Previous Mike Davis books showed a brilliant polemical imagination, but this is a book that manages to combine that polemical fire with a rigorous academic discourse, reinforced with reams of quantitative, demographic, and meteorological data. Certainly, Davis presents a compelling argument for how colonialism and liberal capitalism starved certain regions in particular, stoked social unrest, exacerbated social disparities, and destroyed native techniques for dealing with climactic extremes. I would like if he had drawn out how his "late Victorian holocausts" continue to impact the third world, but it's a good starting point.

Not really sure how to wrap up this one up. A brutal and powerful book. Immensely wide-ranging. For me the highlight was the analysis of the utopian (dystopian) fanaticism and depravity of liberal governance in colonial India

Chapter 9 on the underdevelopment of India and the wider significance of India and China in the global political economy of British empire is awesome political economy. Combined with deep attentiveness to the histories of India, Brazil and China, this was a great antidote to EH’s Eurocentrism in the Age of Empires for someone new to this terrain

Potentially more could have been done to tie the social causes of famine to the ecological dynamics of land degradation and drought, but with the scale of this, leaving some work for the reader can be forgiven…

The author divides his book into three sections. The first section comes off as an overheated tabloid expose a la "The Untold Story of El Nino's Global Impacts." That writing style backfires in the context of a scholarly monograph, which this book purports to be, because an expository essay's thesis is supposed to be developed by the evidence, not the temperature of the analysis. Scholarly research should be balanced, contemplative, and it should seek complexity. And while Dr. Davis tones down his hyperbole in the other two sections by discarding the eardrum-shattering verbiage of the earlier section and adopting a more discursive tone, his analysis is anything but balanced, contemplative, and complex. It's too bad because that mediocre analysis compromised his strong integration of some complex material and and the development of a research purpose that was driven by an ingenious hypothesis. Yes, I know, the book won a lot of awards. I am not convinced. Sorry.

I cannot exaggerate when I call this a life-changing read - especially for those of us in the Indian diaspora - even if we are not the ones directly affected we have been raised by a world shaped by the British Empire's decision to starve millions all in its fetishization of market logic. What we can see in the past is indeed what we can see in the present today.

"The Third World was not a product of underdevelopment, but rather the direct result of imperialism and capitalism."

This is just an eye-opening and thought-provoking exploration of the devastating famines that occurred during the late 19th century and their profound impact on the formation of the Third World. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the complex relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and climatic forces that led to some of the deadliest famines in history. After reading this book, it had made realize how devastating colonization can be.

Davis demonstrates how colonial powers, particularly the British Empire, exacerbated the impact of El Niño-induced droughts and floods through their ruthless economic policies, such as the imposition of cash crops and the dismantling of indigenous agricultural practices. It did gave me a new perspective to the things I have previously read from the history books.

This book an indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding the historical roots of global inequality.

Between 1889 to 1891, in Ethiopia and the Sudan, “perhaps one third of the population died” from famine. In the 1800’s, 12.2 to 29.3 million people in India perished during just two droughts due to starvation. All these famines were avoidable and there were grain surpluses nearby at the same time but as this book amply shows, for Britain, business spoke louder than basic moral qualms. Imagine Americans being taught that China’s Taiping Revolution of 1851-1864 was the bloodiest civil war in history and not our own and that it claimed 20 to 30 million lives. This book was great for telling you about neglected holocausts - but, maybe because of its timeline, Mike does not mention the just as important British made great famine and genocide in Persia 1917-1919, (Mohammad Gholi Majd) which forced alone on Persia (and not any western power) the greatest casualties of WWI (ten million Persians dead). Mike’s book posits that it was the exploitation of the last quarter of the 19th century that forced the Third World into its present state while Majd’s book suggests the truth might be more complex.

This book shows how markets often accelerate, rather than alleviate, famine, pain, and suffering. Picture Britons eating the bread of starving Indians during a famine, unaware of their government’s policies. Lytton puts on a feast in India for 68,000 – “the most expensive meal in world history” - while 100,000 of the Queen’s subjects brutally starved to death in nearby Mysore and Madras. Disraeli, Salisbury, and both sides of the House of Commons saw India first as a moneymaker and so the famine proceeded. There had been a British relief effort in the Nineteenth Century, but the Economist blasted the life-saving move an attempt to keep Indians lazy, as dependent of hand-outs to stay alive. Those dead by famine were recast as “parasitic mendicants who had essentially committed suicide.” This is a story of paupers in India ruthlessly and chronically getting their pockets picked by Her Majesties Government. 78% of collections were “coercive” – ah, so much for the myth of the refined British.

