This was a tough read. In the introduction, he makes the claim that, just in India, China, and Brazil, drought and famine killed somewhere between 30-60 *million* people in the late 19th/early 20th century. He then goes on to show exactly how the imperial British government exacerbated the crises, denied aid, and therefore assume responsibility for a great number of these deaths. The dehumanization of the British "subjects" is clearly demonstrated. There is a long section in the middle of the book that defines a bunch of scientific phenomena like El Niño/La Niña, ENSO, and a variety of other climate events that, even as a scientist, became sort of hard to keep up with. Though important to understanding the devastating droughts/famines, it is fairly complex.

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.

Famines are the result of unequal social relations, not of natural consequence.

This is a fantastically depressing book on how imperialist/colonists relations between Britain and India, China, and Brazil greatly exacerbated the effects of El Niño droughts, leading to famines that killed millions through starvation and communicable diseases such as cholera, typhus, and dysentery. Late Victorian Holocausts argues (very effectively) that imperialist/colonialist relations directly caused famine and food insecurity through imposing fiscal deficits, forcing peasants to grow cash crops for export instead of subsistence crops for domestic consumption, adopting the gold standard which greatly devalued the currencies of these now global South countries, and indirectly imposing massive indebtedness onto peasants through commercialization.

In graphic detail this book lays out the horrors of 1800s colonialism/imperialism and the pain and suffering it caused globally. Through forceful commercialization of the peripheries, the core got their wishes, cheap commodities and a balance of payments, while the periphery received a declining living standard and mass death and starvation. The starvation and mass death also led to mass proletarianization which imperialist forces took advantage of by buying up the now unused land.

This is a must read for anyone that is interested in just how the unequal living standards between the global north and global south came about, on the backs of the intentionally starved and destitute.

an inundation of data that produces a mostly-clear picture. maybe sometime I will get through one of these books and think ‘yes, I understand this completely, thank you Mr Davis.’ this was not that book. still a big fan!

Well this almost gave me PTSD. Famine and drought are the oldest foes of humanity, arguably the simplest, and the worst - they deserve our attention.

Like plagues, we don't tend to talk about them much when we talk history. Unlike most wars, they don't have clear and digestible narratives, clear villains, or uplifting outcomes. They come, they kill and ruin, they go away.

But we ignore them at our peril - especially as they can be effectively mitigated (even with 18th century resources).

As this book illustrates, unimaginable horrors (far worse than Nazi atrocity, described in nightmarish detail here) can come from the triple evil of laissez-faire capitalism, the failure of expected rains, and indifferent, incompetent political systems that refuse to provide relief. The way things are going, even the rich countries are likely to become reacquainted with all of the above in the long term.

Incredibly well researched, and extremely eye-opening when it comes to forgotten catastrophes of the late 19th century: famine and drought in India, China, Africa and Brazil, which were well known in the Western press of the day, but not committed to most history books or school curriculum.

Lots of grim detail about how colonialism created the conditions for disaster, and lots of scientific detail about how El Nino patterns were discovered (which weren't confirmed until the 1960s).

Worth reading - if only so you can laugh in the stupid face of any reactionary simpleton who'd absurdly claim that Mao and Stalin were mass murderers for their famines, but also that European empires "civilized" what we might now call the "third world". The stupid creeps who pass for intellectuals in modern conservative circles often indulge in this hypocrisy, through ignorance or deliberate obfuscation.

Currently free on Audible.

I once heard it said "The English Empire was morally on par with the Third Reich" and I never really knew why that might be true. As an American, the Irish Potato Famine is unique in the way it is taught in that it is not understood as it is more broadly across the world - a genocide. What Mike Davis' brilliant book lays out, is that the forced and violent introduction of global, market-based economics on communities all over the world, combined with the ENSO cycle of El-Nino and La-Nina years of extreme drought and extreme flooding, brought destruction, social and economic upheaval, and death to nearly every corner of the world. Davis leaves no room for argument that the famines that the British Empire oversaw in India, China, and Brazil were holocausts, at the very least mitigable by the oversight regimes, and does put them morally on par with Nazi Germany.
From the introduction, on the reasons why photographs of these genocides were included:
"In her somberly measured reflections, Reading the Holocaust, Inga Glendinnen ventures this opinion about the slaughter of innocents: "If we grant that 'Holocaust,' the total consumption of offerings by fire, is sinisterly appropriator the murder of those millions who found their only graves in the air, it is equally appropriate for the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden." Without using her capitalization (which implies too complete an equation between the Shoah and other carnages), it is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies towards starving "subjects" were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped at 18,000 feet. The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations not illustrations."
So when people are seen not mourning the death of the queen, or even celebrating it, a proper reaction would perhaps not be to scold that person outright, but to ask "what could a person have done in their life to have people react this way to news of their demise?"

