Read this book for a class on the history of climate change, and to be fair there were 2 chapters I didn't read because they weren't assigned. Overall I think Davis did a good job of arguing for consideration of both climate and politics in famine in what we consider the Third World today. There were both interesting parts and slow parts, and I think a lot of the most interesting stuff was when he wrote about colonialism in India. Lots to think about in this book.

Really stellar! Not only is it a great work of political economy describing the historical development of the material conditions in the modern third world, I think it's the best work of Marxist science studies I've seen. It does a great job outlining the ways in which scientific knowledge and engineering expertise can be important for the maintenance of material existence as well as the ways in which the implementation of the expertise and production of the knowledge are constrained by the social distribution of means of production. It does a great job of linking the colonialism-underdevelopment of the primary regions of inquiry to the ecological effects of the social reactions to that underdevelopment.

A difficulty is that it doesn't really have much synthetic analysis. There's not even a real conclusions chapter, it just ends after a chapter about Brazil. This strikes me as pretty bizarre since I was waiting for a big synthesis for most of the book. It seemed to be setting up pretty interesting arguments about the relations between production, climate, and colonialism but they're never made explicit, which I found sort of bizarre. Another avenue that I was looking for but didnt find was any in depth comparison between the objects of study (primarily India, China and Brazil, with Africa sidelined for some reason?) and other historical moments situations where similar things occurred. How does the colonial proletarianization of India compare with the European-industrializing proletarianzation of England, say in terms of the dynamics of how small peasants were pushed off of land, and what happened to them when they were? How do the economic-military pressures described as being so influential on how agriculture developed in these countries compare to the similar pressures the US exerts across the world today? These seem like important questions to answer if one wants to situate this work and put it to use but I guess thats something we need to do ourselves.

"City of Quartz" was wonderful, dense and disturbing; "Late Victorian Holocausts" is profoundly fucked up. Davis essentially maps out the casualties caused by various colonial states during the latter half of the nineteenth century, specifically comparing living conditions in various areas before and after the establishment of colonial rule. Most of the man's books are polemical, and this is no exception, but as usual there are reasons to be pissed, and Davis's impeccable writing, research and usual acerbic style bring the crises of history home all too clearly.

Discovering Mike Davis was one of the few silver linings of this pandemic. He’s been making the podcast circuit quite a bit over the past months because he’s written about how global health issues and pandemics intersect with global capitalism – not irrelevant to the current pandemic situation we are in right now. I noted a few of his books down to read after listening to a podcast episode the Magnificast did on Davis, and Late Victorian Holocausts was one of them. My friend a few weeks ago was preparing to write an article and asked for some book recommendations relevant to the intersection of climate change and colonialism, and this was one of the book titles I passed along with the caveat that I had not yet read it. However, I thought I should probably rectify that and set about digging into this text, and I’m very glad I did. It is a really interesting book.

The book is about famine and how much one might attribute causality to nature and, on the other hand the degree to which human agency is responsible (or at least the agency of those with significant power). It’s always neat to see leftists cite the liberal economist Amartya Sen. I’ve seen Chomsky do it numerous times, and it’s very often over this issue of famines (often the Great Leap Forward is the topic of discussion at hand, which is also the case for parts of this book, and some interesting remarks regarding how natural factors are downplayed on Western accounts of Maoist crop failure, but often made the sole reason in accounts of famines under British colonialism).

Sen has asserted in his work that famines should be seen as social failures rather than merely the cause of unfortunate natural circumstances. And Davis takes this as his starting point, which might not be obvious from reading the book’s subtitle “El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World”. However, Davis takes ecological mechanisms extremely seriously, and spends a good amount of time in this book explaining the mechanisms of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Davis at the same time takes efforts to show how the European scientists piecing together the mechanisms of ENSO from an allegedly objective standpoint, were in so many ways carrying out the project of imperialism and taking efforts to show that famine in European colonies was a natural misfortune and not the result of colonialism's destructive nature.

