Two stars and those only because the subject matter is important. Amazingly, many people seem to be unaware of the dark sides of imperialist capitalism in the 19th century and view this book as an eye opener. In the circle I grew up in this was more or less taken for granted so this book for me is stating the obvious, in a very detailed and I must say annoying way.
What bothers me most is the writing style. Mud slinging and overblown language or not for me in the context of a non-fiction book on serious subject matter. The tendency to point at the ideological adversary for everything that is wrong in the world is all too clear here. As Amartya Sen nicely points out in his review of this book, the great famines of the 20th century took place in communist countries and this fact should give every Marxist writer some pause when pointing at Capitalism as the source of all evil.

Reading Late Victorian Holocausts is not an experience for the faint of heart. Mike Davis provides his readers with a warning when he says at the end of the introduction that the photographs he uses throughout the text are "intended as accusation, not illustrations." His entire book is an indictment of European imperialism and the laissez-faire capitalist system that made it possible. For the first two parts of the book he lays the millions of famine deaths at the doorstep of imperialists, particularly men like Lord Lytton and Richard Temple. Davis then goes on to theorize the causes of those deaths and demonstrates that combination of political and economic degradation under imperialism made countries like India and China more susceptible to climatic shocks brought on by the ENSO cycle. Davis is clearly a follower of Amartya Sen and his contention that famines cannot happen in a democratic nation.

Davis focuses primarily on the drought-famines taking place in India between 1876 and 1902, not only because these events were dramatic and widespread, but also because the link between imperial economic policies and famine-related deaths is crystal clear. In China and Brazil, Davis' other main regions of focus, direct causality is more difficult to discern, though there is some pretty damning correlation. At times, the litany of starvation, disease, and death can become repetitive; this is not the fault of the author's writing, but his choice of subject matter. Stick with this book. Though heavy, it provides an important perspective on the origins of global inequality.

Very dark, don't read if you're in a dark place mentally, but otherwise I feel it should be required reading. It completely demolishes any myth of western superiority. It explores in great detail how nations like the British empire and the US plundered and looted the common wealth of the third world. It explores the sciences of weather and climate systems and how they are used as a mask to cover the exploitation of people living subsistence life's. It covers so much, and even if you know how awful the British empire is, there are still things in this worth learning about. We don't get to let this be forgotten. We cant accept the lies they feed us, with the food they stole from India. With the wars they orchestrated in China. With the complete neglect of their colonial conquests as they feast with spices stolen from indentured slaves.

Read it.

Late Victorian Holocausts melds the history of Victorian-era Imperialism with climate science, particularly with studies of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (or ENSO) and its effects on global regions that rely on seasonal monsoons.

Davis explains that the science surrounding ENSO is relatively new (as in, no earlier than '69). The history of Imperialism, however, goes all the way back. Many know about the Irish potato famine, whose million dead perished only because of a lack to access to the abundant grains that grew in other parts of the island, which were only grown for export and whose owners refused to share, choosing profits over the lives of these victims of famine.

But rather than teach the British a lesson in humility, they simply marched on, or in other words stuck to their ideology which had served them so well, and did the same across all their newly-acquired Imperial possessions.

So why did these extreme ENSO events at the end of the 19th Century, which Davis documents, lead to such devastating famine—which left tens of millions dead globally—as had never been recorded in history? I'll let Davis explain:

India and China, in other words, did not enter modern history as helpless "lands of famine" so universally enshrined in the Western imagination. Certainly the intensity of the ENSO cycle in the late nineteenth century, perhaps only equaled on three or four other occasions in the last millennium, must loom large in any explanation of the catastrophes of the 1870s and 1890s. But it is scarcely the only independent variable. Equal causal weight, or more, must be accorded to the growing social vulnerability to climate variability that became so evident in south Asia, north China, northeast Brazil and southern Africa in late Victorian times. As Michel Watts has eloquently argued in his history of the "silent violence" of drought-famine in colonial Nigeria: "Climate risk... is not given by nature but by 'negotiated settlement' since each society has institutional, social, and technical means for coping with risk... Famines [thus] are crises that represent the failures of particular economic and political systems."

And also...

From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to regional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form Of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." [ etiology: the study of what causes a thing]

And finally:

But how, in an age of famine, could the subcontinent afford to subsidize its conqueror's suddenly precarious commercial supremacy? In a word, it couldn't, and India was forced-marched into the world market, as we shall see, by revenue and irrigation policies that compelled farmers to produce for foreign consumption at the price of their own food security.

Late Victorian Holocausts is a well-written and accessible history of Imperialism, its intersection with famine in the late 19th Century, and climate science. I've never read such a successful marriage between social and physical sciences, and even more, a marriage produced by Marxist analysis.