Picture Indian farmers scratching hardened soil with sticks, no one can pay for the food or fuel to transport anything anywhere, and humans have replaced dead draft animals in carrying goods or by hooking themselves to a remaining plow. If you saw that and started relief work in India back then, you were reprimanded and shut down. But in 1878, the famine story finally started to get out. This was now 20 years after the British tied Indians to cannons to blow them apart (the Sepoy Mutiny). Indians were taxed at double the rate of an Englishman even though they produced 1/15 the income. The rule of India was not about civilizing; it was about empire. It was about following the Benthamite principle that aid to the poor must be “bitterly” punitive to discourage dependence. The Irish Famine kills one million whites and all U.S. elementary schools mention it – the Indian Famine of 1877 wiped out a non-white population equivalent to the ENTIRE Irish population and no one ever talks about it. 5.5 million to 12 million people died in an easily preventable famine with nearby railroads and grain. Adawa (1898) was Europe’s greatest defeat in Africa. In 1888, Kodak releases a camera that any missionary could use and that changes India’s photo documentation big time.

Britain had a problem, Queen Victoria’s $$$ Diamond Jubilee was coming up and to finance it they had turn grain to cash forcing many people in India starve to get the last bits of money to pay for it. Luckily, the British at the time had no moral qualms as long as they couldn’t hear all that blasted screaming and/or moaning on a different continent and so the Jubilee was the huge success. 12 to 16 million died in what the Press called the famine of the century, but Mike says, there was a bigger famine in 1899-1902. Lytton and Curzon were famine architects. Think of Fabians as hardcore imperialists. The Lancet in 1901 said India’s Famine Death Toll under British rule was 19 million. See how well Britain treats its “possessions”? To be fair, in Xian in China, famine caused ground corpses to be sold for “the equivalent of about four cents per pound” by real life “flesh peddlers” and became an actual staple sold in meatball form. Beginning in 1899, the Americans closed off the ports of the Philippines and manipulated disease and hunger as well as their prior masters, the Brits, had done. Destroying the Philippine food economy and a nation’s basic self-sufficiency – such a laudable Christian goal was achieved there, as well as setting up the first surveillance state (Alfred McCoy). The Americans, who love freedom and liberty so much, killed off 1 out of 7 Philippine residents and began immediately surveilling the other six million (McCoy).

In the 18th century, weavers and artisans in India had better diets than their British counterparts. See how Britain ripped $ from not only India, but China and others to create the British Empire. India was forced to buy Britain’s old crap that it didn’t want any more in order to subsidize Britain’s growth. It’s called putting your capital where it has the great rate of return (of course, under the threat of violence). Britain controlled China’s domestic commerce and shipping. Opium sales paid for the “cost of imperial expansion in India”. From 1757 to 1947, under British rule, Indians saw zero increase in income, but during this books time frame, many saw an income decline of 50%. The average person in India thought English officials were there only to tax, kill or imprison them. Ah, winning hearts and minds, London-Style. Picture China as a land that developed its water transport but had long ignored its roads. Overland transport was crazy expensive, and shall we say inefficient? US War Hawks forget that the Communists won against the Nationalists partly because the Communists had long emphasized rural road building. By 1939, Africa had lost its economic independence to the world market. Another great book by Mike Davis that should be read by every British citizen, or moral carbon-based lifeform.

A bold interpretation of the interaction of nature and history that ties the impact of El Nino and climate conditions to the globalization of the economy in the late 19th century and how these factors helped create what we now call "The Third World".

If you, like most people, have never heard of the enormous famines that struck India and China in the late 1800's you owe it to yourself to read this. It's not pretty, but essential history reading.

Very informative, both about climate cycles and the politics of famine. Glad to know more about El Nino and La Nina, as well the huge differences between famine/drought/flood/crop failure and hunger. Davis makes a very convincing argument that Britian and capitalist ideology were behind some of the largest famines in history. That said, defending Mao's incompetence in the great famine of the 50s is a little uncalled for...

