An utterly satisfying Marxish multidisciplinary history of famines, drought, and the capitalistic system which doomed millions to their death during the late 19th century. Cheery stuff with lots of harrowing photographs.

Uma história que nunca havia lido em outros livros, pelo que lembro, pelo menos. Mike Davis conta um pouco do que aconteceu no terceiro mundo (pelo menos na época) enquanto a colonização inglesa avançava. O livro traz uma discussão grande sobre o que acontece quando Governos e economia se fortalecendo entram em conflito com subsistência e quem não é interessante para economia ou votos. Com direito a uma passagem pelo Nordeste brasileiro no fim do século XIX.

Estou bem acostumado com a narrativa do capitalismo trazendo a prosperidade (de The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World aO otimista racional: Por que o mundo melhora), mas nunca tinha lido sobre o que pode dar errado. Quando o capitalismo traz fome. Até ver o que acontece quando a Inglaterra estende vias de comércio e linhas de trem para a Índia e ingleses podem pagar mais pelo trigo do que os indianos. Só ingleses comem e a Índia passar por uma Fome enorme.

In case you've been wondering why the Indians wanted to boot out the British...A fascinating read, would have finished it but I was only a houseguest for the weekend, plus Davis's writing is a bit dense and academic.

Mike Davis focuses on the last quarter of the nineteenth century, looking at the extreme climatic conditions of the times which led to droughts, floods and famines. He looks at the El Nino events and there is a good deal of meteorology in the book. Davis focuses on India, China and Brazil in particular, but also partially on Southern Africa, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Sudan. The death tolls are immense 12 million in China and 6 million in India in 1876-8 alone. Davis provides a detailed analysis which shows that the real problem was the way the Imperial powers managed the problem, sticking to the principles of free trade leading to hikes in grain prices and very little famine relief. The European powers (particularly Britain) are the main culprits, but also to a lesser extent the US and Japan. Davis concludes that the imposition of free market economics was cultural genocide and it’s difficult to argue with that conclusion.
Davis points out that there was no increase in India’s per capita income between 1757 and 1947 and the British systematically dismantled the Indian manufacturing sector. In the mid eighteenth century the average European standard of living was slightly lower than the rest of the world and India actually produced a quarter of the world’s manufactures. The Raj soon changed all that!
There is a political history and a scientific history contained within this book and Davis has done his research. The total death toll due to famine in India, China and Brazil 1876-1902 was around sixty million. Two points stand out:
“They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed many were murdered... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.”
And
“Although crop failures and water shortages were of epic proportion.. there were almost always surpluses elsewhere in the nation or empire that could have potentially rescued drought victims.”
Of course the railroads were a possible solution, but:
“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.”
The pictures of famine victims look similar to those of people in later concentration camps. This completely blows any illusion that Empire was in any way “good” for colonized peoples and should dispel any nostalgia for a lost imperial past. One small niggle: a chapter to round it all up at the end would have been helpful.

A fascinating book showing that the great third-world famines in India, South America, and China in the nineteenth century, which killed tens of millions, was in fact not the result of random weather patterns, but Western interference in the global market and colonialism. A devastating book, one that any casual defender of the "good" brought by the West to the world needs to read.

It is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies toward 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.

This book helps to put looming climate catastrophe in perspective. The apocalypse has already happened, many times over, and we're hardly even aware of the fact.

When you consider that a combination of European imperial policies and extreme climate disturbances in the late 19th century led to tens of millions of deaths from famine (and the system of global stratification that is still with us), and that then inter-European imperial rivalry led to a world war in 1914, which, unresolved, would lead to another world war in 1939, and that another 60 million or so would die in these wars...

The 1878-80 Famine Commission statistics revealed a surprisingly perverse relationship between modernization and mortality that challenged the British belief in 'life-saving' railroads and markets. In both the Bombay and Madras Deccan, as Digby pointed out in an acerbic commentary, 'the population decreased more rapidly where the districts were served by railways [23%] than where there were no railways [21%]. This is a protection against famine entirely in the wrong direction.' - pp 111

***

Overall an extremely depressing book, but then there is this inspiring moment:

Indeed, Hyndman's feisty little Marxist party, the Social Democratic Federation, was the only British political organization that never wavered in its attention to India's famine victims... Typical of the SDF's courageous anti-imperialism was the response of one Scottish branch to the otherwise delirious celebration of the British victory in South Africa in 1902: 'While on all sides of the street the harlot, Capitalism, was decked in horrible array of all possible and impossible colours, there was projected from the windows of the SDF a transparency of five feet, giving the statistics of deaths in war, deaths in concentration camps, the numbers of paupers, the number of unemployed in Britain, the famine deaths in India, and the famine deaths, emigration and evictions in Ireland.' - pp 165

The British empire was just massive machine for inducing famine, and they more or less completely got away with it. Grateful for these Scottish comrades from 1902.