The word “El Nino” means ‘Christ child’, a term derived from the coasts of Ecuador and Peru, where ENSO often causes an increase of seawater temperatures around Christmas. I love that Davis mentioned this a couple times in the book, because ‘Christ’ means ‘Messiah’, and Davis has a whole chapter entitled “Gunboats and Messiahs” delving into a theme that runs through a lot of this book actually: millenarian uprisings and revolutions led by various messiahs in the wake of El-Nino induced famines, which wreaked devastation among populations mostly at the behest of colonial interventions and imperial policy. Davis spends quite a bit of the book establishing the mechanisms in place in various places like India and China for effectively dealing with ENSO-induced famines to maintain the livelihoods of populations, and how the arrival of Western colonial powers absolutely collapsed these systems and left deadly famines in their wake.

In Brazil, Davis discusses Antônio Conselheiro who led an uprising, which became Brazil’s deadliest civil war, and Padre Cicero, who is sometimes considered a precursor to Latin American liberation theology, but was actually explicitly anti-communist in his politics. I just want to provide a sense of how well Davis is able to elaborate on these things, because he truly makes these fragments of history very exciting to read about:

“Brazil’s nineteenth century ended in a bloody sunset of drought, famine and genocidal state violence. Across widening regional and racial divides, the positivist Republic, established by coup in 1889 and dominated by Paulista elites, conducted a ruthless crusade against poor, drought-stricken but pious sertanejos in the Nordeste. The 1897 War of Canudos, which culminated in the destruction of the holy city of Canudos in the Bahian sertão and the massacre of tens of thousands of humble followers of Antonio Conselheiro, is one of the defining events in Brazil’s modern history – the subject of Euclydes da Cunha’s epic Os Sertões [1902]. Another famous backlands utopia led by a religious folk hero, Father Cícero Romão’s city of Joãseiro in Ceará’s Carirí Valley, narrowly escaped the fate of Canudos: it survived into the twentieth century only through shrewd compromises with local elites. If eschatological imminence (with the oligarchic Republic as the Anti-Christ) suffused both communities, each was also a pragmatic and successful adaptation to continuing environmental crisis and economic decline in the Nordeste. The roots of both movements, moreover, go back to the Grande Seca of 1876–78.

The sertão had long been a religious volcano. “Sebastianism,” based on mystical belief in the return of the Portuguese monarch who had vanished fighting the Moors in 1578, was particularly widespread. The first massacre of millenarists occurred at Serra do Rodeador in the sertão of Pernambuco in 1819–20. “A prophet gathered together a group of followers to await King Sebastian, who was expected back at any moment to lead them on a crusade for the liberation of Jerusalem.” Their roughshod utopia was instead destroyed by a nervous government who viewed the utopian-apocalyptic strand in folk Catholicism with the deepest suspicion.41 The great droughts of the late nineteenth century, however, only further entrenched Sebastianist eschatology in popular culture. From the ranks of barefoot beatos and beatas, the famines of 1877 and 1889 mobilized fierce new visions of cataclysm followed by Christ’s thousand-year kingdom.

Yet millenarianism in the sertão was also a practical social framework for coping with environmental instability. When foreign priests and missionaries fled the scorched sertão in the spring of 1877, the former-schoolteacher-turned-beato Conselheiro and the ordained priest Cícero stayed behind with their flocks, sermonizing apocalypse but practicing energetic self-help. The first acquired his reputation for holiness by repairing local churches and graveyards, while the second became locally famous for resettling starving drought refugees in the undeveloped but fertile lands of the Araripe Mountains. ”

Davis spends quite a bit of time referring to the Taiping insurrection throughout the book also, but I have discussed that far too many times, so I will pass on to the fascinating segments he wrote on Southeast Asian millenarians like Estrella Bangotbanwa, Clara Tarrosa, and Dios Buhawi:

“By the late 1880s, thousands of peasants and aborigines in both Panay and Negros (in a movement strikingly analogous to the millenarian refuges of Joãseiro and Canudos in contemporary northeast Brazil) had withdrawn into autonomous armed communities in the mountains led by prominent babaylans like Panay’s Clara Tarrosa, “an eighty-year-old woman … who claimed to be the ‘Virgin Mary,’ ” or Negros’s Ponciano Elopre, a transvestite [sic] miracle-worker known as Dios Buhawi (the Waterspout God) for his/her skill in rainmaking. Despite brutal retaliations, including massacres and summary executions, Spanish power essentially collapsed in the island interiors, leaving the babaylons and their followers to confront the more ruthless, usurper colonialism of the Americans a decade later.”

