid, claim that mortality numbers are inflated, condition rations on hard labor and far travel, guard hoarded food with armed militants, and generally disregard the humanity of those dying.

"The Gujarati is a soft man, unused to privation, accustomed to earn his good food easily. In the hot weather he seldom worked at all and at no time did he form the habit of continuous labor. Large classes are believed by close observers to be constitutionally incapable of it. Very many even among the poorest had never taken a tool in hand in their lives. They lived by watching cattle and crops, by sitting in the fields to weed, by picking cotton, grain, and fruit, and, as Mr. Gibb says, by pilfering" (this quote from British officials is accompanied by several contemporary photographs of piles of emaciated corpses from Gujarat)

The total death count estimated by Davis solely between India, China, and Brazil between 1876 and 1900 is between 31.7 and 61.3 million. When it is not extremely sad and dark the scale of human suffering described is numbingly difficult to wrap one's head around. Shocked and kind of ashamed I hadn't really heard of this before picking up this book.

A clearly written and well researched account of ecological poverty - defined as the depletion or loss of entitlement to the natural resource base of traditional agriculture - consitituted a causal triangle with increasing household poverty and state decapacitation in explaining both the emergence of a "third world" and its vulnerability to extreme climate events

Another paragraph of note were the British policies in India that established property forms that freed village caste elites from traditional reciprocities and encouraged them to explot irrigation resources to their selfish advantage. The entitlement to water thus openly became a relation of inequality and a means of exploitation

good book

Excellent; horrifying. Absolutely lays bare the absurd myth of "colonial beneficence" that somehow still gets toted around. One of the best historical books I've read recently.

Fantastic book. Punishing, absolutely brutal to get through at times, but that's the point. It is a brilliant choice to combine the exploration of how Capital has killed tens of millions all over the world, for years at a time, all over the world, with a deep dive into current scientific analysis of long-term climatic/meteorological systems and their dynamics of interplay. Because of course that is the go-to dodge: Capital didn't kill those people, bad weather and famine did. (The same people of course never deploy that defense of Mao. It's an obvious bad-faith dodge. That said, Davis handles Mao well here, with nuance but also not sparing him and his policy failures.) By comparing across systems, across time, across regions, with attention to markets, to British (and others') policy, to the natural experiments presented by water shortages and famines across the whole world throughout the 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries, Davis answers all the questions.

But here's the real kicker, here's what makes this book such an urgent horror to read now: we are obviously headed into an era of increased climate collapse, increased food and water shortages, with whole regions of the globe becoming unlivable. And we head into that era with Capital, despite its horrors, still firmly entrenched with our so-called elites and well supported by propaganda to brainwash most of the rest of us. This book lays out so clearly what Capital will do when the two options are: preserve the market or save lives. It will gladly, gleefully preserve the market, blaming the sufferers for their own suffering even as the capitalists are enriched by it. So we know what the great capitalist powers are going to do: they are going to cage and kill climate refugees at the border, they are going to preserve markets even when it leads to famine (indeed, we can already see this happening).

So what are we going to do? Those of us in the imperial core, those of us with a larger margin of comfort from these impacts? Will we be able to live with ourselves if we leave this monstrous system in place as it starves and murders millions of our fellow humans in order to serve that monstrous god, Capital, whose Invisible Hand these small-minded cruel "business leaders" and "entrepreneurs" worship and serve?

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.

Breathtaking and morally infuriating.

“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.”

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.