This is one of those books that everyone should read. Actually, find a summary somewhere and read that instead.

The gist here is that a series of major droughts in the late 19th century were caused by a combination of strong El Nino events coupled with awful consequences of colonialism, laissez-faire capitalism, and social Darwinism. However, after 400 pages, I came away feeling pretty convinced, but also pretty confused, because Davis does a great job of telling the terrible stories of India, Africa, China, and Brazil, but never seemed--to me--to tie them together into one big narrative.

He does write a really great description of how El Nino and ENSO work in Chapter 7, but then discusses how there are several other systems which cause long-term and local modulations, so that despite knowing about ENSO, no actual pattern in the floods and droughts discussed ever actually emerges. I felt like the economics side was even worse--prices of this are collapsing, or skyrocketing, or people are suddenly destitute for whatever reason, but it always seemed like there was no underlying scheme or pattern besides Imperialism And Capitalism Did It.

So in the end, I'm glad I read it, but I kinda wish Davis could have held my hand a little more.

Yazarın tüm kitap boyunca üzerine durduğu ve okuyucularının zihnine zerk etmek istediği ana mesele, 19. yüzyılın özellikle ikinci yarısında ivmelenen sömürgecilik ve emperyalizm dinamiklerinin, bugün üçüncü dünya ülkeleri olarak bildiğimiz ülkeleri, dönemin doğal afetlerinin yarattığı etkilerle de birleşerek nasıl üçüncü dünyalaştırdığıdır. Bu ülkeler (Çin, Hindistan, Brezilya) daha önceki yüzyıllarda da de kuraklık ve sel gibi afetlerle karşılaşmışlardır ancak kendi geçimlik ekonomileri ve "paternal" özellikler taşıyan devletleri sayesinde, bu afetleri asgari hasarla atlatmayı bilmişlerdir. 19. yüzyılın sonlarındaki afetlerinin bu ülkelerin halklarını yıkıma sürüklemesindeki asıl fail ise, Britanya öncülüğündeki emperyalist güçlerdir. "Gelişmişlik,modernleşme, ilerleme ve demiryolları beraberinde açlığı ve ölümü getirmiştir.
Kitabın güçlü bir diğer tarafı; uluslar arasındaki eşitsizlik üzerinde dururken, ülkelerin kendi içerisindeki sınıfsal dengeleri göz ardı etmemesidir. Özellikle, farklı ülkeleri merceğine aldığı son bölümlerde, açlıktan ölen Hint,Çinli ve Brezilyalı yoksullarla birlikte, bunlar üzerinden servet biriktiren toprak sahiplerini ve tefeci tüccarların hikayesini de okuruz.
Kitaba getirebileceğim iki eleştiri var. Birincisi, koca bir bölümü meteoroloji tarihiyle ilgili bir bölüme ayırmış ve bana göre bu bölümün biraz teknik bir dili vardı. Okuyucuyu zorlayabilecek ve kitaptan koparabilecek bir bölümdü. İkinci olarak ise, kitabın sonunda toparlayıcı ve kısa bir sonuç bölümü okumayı bekledim. Ancak sanıyorum, yazar kitabın giriş bölümünde meramını aktardığı için böyle bir şeye gerek duymamış.

I find a quote Davis includes in his preface to this book to be a good summation of the liberal worldview

"In capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms."

All liberals will eventually default to this argument if you press them hard enough.

This line of thought has always struck me as a kind of existential self preservation. Those who feel the need to slavishly defend capitalism can never truly reckon with its historical impact. Doing so would mean coming to terms with the fact you share the same ideology as the people who colonized and brutalized the world over.