A classic historical account that gave prominence to environmental history in order to fully reveal the sheer scale of imperial inhumanity. By illuminating the impact of ENSO - regular but unpredictable climactic variations that can cause drought in large portions of the world by diverting air streams - Davis is able to excellently break down how the unstoppable force of drought met with the immovable object of British cruelty.

To stress the point, drought alone does not case famine. In fact, most areas affected by severe ENSO disruption in the 19th century (India, China, Brazil) had methods of coping with famine before being immiserated and systematically deconstructed by the unrelenting movement of global free markets and militarily enforced white supremacy. For example, China had an elaborate system of grain storehouses supported by wealthy landowners, able to be mobilised and transported via canal routes by zealous administrators in times of regional famine. Besides such carefully planned networks to limit loss of life, traditional methods of farming and small scale water control methods and relationships with the land allowed various peasant communities all around the world to respond flexibly to droughts.

Imperial policy changed all this: rapidly fencing off and destroying communal land; brutally enforcing the encroachment of world markets which destabilised local economies and encouraged unsustainable mono-culture farming; emptying disaster relief funds and storehouses; implementing previously unheard-of levels of taxation to spend squarely on the military; intervening to prevent local land and irrigation improvements. Truly no policy was too inhumane if it could make a quick profit for imperial shareholders. The much praised railroads that the British Raj built all over India (constructed using the exploited labour of forcefully impoverished people while bodies piled up alongside the tracks) were used mainly to quickly remove food from areas of famine so that it could then be price-hiked and sold at massive profits to people forced to sell their children and eat rodents or human flesh to survive - though most peasants would not have been able to afford the grain anyway after the hikes. Ignoring Mughal practices of providing food at no means testing to areas affected by famine, the British forced starving victims to commit to gruelling labour, often without any guarantee of recieving the aid anyway. For example, to prove they weren't faking starvation, victims would be made to walk miles to access relief stores in other towns, only to die of exhaustion on route. The imperial policies which birthed some of the worst famines in human history (damningly labelled holocausts by Davis' thoughful appraisal) are even more heartbreaking for being juxtaposed next to breakdowns of how previously wealthy and well insulated certain regions had been. India and China both had much higher qualities of life than Europe for much of the 18th century, were responsible for a quarter and a third of global wealth production respectively, and had successful honour-based systems for limiting ecological damage and mitigating natural disasters.

As someone who has studied Indian and Chinese environmental history, much of the book was familiar to me, though a more full picture is achieved by also comparing these regions with parts of African and Brazil. As someone who mostly worked with social history (and thus who found some of the economic bits dry, and the death toll counting rather besides the point), the section on the workings of the ENSO was near indecypherable, though a not-inadequate attempt was made to break it down for subject-adjacent specialists (though not laymen, certainly!). I'd certainly recommend the book for those interested in British colonial history or environmental history. The two should rightly go hand in hand, as it is impossible to understand the wide reaching impacts of the former without earnestly tackling the latter.

Though I agree with other reviewers that Davis is at his best when discussing India, the sections on Brazil, China, and numerous other places (to which he pays insufficient attention, truly) are generally informative. Perhaps it's fair to say that he establishes his argument on the basis of the British genocides in India, and then produces schematic outlines of varying depths for the imperial genocides in China, Brazil, Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and so on. That slight flaw noted, this text has very high quality--fine documentation and a well reasoned, committed perspective. Overall, this text is probably the first step in rationally countering the trash that is *The Black Book of Communism*--call this chapter one of *The Black Book of Capitalism* (perhaps Blum's *Killing Hope* can be chapter 2--and, yes, there is in fact a *Black Book of Capitalism* in German, which is actually about capitalism; I am unaware of any translation yet to English--no surprise there!)

Some reviewers have pooh-poohed the text on the basis that it sets up typical marxist hierarchies of villainy in its attempt to define famines as political events. This complaint is of course a straw man: though proper marxists will point out that there is a politics to everything--including the weather--it is unlikely that marxism traditionally attempts to blame someone for everything.