In "Late Victorians' Mike Davis exposes the wide social and economic context in which the great famines of late XIX happened. More than simple causalities caused by climate turmoil, the human catastrophe that wiped out millions of lives in the periphery had undeniable social origins, whose existence was located in the transformations led by the insertion of agriculture populations into a world market where the relations of power of the empire played against those same populations.

Davis explains how India and China were subjected to a historic process by which their social structures were dismantled to accommodate the needs of the world capitalism lead by England, and how that dismantling contributed in a great measure to expose entire communities to the climatic ravages of the droughts and economic hardships inflicted by an unstable global trade. The ending of the traditional systems of social security and the Increasing commodification of the common Goods ended up raising the vulnerability to the climatic shocks like El Ninos, which aggravated the food insecurity of the peasants and the poorest. Also, the responses to the famine were delayed or pretty much insufficient because of the consequences of decades of impoverishment caused by the new relations of power at the world market.

He could have called it a genocide instead of a Holocaust which is a very specific genocide.

In Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, Mike Davis casts a wide net by doing a cross-global history of the devastating famines and natural disasters that effected significant portions of the world in the late 19th century. In doing so, he places the blame on the European powers in using these famines to strengthen their colonial rule, eventually leading to underdevelopment which caused the creation of the Third World. I was impressed with the amount of work it must have taken to collect the data and information (including qualitative and quantitative) from each of the regions he described (South Asia, Middle East, Africa, Latin America) and the responses of the colonial powers (the British, Dutch, French, etc.). This is an expansive research project, and I applaud him for being able to tie it all together in a compelling narrative. It is also extremely relevant in our day--and scary how certain themes repeat themselves throughout history.

The sheer depth of information is impressive; it's part history part climate science part agriculture part economics and probably other stuff. Because it's dense, sometimes getting through is a slog but the gist is that various phenomena (some climatological, some engineered by British colonialism) resulted in the underdevelopment and thus particularly bad drought/famine endured by India, China, Brazil, and parts of Africa in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Happy I read it, and fuck the Brits

It's hard to summarize such a broad-reaching book in a review. This is both to the credit and detriment of the book as a whole: there is no singular thesis because the world is complicated and history is multi-layered and geographically diverse. But despite or maybe because of its range, this is truly a marvelous and exceptional work that lays out some of the important historical factors that characterized the colonial era and set the foundation for the modern era and the division between poor third world countries (the colonized) and rich first world countries (the colonizers).

In lieu of a summary, here are some vignettes that I found important/interesting:
The industrial revolution in Britain was largely financed by China. Due to the opium wars, gold was routed through India, draining Chinese coffers due to the massive trade deficit forced upon them. In turn, colonial India sent this wealth to Britain in exchange for the manufactured goods of the industrial revolution, not being allowed to move up the industrial ladder themselves due to the dynamics of colonialism. In the 18th century, both India and China were on par or surpassed Britain in terms of economic output/technological development, but in the following 200 years, there was no net growth due to the ravages of the colonial machine.

What does all that have to do with the title? Well, the weakness of the Chinese state and the implementation of British rule over India played a huge part in the deaths of tens of millions of colonized people across the globe during the eponymous "Victorian Holocausts" caused by drought and famine. While, as I'll go into a bit below, these drought-induced famines have a natural component, Davis makes the strong argument that their intensity and impact are crucially linked to colonialism and political decisions. Following in the analysis of Amartya Sen who noted the political nature of famine, Davis highlights how areas of India that had better connection to train networks suffered *more* during these famines and how the famines in the 18th century had their damages mitigated by effective governance and redistribution of grain whereas the 19th century, colonial famines were characterized by governmental indifference and exacerbation of natural drought cycles due to a prioritzation of cash crops and squeezing money in the short term at the expense of water infrastructure development and soil health. In varying patterns across the colonized world, the rent-seeking behavior of colonial regimes or local landlords paying taxes to colonial regimes required squeezing more and more money out of poor farmers. These farmers, pushed to the brink in good years, were forced off their lands and into debt in bad years, resulting in landless and desperate strata of people. These marginalized classes couldn't invest in long-term soil health and farming infrastructure and were often pushed out of subsistence farming as they were reduced to taking farms on marginal soil that wouldn't support them. So the only option left is to turn food-producing land into cash-crop land and selling those crops for money to then buy the food required to survive. Farming is meant to be conservative because there are good years and bad years and bad years require a buffer. But this buffer was erased by colonial logic.

The result of all these factors is a horrible case of dying off of tens of millions of people at the end of the 19th century. These holocausts are awe-inspiring in their scope and not events I was familiar with before reading this book. I found the first half of the book slow to get through because Davis is very clear-eyed about the horror of these events and the horrendous situations so many people found themselves in, unable to provide for themselves and their families. These famines, were also accompanied by migration, disease, and social unrest in various forms. Again, Davis highlights particular examples mainly from Brazil, India, and China.