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 to prove opposite points:' he says railroads in India allowed capitalists to move grain to areas paying highest prices, thereby starving people in certain regions, yet flips this argument in China, saying that the Qing Empire caused famine because they had NOT developed a rail system! Which is it, Mr. Davis? Are railroads good or bad for capitalist roaders?

Still, I would like to get it again when I can and give it a better read.

This is a well-written book about an important but little-known subject: the way in which imperialist policies and weather patterns combined to produce some of the worst famines in human history.

Concerns how colonial management of both colonies and trade partners during the Victorian era resulted in various starvations, such as the export of food in the famine plagued Bengal region and the crown's insistence to impose destitution on China.

It is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies towards starving "subjects" were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet. The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations not illustrations.

The first Mike Davis book I've read and the sheer amount of research and sources in this was daunting. One minor gripe about the structure before getting into some takeaways. It frustrated me to no end that he began with the events of the major droughts before explaining the El Nino climate cycle and the political ecology of the regions. I understand beginning with the gravity and seriousness of these events, but jumping around in the timeline just kept messing with me.

This work is jam packed with analysis of late 1800's famines in India, China, and Brazil with a focus on the economic dogma enforced that led to mass death. I'll spare the grisly detail, but an estimated 45 million died. The Malthusian interpretation at the time was that the populations of the global South had overextended to unsustainable levels. David points to a relatively stable population growth in the regions in the preceding 200 years that would lead us to look elsewhere. The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) that leads to relatively predictable drought seasons had been managed effectively in both India and China for 100s of years before, either by the Qing developing whole infrastructures for grain stores to be systematically distributed in the event of drought, or in India where water and manure being freely distributed goods which the poorest of society depended upon.

The colonial causes of the famines are different depending on the region effected, but they can all be explained under the umbrella of slow advancing economies into the developing worlds. In the British Raj, grains were sold out of the country at low cost, draining reserves for years before each famine. When grain prices skyrocket in response to economic conditions (and the Panic of 1873 crashed the European economy) peasants producing the grain had no money to pay for anything in return. In the Qing Empire, years of colonial and civil war (Opium Wars, Taiping Rebellion, Muslim Rebellion) left the government sclerotic and focused on military rule over infrastructure management. Mass clearing of forests to grow cash crops led to central and northern China suffering SEVENTEEN consecutive years of flooding, killing a million people alone, an event so cataclysmic the route of the Yellow River permanently redirected from south to east, where it lays today.

This is only a small portion of the book, but holy shit is there so much in here. Political ecology is only going to become a more prevalent study in the coming years and scientists believe climate change is only going to intensify ENSO climate patterns. Highly recommended reading in order to understand that climate casualties are just as much a result of poor planning and political choices than any environmental anomaly

My intention was to read as many Mike Davis books as I could in a row to celebrate his life now that he has announced he is stopping treatment for his esophageal cancer and, at the time of this writing, may only have several months to live.

But several days into reading Late Victorian Holocausts, Queen Elizabeth II, Britain's very obsolete power with non-obsolete symbolic weight, shocked the world by dying at an extraordinarily old age. Her relevance basically being her longevity, many of the monarchy's critics (read: truth-tellers) thought it the appropriate time to audit Elizabeth's tenure in the aftermath of such a monstrous colonial legacy, what she had done to uphold it, and what she had done to preserve it, and of course that whole Diana and pedophile thing. Late Victorian Holocausts is a brilliant, searing document of that colonial legacy. It also seems to attract false aspersions.

The first 186 pages of the reissued paperback edition courtesy of Verso Books are essential and straightforward reading. It is an open-eyed, honest gaze at the abject atrocities that British's administrative neglect and colonial agenda engendered, rife with disturbing content, haunting images, and loads of what should have remained to us as a species unimaginable cruelty. I appreciate Davis' bravery and equanimity here.