“In Vietnam the coincidence of drought-famine and cholera was a bellows that fanned the embers of peasant anti-colonial resistance into millenarian revolt. With the killing in 1872 of Tran van Thanh, the leader of the populist Dao Lanh sect, the French believed they had pacified their new colony. “Unfortunately,” as Reynaldo Ileto points out, “they had not reckoned on the popular belief in reincarnation.” As the threat of famine spread panic through the countryside in 1877, another Dao Lanh apostle, Nam Thiep, announced that he was Tran’s incarnation and “that the time had come to expel the French” (widely believed to be responsible for this conjugation of disasters). “Nam Thiep was able to unify the Dao Lanh groups and mount a rebellion in 1878. He announced that the Low Era was ending, and that the reign of the Emperor of Light … was being established. Peasants armed with bamboo spears and amulets attacked French garrisons, only to be driven back decisively by rifle fire. But this did not faze Nam Thiep, who in 1879 proclaimed himself a living Buddha and built a new community on Elephant Mountain, in the region of the Seven Mountains.”

Southeast Asian millenarian movements are an entire universe of history I'd liked to read more about.

As for my friend whom I recommended this book to, his family was deeply affected by partition and British colonialism in the Punjab, and so I believe he was very drawn to Davis’ elaborations on the railroads and how they impacted El Nino famines in South Asia, by essentially transporting food out of famine affected regions under the behest of the British East India Company leaving people to starve and die:

“Although rice and wheat production in the rest of India (which now included bonanzas of coarse rice from the recently conquered Irrawaddy delta) had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England.4 Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread. “It seems an anomaly,” wrote a troubled observer, “that, with her famines on hand, India is able to supply food for other parts of the world.”

There were other “anomalies.” The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation.”

Davis also has some fascinating descriptions of the way British imperialism impacted China, devastated Qing state infrastructure initiatives, which had helped alleviate ENSO droughts by maintaining steady supplies of water through continued investment in water infrastructure maintenance, and also through cross-subsidization initiatives between poorer and more well-endowed regions. He also makes a fascinating link between the waves of labour migrants out of China into the rest of the world (including the railway workers in North America) being related to British imperial policy towards China.

I was particularly drawn to Davis’s elaborations into ‘famine’ at the beginning of the book, and I think it’s an interesting quote to end on, as it really helps one think what famine actually is:

“In recent years, Amartya Sen and Meghnad Desai have meticulously formalized this Victorian common sense in the language of welfare economics. Famine in their view is a crisis of “exchange entitlements” (defined as “legal, economically operative rights of access to resources that give control of food”) that may or may not have anything to do with crop yields. “Famine,” emphasizes Sen, “is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.” In theoretical jargon, the “endowments” of different groups (ownership of land, labor, power and so on.) “map” to alternative “entitlement sets” of goods and services. People starve in a Senyan world when their endowments, for whatever reason, cannot command or be exchanged for minimal calories to subsist, or, alternately, when their entitlement mappings shift disastrously against them. Famine is thus a catastrophic social relation between unequally endowed groups that may be activated by war, depression or even something called “Development” as well as by extreme climate events. Most likely, of course, it is a conjuncture of different factors.

Critics have considerably sharpened the teeth of this model. David Arnold, for instance, has usefully warned against excessive demotion of environmental factors, especially the impacts of the nineteenth-century mega-droughts. He has also taxed Sen for ignoring mass extra-legal actions – riots, protests, rebellions – that constitute populist appropriations of entitlement. Amarita Rangasami similarly has reminded us that famine “cannot be defined with reference to the victims of starvation alone” In her view (and mine), the great hungers have always been redistributive class struggles: “a process in which benefits accrue to one section of the community while losses flow to the other.”