Liberalism and Imperialism, 2 sides of the same Capitalist coin…

Preamble:
--2022 Update: with the author going into palliative care, it’s time to update this review and fill in some gaps (esp. political economy of imperialism).
--I am most interested in the materialist structures (political economy: production/distribution) behind “liberalism” rather than getting lost in the cultural spillover effects. What drives our notions of “progress”, “growth” and “cosmopolitanism” behind liberalism? Instead of merely dwelling in ideas (where we are a bundle of contradictions), what about the production/distribution of real-world capitalism (i.e. commodification of society for endless private accumulation) from the 1600 East India Company and 1694 Bank of England to today’s Amazon and Wall Street?
--Meanwhile, this critical examination of real-world history/political economy is buried. “History” starts with names and dates; names of the great men who won (and their perspectives) and dates of singular events (noisy surface phenomenon which barely reveal the underlying structures). Next, “economics” takes the winners, abstracts away interrelations (ex. imperialism), and builds a vulgar utopian (insert “free” to everything) model devoid of real-world application (power, class, contradictions, crises).
--What we are left with, once we remove the politically-correct facade, is enlightened (industrious + humane) Western liberalism burdened with bringing civilization to the backward, coloured continents.

The bones of history:
--On one side, the colonizers bask in their spoils while looking away from the ruins of the other side. Critical books like this one are not meant to simply cross to the other side and pick through the bones; they are meant to rebuild historical context.
--Consider: a common capitalist ploy to make socialism/communism scary is comparing “communist famines” with the mass consumerism of capitalism. On the surface this seems so obvious. Let’s first unpack “capitalist mass consumerism”, and then “communist famines”:

a) “Capitalist mass consumerism”: first, consider the decreases in living standards of the masses upon the introduction of capitalism. This initial capitalist accumulation in the real-world requires the violent enforcement of the land market (private “enclosures” of “Commons” common land), forcing the creation of the labour market of masses dispossessed and thus can only sell their labour (a crucial input for capitalist production). Introduced in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails.
…Thus, conditions for (domestic) masses only recovered (ex. English workers’ 300+ years of struggle 1500-1800s) after workers organized to struggle for proto-socialist/socialist reforms (social services esp. public sanitation/health, less atrocious working conditions, welfare, etc.). A summary of this decolonization perspective is found in Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and detailed in Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital.
…Capitalism's global relations have been tidal waves of dispossession during booms and busts (colonial loot/slave trade/drug trade workhouses/dark satanic mills of the Industrial revolution/military industrial complex). No doubt the real-world has many contradictions; capitalist property rights’ sheer abstraction ensures mass social consent required to mobilize and squeeze the masses to unleash vast productive powers.
...Capitalist technology is driven by private accumulation for the few; “mass consumerism” only reached the (domestic) masses after the 2 greatest wars in human history; WWI from the collision of imperialist rivalries; WWII from capitalism’s Great Crash and endless Great Depression that spawned fascism’s attempt to revive capitalist production.
…World destruction was the only excuse capitalists could tolerate for risking enough social planning which revolutionized production/technologies. The risk is the realization that we don’t need the absentee shareholders/bondholders and private bankers behind capitalist property rights (remember: management is a waged occupation; shareholding/capital gains/collecting interest is not work) and can instead plan our economy for social needs. War is tolerable because it is inherently hierarchical and driven by short-term pillaging, like a corporation: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.
…Capitalists were gifted with so much new technologies by the planned war economy, but the irrationality of a society driven by capitalist accumulation meant returning to the Great Depression when the war markets of WWII world destruction ended. This is when capitalists finally shifted to “mass consumerism” (and the welfare state compromise to catch up to the USSR on social services), but for many war industries (esp. the “near bankrupt aircraft industry”: Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation) this was not enough (while other industries quickly reached overproduction/market saturation, thus requiring built-in obsolescence (Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage) and a colossal advertising industry of dissatisfaction/social addiction (Captains Of Consciousness: Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture). Hence, the Cold War and the Military Industrial Complex war spending's continuous centrality to the US economy since WWII.

b) “Communist famines”: just what is the starting point of our comparison? How convenient it is to compare capitalist winners (and not the capitalist losers, i.e. the colonized!) who already went through industrialization over centuries, on the backs of slavery/dark satanic mills/colonialism/settler colonialism that (surprise!) include the communist countries. Meanwhile, 20th century revolutions started from feudal backwaters/colonized destitution (pre-revolution China was the "Sick Man of Asia" with a life expectancy in the 30's), going through rapid industrialization/urbanization/agrarian reforms in decades in a hostile capitalist world, i.e. economic sanctions (US’s total trade embargo on post-revolution China 1950-1972 and continuing embargo on post-revolution Cuba) and “war communism” of USSR being mutilated from Civil War’s imperialist invasion/direct Nazi invasion/Cold War arms race arms chase more accurately, see: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
…Next, let's take the biggest bogeyman: China’s Mao-era famines. More honest liberals (not surprisingly originating in the Global South, i.e. not the imperialist winners) like Amartya Sen are willing to make non-ludicrous comparisons: post-independence China under a communist party/“socialism with Chinese characteristics” vs. post-independence India under liberalism (parliamentary “democracy” + driven by capitalist markets). The results are something you just do not hear in our “free marketplace of ideas”, which I summarize at the bottom of this review: Capitalism: A Ghost Story
…For more, see:
1) Vijay Prashad on imperialist ideological censorship: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74
2) ...on comparing countries ("the world's largest democracy" India and "authoritarian" China): https://youtu.be/4hz5sXYiBo8
3) Michael Parenti on comparing countries: https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc
4) Global South decolonization and self-determination: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...