The book soldiers on to a section on millenarian revolutions, uprising, and revolts, in ways that recalled Joshua Clover's work on riots (Riot. Strike. Riot.) or Davis' own Buda's Wagon. The next third or so details in painstaking meteorological detail the scientific arrival at the discovery of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, what the rhetorical ambiguities and controversies around ENSO labeling are, and why this phenomenon on weather came to be understood the way it is now and the resultant consequences. This is a technical portion of the book that is unabashed about using dense, academic language. Why I still recommend this section as vital, despite many readers skipping or skimming it, is that it functions as a very informative history of climate change. This section is crucial because it is the moment that Late Victorian Holocausts pivots between being a historical document and a presaging document. Water scarcity looms large. Climate change of unforeseen human scope and influence will cause weather disturbances and phenomena far more unknown to us than ENSO, but as far as climate change phenomena go, will cause massive emigration and perhaps, yes, even famine. As a vision of what is to come, this book pivots from being depression to being both depressing and horrifying. It is also honest while being posited in this grim landscape, again, with honest and open eyes.

The third section deals with the third world concept described in the title. This section is in desperate need of a conclusion to incorporate the three separate case studies (India, China, and Brazil) into a unified statement that reiterates the thesis in the Third World chapter preceding the final three. However, as its own section, this is where the encroaching dread of section two starts to resemble prophecy and revelation, revelation in the truth of a history revealed, and prophecy in that it gives us the facts about impotent bureaucracies and dishonest actors amidst utter climate disaster. Davis uses an overarching chapter to put forth his argument that is rather excellent, then ends the book abruptly after analyzing India, China, and Brazil separately.

The British legacy in all of the above regions is horrendous, still resonant, environmentally catastrophic in ways that will continue to reverberate, and genocidal. People's perceptions of Davis as an unapologetic Marxist and socialist do get in the way of an appropriate understanding of the book. While Marx's analysis of India (Edmund Burke's and Florence Nightingale's writings also) is cited, Davis is critiquing specifically the colonial, imperial regime that used flagrant usury, exorbitant tax schemes, promulgated innumerable market failures, and more. In this case, he is rampaging against how globalization and modernization had manifested itself and the dire consequences it has on the fate of the entire world. The pillaging of India, China, and Brazil was monumental. I'm not convinced that this is anti-capitalist muck-raking, or even Luddism. Davis advocates for railroad usage if it is used for equity and to deliver relief to the working poor rather than being anti-railroad altogether, so he critiques unjust railroad usage in one case and neglecting to build railroads in an other in a manner that is not self-contradicting. When Davis discussed neo-classical economics, it is because these were the theories in fashion at the time (in Brazil's case, how racism interfered with these principles is discussed, and he condemns how race made Brazilian elite choose destructive underdevelopment, which is a discussion about irrationalities that is far more nuanced). The text is so exhausting that of course he is careful to delineate the many abuses of the system the British committed, why development economists writ large would agree with him, and through the comprehensive listing of all of the British misdeeds, it is clear that these are abuses that would violate any theoretically just system of economy. Because of this, his own political affiliations are hardly relevant.

For me, we are seeing Davis as a historian who has subtly used history to make a nightmarish statement about the impending thread of climate change and the devastating social consequences it would have, consequences that are beyond horrifying and beyond tragic. I would recommend this one, honestly, to people who want to see less of Davis' polemical instincts. The history speaks for itself here, as does Davis' fast-paced, mind-blowing, fiery writing. An extraordinary read, and a timely referendum on the British legacy in the wake of Lizzy kicking the bucket.

Really great read. I’m a [redacted] dunce so it took me ages to finish, but that isn’t a reflection on the book. Very information dense but not in a dry way; however I needed to take lots of breaks for it to process. Davis has a great way of getting to the point with his ideas and was absolutely impeccable backing them up, but as I mentioned, it’s a lot to take in at once. Something I appreciated was how in-depth he went with explain the science behind the atmospheric changes— as a layperson, he wrote about the ENSO phenomena in a graspable way without dumbing it down. As someone with a lifelong interest in history and environmental issues, this does a really good job of putting both together with an added layer of how the execution of imperialism (mainly British, but he didn’t spare other countries when appropriate) made bad situations worse. As someone with a superficial knowledge of Indian history and even less of Chinese and Brazilian history, this was a book I was able to follow fairly well; he does throw a reader into the deep end with the amount of info he gives, but it doesn’t require knowing every single thing going on in the Victorian era before starting it. A great text if one wants to learn about the development of these countries and how richer countries impacted them.