Perhaps most incisively, Michael Watts, discounting any “generic theory” of such an “enormously complex social and biological phenomena,” sees the exchange-entitlement model as merely a logical first step in building a fully historical account of famine in different social formations:

'If famine is about the command over food, it is about power and politics broadly understood, which are embedded in a multiplicity of arenas from the domestic (patriarchal politics) to the nation/state (how ruling classes and subaltern groups acquire and defend certain rights). In social systems dominated by capitalism, ownership through private property determines exchange entitlements, which is to say that class and class struggle shape the genesis and the outcomes of the property–hunger equation. At the same time capitalism has develped unevenly on a world scale, with the result that there are national capitalisms (colored by differing configurations of class and international geopolitics) which provide the building blocks for distinguishing different species, and consequences, of subsistence crises. Actually existing socialisms have class and other interests, too, and perhaps other property rights consequent on political action and “socialistic” regimes of accumulation. The same can be said for pre-capitalisms for which the moral economy of the poor may be constitutive of some important entitlement claims. In all such cases, however, one needs to know how enforceable and legitimate are the legal and property relations which mediate entitlements and to recognize that all such rights are negotiated and fought over. Such struggles are not peripheral to famine but strike to its core.'”

As a concluding note, Davis discusses how climate change might severely exacerbate the consequences of ENSO famines. It's alarming to think that small changes in water temperature across the Pacific Ocean can have such severe effects on millions of lives. To think what global climate change will do in the future combined with the deadly theology of capitalism is frankly terrifying.

I'm reading books about the British empire at the moment to try and get some idea of what it is that Brexitiers see as their role in the future.

But shortly after starting I realised that the book is incredibly useful in understanding how climatic chaos will effect countries. I hadn't realised that so much of the colonial expansion into Africa and Asia was during major droughts caused by the regular El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Both the Mughal and Chinese empires factored in these cycles and often looked after their people in a very sophisticated manner during droughts, with grain stores and irrigation.
The colonial powers basically stripped the financial, foodstores and infrastructural capital needed to maintain irrigation etc. The focus on the needs of the colonial power and not on the native population was absolute. The word Holocausts cannot be denied.

But what was more interesting from my own interest in sustainability is that this can be seen as a blueprint for what could happen as climate change starts to grind social systems down. We have seen the increasing power of the market place and the undermining of the public sector world wide. There is a lot of discussion among many about the need to reduce government and that really their role should be just the protection of private property and people.

This book shows a world which only looked to protect private property and those in control. While the poor and those without power watched on helplessly as land taxes inconjunction with the courts, the military and money lenders ripped their societies apart and took everything It is important to read books like this and imagine your own district or country being ruled like this.
Too often I think people think that they have sufficient resources to survive financial and climatic collapse. But everything can be taken away as much by far right as far left powers.

As many former colonial powers are bypassed by their former colonies, it should be hoped that they will not behave as rutlessly.

The Great powers were not great because of their capacity for innovation or goodness but because they didn't care about the weak and were happy to consume them.

Anyone interested in food, globalisation, imperialism or India should find this book unbearably fascinating. Anyone else should be equally interested and horrified at its contents.

In the years 1876-1879 and 1896-1902 between 12.2 and 29.3 million died of famine in India. In the years 1876-1879 and 1896-1900 between 19.5 and 30 million died of famine in China. In the same period, an estimated 2 million died in Brazil. Famine hit these three nations the hardest, but many other nations were also affected. In the US, churches organized to send relief to hungry farmers in the Dakotas and western Kansas.

Mike Davis wrote about these famines in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. The famines occurred in regions slammed by severe drought. The droughts have been linked to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a major factor in global weather patterns.