At the end of the book, he spends a large section talking about the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) that is part of the root cause of many of these droughts. Ocean currents have various stable patterns, one of which is the El Nino pattern that, when "strong" causes excess rains in portions of the world and drought in others. La Nina patterns rest at the other end of the spectrum and have similar effects, but are often reversed in which ares of the world see more or less rain. Davis, as meticulous as he is elsewhere in the book, describes in detail the current understanding of the phenomenon as well as the history of how the scientific community was able to understand its intricacies over many decades and the correlation between this phenomenon and various droughts and floods. He also explains the interplay between macro climatic effects like ENSO and various smaller micro-climatic effects that may lead to local differences between the effects of a particular year inside a given country. The book didn't need to go into as much depth as it does, but it give a clearer foundation to everything happening elsewhere in the pages.

At the end, the reader is left with a tremendous amount of new information in surprising depth about famine and the colonial era. It's hard to feel the "shape" of it because there are so many details about events from different perspectives: political, social, religious, environmental, agricultural. I think some of this could be told in a clearer manner, which is really the only downside to this tome. I almost laughed at the end of the book since it has literally no conclusion. The last chapter is on Brazil, analyzing the events talked about earlier in the book from a higher level political lens than some of the earlier focus on specific events and then the book is just...over. The overall organization of the book is also hard to capture: it's important to set the scene with "what happened", but the book shifts back and forth between historical acccounts, analysis of historical trends, and specific histories of specific countries. The logical flow of all the information could be improved. But despite that, it's still an important and illuminating resource.

This was a thorough and illuminating book, illustrating what many of us already know: that famines do not "just" happen. They are not caused by natural disasters alone. There is much here about El Nino itself, the weather system that changes weather patterns across much of the world but can cause devastating anomalies in monsoon-dependent areas, as in India. But the crucial focus is on the human causes of the famines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in India, China, and Brazil: the involuntary shackling of erstwhile subsistence economies to the world market, the British disregard for "native" life, and the insistence that "free" markets, complete with opportunities to make money through speculation, must prevail over life-saving relief for the poor. Davis argues that the natural and deliberate underdevelopment of British colonies of the time are largely responsible for the continued underdevelopment of what we call the "third world" today. This is a depressing book, with its unflinching treatment of unnecessary human misery, but one that has tremendous relevance today. Greed and callous economic "liberalism" still carry the day at a time when climate change and persistent and growing inequality of wealth and living standards are less and less able to ignore.

Empire laid bare

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Mike Davis attacks the reader with a firestorm of brutal epiphanies, and even if you're not so smart, or have a degree in economics, you get to grasp the idea. But after discharging his bombs, as in an air strike, the Red Baron veers off, leaving you on the ground, lost amidst smoke and debris. There's no conclusion to the sequence of blows, no further readings, no wrapping up.

The book trains the reader in the unpleasant discipline of Empire Pattern Recognition (EPR), and implicitly, after 400 pages spent analysing the most extreme examples of nation states exploiting other nations and their peoples, the reader is expected to continue by themselves, moving from India, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Brazil between the 1870s and 1900s, to any place in the present day. Do not think - not even for a second - that the holocausts are over. Millions died of hunger because of market ideology in bad faith under Queen Victoria, millions continue to die from market ideology in bad faith today.

What resistence is possible? The book's main lesson is that empire first and foremost reengineers societies to make them more vulnerable to volatility (of climate, purchasing power, health conditions). Any attempt at dismantling those institutions that for a given society represent solidarity, i.e. security of livelihood for all, has to be counteracted.

The perfect companion to Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

at the end of the nineteenth century india, china, brazil and other countries which would henceforth be labeled "third world" were hit by a catastrophe on a scale beyond anything imaginable; tens of millions of people died of hunger and disease, and the affected societies remained in a destructive circles of underdevelopement for generations to come. the main factor made responsible for this mass destruction of human life is the weather phenomenon known as ENSO (el nino southern oscillation). but as the author puts it, drought is always partly man-made, it depends on the social and industrial infrastructure if a weather phenomenon causes catastrophe.

attempting to explain what had happened is a task that mike davis takes on by investigating the fatal interdependencies between neglected irrigation systems, failure to distribute relief, integration in a world marked controlled and hence regulated by the British and other factors introduced or exacerbated by colonial imperialism.

the book deals with an important topic, its implication touches on the situation of the world of today.
unfortunately the book is detail oriented to a degree that makes it sometimes difficult to read. imagine a text comprised almost entirely of footnotes, only that they are not footnotes but regular sentences. nevertheless i learned a lot from this book.