Some have also carped against the text for suggesting simply that some deadly virus of capitalism infected China, resulting in the famines there. In fact, Davis' reading of the Manchu Qing dynasty and its policies is much more nuanced than that, and considers a host of issues--including ENSO, the Taiping and other rebellions, surely the Opium Wars, the catastrophic shift of the Yellow River in 1855, and numerous others--including indigenous Chinese corruption, and, yes, some of the more familiar brutalities of the capitalist system.

Critics tend likewise to have a dismissive attitude toward Davis' thesis regarding the integration of India, China, and Brazil into the world capitalist system--not a useful intellectual response to a serious historical debate. I for one would appreciate an actual refutation, by means of proofs that the genocides indeed were not caused, exacerbated, or otherwise enabled by British capitalism & imperialism. Instead, for the moment, all the rightwing offers is "two cheers for colonialism," like a pack of dirtbag fascists.

Critics have otherwise attempted to critique Davis on the basis of a perceived turn in his analysis of the big 20th century famines, under Stalin and Mao, which are said to be unrelated to ENSO, both in fact and in Davis. Such statements are fairly dishonest and perplexing. Davis does in fact make a case for such developments continuing into the 20th century--and he does in fact furthermore consider, briefly albeit, both the Ukranian and Chinese famines mentioned above. Though his treatment overall of Russia is one of the most schematic in the text, he does note that the Volga basin seems to feature a correlation of ENSO to drought/famine, and moreover records the 1930 El Nino as correlated to the 1931 drought crisis (269). This undoubtedly does not explain the fullness of the Ukranian famine, but it certainly will contribute to an explanation that otherwise focuses on Stalinist criminality and commie bungling. The same goes for the Maoist case, where Davis correlates the famines associated with the Great Leap Forward very specifically to ENSO, an argument certainly to be ignored by unreconstructed Cold Warriors and crypto-mccarthyites (248-251).

One of the most assinine criticism of the text from the rightwing regards Davis' thesis that the maoist famine was attributable to the inability of the countryside to communicate effectively with the bureaucracy, the purported lack of socialist democracy, which is summarily dismissed as a fantasy. It is incredibly obtusely dishonest to make this kind of criticism. Davis does attempt to explain the Chinese famine as a result of a complex of factors, including human decisions, meteorology, and the weight of the aggregate of history (the suggestion that Chiang, a victorious Japanese invasion, or an outright US occupation of China would've performed better is quite simply laughable, given the circumstances).

Also, critics respond to Davis by heaping adoration on Robert Conquest and western Cold War Sovietologists; these folks would have us believe that, say, Stalin killed 50 million people in the USSR, but still managed to defeat the Nazis, losing 20 million more in the process-such claims make little sense--indeed, the only people who accept Conquest's exaggerations are pathological anti-communists who don't need any evidence at all for anything.

The anti-communist will further criticize Davis by suggesting that the lack of "socialist democracy" in China is axiomatic, sniping that socialist democracy has never existed. This more or less vapid point is both puerile and a red herring, evading Davis' thesis--which was that the lack of two way communication between Beijing and the Chinese peasant allowed for the true extent of the famine to remain releatively unknown to the state planners. (The rightwing response is of course that the maoists wanted the peasants to die off--which is about as plausible as Bush wanting to blow up Manhattan--but, what the hell, they're evil commies!)

It is likewise disingenuous, as any attempts to pair a socialist economy with a political democracy have been destroyed by the Western powers--consider the destruction of Allende's regime in Chile (1973), to take the most famous example, the sabotage of the Vietnamese general elections in 1955, the low intensity warfare carried out against any number of regimes in Latin America or Africa (Nicaragua? Angola?), resulting in their degeneration and destruction, and the crushing of dozens of movements that struggled against autocratic capitalist regimes all over the world (El Salvador? South Africa? Philippines? Indonesia? everywhere in the Middle East?)--all crimes committed by the US precisely to destroy any potential "socialist democracy" from coming into existence and thereby providing a model of development that counters western militarism and economic hegemony, i.e., the friendly fascism of the US and its allies.

Very highly recommended. Would be perfect if the rigor of the Indian sections were carried through to the rest (including the 20th century items aforesaid).

It's an incredible book depicting the ways in which Imperialists (especially the British) created the "Third World" through exploiting climatic conditions to impoverish the people of their colongies. It's very powerful;moving beyond belief.