Droughts have been common throughout history, and agricultural societies have commonly prepared for them by creating emergency reserves of stored grain. Because of political shifts in many regions, these safety nets were in poor condition during the late Victorian droughts. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution came a new mode of economic thinking that frowned on setting aside significant wealth for insurance against disaster. It was more profitable to sell the grain today, pocket the cash, and worry about tomorrow’s problems tomorrow. Peasants were expendable.

The Qing dynasty in China believed that subsistence was a human right, and it had relief management systems in place to reduce the toll of famines during drought years or floods. By the late Victorian era, conflicts with colonial powers had drained the wealth of the Qing government, so it was incapable of effectively responding to the catastrophic droughts.

Prior to the British colonization of India, the Moguls had a similar system for responding to famine. The British, on the other hand, were cruel masters (as they had been during the 1845 famine in Ireland). Food was widely available, but few could afford the inflated prices. While millions were starving, they exported Indian wheat. They outlawed donations of private relief. They forbid the Pariahs from foraging for forest foods, leading to 155,000 deaths. They created relief camps where the starving received inadequate rations, and 94 percent died. Very civilized chaps, eh?

The hungry hordes in Brazil were the victims of their own corrupt government, which had disposed of grain reserves. Brazil was not a colony of Britain, but English investors and creditors played a powerful role in the economy, turning Brazil into an “informal colony” that was kept permanently in debt.

Davis argued that the millions of deaths were largely a deliberate “holocaust” rather than a spell of bad luck, because political actions were a primary factor behind the high mortality rates. He also argued that this holocaust played a role in the creation of the Third World. In the eighteenth century, Europe did not have the highest standard of living. The biggest manufacturing districts were in India and China. Their workers ate better, had lower unemployment, and often earned more than workers in Europe. Literacy rates were higher, including women.

One of Davis’s primary objectives was to spank capitalism, colonialism, and the hideous overseers of the British Empire. There has been lively discussion in the reader feedback at Amazon, and a number of critics have questioned the way in which Davis assigned blame for the massive famines. For me, the book had important messages: (1) Droughts happen. (2) Agricultural societies are highly vulnerable to droughts. (3) Famines commonly follow droughts. (4) Famines can be horrific.

When rains ended an Indian drought in 1878, the mosquito population exploded, and hundreds of thousands of malnourished survivors died of malaria. Meanwhile, locusts gobbled up the growing young plants. Hungry peasants murdered many creditors who threatened foreclosure. Then came gangs of armed tax collectors. Hungry wild animals became very aggressive, dragging away the weak, screaming. In the Madras Deccan, “the only well-fed part of the local population were the pariah dogs, ‘fat as sheep,’ that feasted on the bodies of dead children.”

In China, the flesh of the starved was sold at markets for four cents a pound. People sold their children to buy food. Husbands ate their wives. Parents ate their children. Children ate their parents. Thousands of thieves were executed. At refugee camps, many perished from disease. If too many refugees accumulated, they were simply massacred. In some regions, relief took more than a year to arrive.

Davis’s vivid and extensive descriptions of famine times remind an increasingly obese society that we are living in a temporary and abnormal bubble of cheap and abundant calories. Importantly, he puts a human face on the consequences of climate change, a subject usually presented in purely abstract form: parts per million, degrees Celsius, and colorful computer-generated charts, graphs, and maps.

Near the end of the book, Davis gives us a big, fat, juicy discussion on the history of agriculture and ecological catastrophe in China. People who remain in denial about the inherent destructiveness of agriculture typically point to China as a glowing example of 4,000 years of happy sustainable low-impact organic farming. Wrong, wrong, wrong! This chapter provides a powerful cure for those who suffer from such embarrassing naughty fantasies.

The late Victorian droughts happened at a time when the world population was less than 1.4 billion. Today, it’s over 7 billion, and growing by 70 million per year. Cropland area per capita is shrinking, and soil health is diminishing. Energy prices are rising, and water usage for irrigation is foolishly unsustainable. We’re getting close to Peak Food. World grain production per capita peaked in 1984, at 342 kilograms per person. World grain stocks (stored grain) peaked in 1986, and have been declining since then.

On 24 July 2012, the venerable Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute published a warning in The Guardian. “The world is in serious trouble on the food front.” World grain stocks are currently “dangerously low.” “Time is running out. The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage — replete with soaring food prices, spreading food unrest, and ultimately political instability — than most people realize.”

For me, the main message of this book was a powerful warning about the huge risks of agriculture, and its insanely destructive companion, overpopulation. The famines discussed in this book were not a freak event in history. Famine has been a common, normal, periodic occurrence in virtually all agricultural societies, from the Cradle of Civilization to today.

As the collapse of industrial civilization proceeds and life slows down, opportunities to live more in balance with nature will emerge. Clever societies will carefully limit population size, and phase out their dependence on farming. Un-clever societies will continue to breed like there’s no tomorrow, beat their ecosystems to death, and hippity-hop down the Dinosaur Trail.

What historians, then, have so often dismissed as "climatic accidents" turns out to be not so accidental after all. p. 279

Understatement of the century. I had gone into this thinking it was exclusively about British India, but it also talks extensively about China and Brazil's genocide under the guise of an "act of God" as well. This book really shows the importance of having an intersectional approach on history. This also was beneficial for me to learn a little bit more about how climate justice is inherently linked to every other social problem. It's difficult to read something like this and not feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of colonial influence that haunts the world to this day.

It's impossible to write an accurate synopsis because of the sheer amount of information presented in this. I kept thinking to myself that this would best be categorized as reference material. It's ridiculously thick with statistics and dozens of historical figures that Mike Davis expects you to already know about. While it was fun to learn about someone like Ponciano Elopre, I think I would need to really spend months reading this if I wanted to digest every detail. And this was an ILL baby!

The first hand accounts of catastrophic famine are truly horrifying. Davis masterfully weaves together the history of extreme el nino weather events with the age of high imperialism as intense drought and disastrous flooding combined with racist imperial policies and free market fundamentalism to create what became known as the third world. He shows that food shortages may frequently occur due to natural factors but famines represent the failures of particular economic and political systems. He lays the blame for tens of millions of deaths squarely at the feet of the great empires of the day and those who collaborated with them. As Davis sets out in the introduction: "the contemporary photographs used in this book are intended as accusations not illustrations."

This is one of the most difficult, yet enlightening books I’ve ever read.

Mike Davis writes a convincing argument about how British Imperialism and Market Orthodoxy contributed to massuve famines in the sub-continent and underdeveloped India for ages to come. His argument is much less convincing on China and Brazil, yet his narrative capabilities are admirable and his ability to engage with granular data is to be celebrated. The scope of this book ranges from Raj history to climate analysis, agricultural history, and economy history, an impressive demonstration of knowledge from Davis' part. Its well sourced, although a bit overrealiant on travellers account.

I have some personal oppositions however to Davis' designation of some Raj policies as "market orthodox policies" such as demanding monopolistic control of exports, forbidding independent charity and raising taxes to pay for a military surplus. In nature, none of these policies should be considered liberal. Nevertheless, the men that spplied them definitely thought of themselves as liberal ideologues, so to wave this fact as irrelevant would be absurd.

Davis also paints a much rosier picture of the economic health of pre-colonial India and 18th century China than it really was. Several later studies, including some Davis mentions including those of Pommeranz put Chinese Great Divergence well before the 18th centuries, and a severily impoversihed India by the time of British Conquest. Gdp per capita of India had fallen in a near constant since Akbar's time, and reached its nadir during the Raj.

Davis however is correct in describing the malicious economic effects of colonization. Time and time again supporters of colonialism sincerely believe that building railroads and other structures is enough to promote development. Infrastructure is certainly important, but ultimately useless in a severily improductive society focused on direct extractivism, without late term planning.

Ultimately, a better understanding of the time of Late Victorian Holocausts would require much further research from other authors, including those that disagree eith Davis. That other authors also put a convincing argument supporting the beneficial effects of the Raj or of global economic integration do not by themselves make Davis less deserving of praise. The idea that One Book shoukd be always right or otherwise is of no validity is completely twisted, and its natural that an independent position is built by comparing different wellnsourced arguments and taking from them what appears more convincing. With this in mind, this book is in an excellent position to encourage this kind of discussion and analysis

Where did the massive and seemingly perpetual poverty of "Third World," or global south, come from? This is the core question of Davis's ambitious and disturbing book. His answer is both as old and as new as his question is perennial. For Davis the Third World came into existence quite specifically between the years 1877 and 1902, the high points of the two greatest famine-droughts of the 19th century, and possibly of the previous 500 years. But nature was not unassisted in these developments. Their baleful impact was immeasurably amplified through their coincidence with the integration of the largest and most affected societies in question - China and India - into the newly-global capitalist economy, and their submission to colonial and semi-colonial regimes.

On one hand, this is an old argument, first formulated by Indian nationalists intent, as Davis puts it, on turning the statistics of the British against them. They first made the case for colonial underdevelopment in the late 19th century - in the aftermath, it is no coincidence, of the epochal famines that Davis revisits. It was the very implementation of British rule and its program of classic Smithean-Benthamite economic reform, they argued, that served to transform what had been one of the richest civilizations on Earth in the 17th century into one of the poorest by the 1920s. Britain, in a crude simplification of the argument, skimmed the surplus from the Raj, whisking it away for two centuries in order to to balance the Empire's books and to fund its border wars. The result was a per capita GNP in the Raj that by the 1920s had not changed since 1757.

On the other hand, it is an eternally new argument. The history of capitalism has until quite recently concentrated on what went right with Europe and, to quote the title of a related book by Bernard Lewis, "what went wrong" with everyone else. The tradition stretches back to Marx and the post-Enlightenment critiques of "Oriental despotism", and was given its 20th century social scientific chops by Max Weber. More recent thinking, along the spectrum of which I would situate Davis's book, sees the decline of Qing China and post-Mughal India as to a great extent a product of their encounter with Western conquerors and institutions, rather than any preordained internal decay. All the elements of progress that Locke had theorized and Marx had described in the experience of pre-Modern England turned out to be deeply destabilizing when exported elsewhere: the privatization and enclosure of communal lands, the switch to export cash crops, the breakdown of the village commune, the burden of state taxation in the absence of paternalist reciprocities. When combined with intensely racist structures of economic exploitation that knew no equivalent in the Europe of the time, the picture emerges of civilizations that were strategically maimed.

The force of the argument rests with Davis's gruesome and often heartbreaking portrayal of the climate disasters that exacerbated these political developments. The demographic destruction, greatest in China and India, but felt as far away as Morocco and Brazil, and as great in its death toll as any of the Holocausts of the 20th century, was a blow to economic resources from which these nations were not to recover until well into the last century. Davis points out that it was from the epicenter of the 19th century Chinese famines, in the northern plains of Shanxi province, that Mao's army marched out to communist victory in 1949; it was not until 1953 that the population of the province reached the pre-famine level of 1870.

Davis is most ambitious in his attempt to reconstruct the climate history of the period. In doing so he takes a step closer to a type of interdisciplinary history that allows nature an active role in the story. El Niño is the culprit, and we learn much about it. Perhaps most interesting, and eerily harmonious with the thesis of the book, is that the same forces of global integration that were destabilizing the societies falling under European influence were allowing, for the first time, a truly worldwide climatology. It was the infrastructure of empire that provided the data with which early climatologists first noticed the simultaneity of the weather events of the 1870s and after.

Already Davis has accomplished much. By seeking to describe a set of complex feedback loops that involve peasant societies, colonial states, and extraordinarily complex global weather patterns such as El Niño he is taking a step towards a new kind of socio-ecological history that is badly needed in the age of climate change. Where I find fault with his book is that he does not push ahead to make this connection, and to refer to the contemporary irony that, if climate helped make nations vulnerable to the depredations of colonialism in the 19th century, today it is climate change that threatens to affect the poorest nations most severely.