Highlights:
--My apologies if the above is already obvious; in the spirit of uncensored histories, I felt the preamble was necessary. Finally, onto the book (note: I've filled in gaps in political economy, with sources):

1) History of the Visible Fist:
--Civilizations of China and India were non-capitalist: these were “societies with markets”, not “market societies” (as mentioned earlier, capitalism = driven by endless private accumulation from the commodification of society via land market/labour market, and increasingly stock/financial markets + private investment banking). China/India were also global leaders in traded goods and were only overtaken by violent conquest (instead of utopic “free trade”/”free market” competition), where Britain’s superior violence (no doubt refined from centuries of European religious wars) smashed Indian manufacturers and turned them into growing opium to force-sell to China (after superior violence in the Opium Wars). Finally, Britain could fix its trade imbalance with Asia, as prior to this Britain’s only worthwhile traded commodity to offer was silver/gold from settler colonial pillaging.
--Of course, on the back of the tidal waves of violence, Britain could establish more abstract (once again: social consent, long-term) economic imperialism. Britain’s industrialization policy contradicted “free trade” propaganda because domestic “infant industries” in manufacturing must be protected (protectionism) and nurtured against global competition of superior foreign manufacturing. Once British manufacturing became dominant, Britain could preach “free trade” to prevent competitors from the same tactic of “infant industry protection” and keep them as cheap raw materials exporters to feed British manufacturing. This is popularized to the liberal mainstream in Ha-Joon Chang’s “kicking away the ladder” Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, but we can bypass Chang's US enlightenment lens with The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, and related: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry.
--The book’s last quarter maps out British imperialism amidst imperialist competition, where British free trade policy (including opening its domestic market to industrial imports i.e. US/German) eventually led to second-rate technology compared to US and German tariff-protected state-subsidized innovations. The crucial point here is British imperialism's pillaging of India/China allowed the British Empire to sustain such deficits with rising US/Germany during the Late Victorian era, thus a triangular colonial arrangement that indirectly subsidized US/German industrialization. See the dense but essential Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present which compares this “triangular colonial arrangement” with the other major phases of capitalism.

2) Politics of Capitalist Famines:
--Tens of millions died of famines during the Late Victorian era (1876-1902). Are we to believe the ancient civilizations of China and India are destined for “overpopulation” and starvation? Davis details the political nature of mass famines. China and India had numerous adaptations (price control, grain surplus granaries/redistribution mechanisms, hydraulic infrastructure to handle floods/irrigation) but these all collapsed as British imperialism forced both countries to become cheap exporters to feed global capitalism.
--Capitalist famines resulted not from absolute food scarcity, but from high food prices of laissez-faire market, as State famine relief and ecological regulation were demolished. The dispossessed died next to railroads that shipped food away for export. Profit (and racism) over people. See “The Divide” mentioned earlier, as global capitalism continues to kill millions annually due not to lack of resources/overpopulation (Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis) but due to maldistribution of imperialist trade pillaging via capitalist markets/property rights.

3) Non-capitalist Famine Relief:
--Details of China and India’s prior famine relief infrastructure was fascinating. While European peasants had no guarantee of subsistence as a human right despite European liberalism’s “Age of Reason”, French Physiocrats (precursors of Classical political economy) marveled at China’s mobilization for famine relief. Never believe “there is no alternative”.
--I’m curious to read more on Classical political economy Adam Smith’s perspectives on China (Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Despite being vulgarized to just the “Invisible Hand” bringing the best social outcome from selfish individuals, moral philosopher Smith wrote an entire book (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) on his moral assumptions prior to his “The Wealth of Nations”.

4) Political Ecology:
--The divide between physical sciences vs. social sciences/humanities is slowly being filled by syntheses like this book. The book’s organization was tricky, and much of the climatology details went over my head on my first read; I’ve since been prioritizing the synthesis of the environment with critical political economy:
-Degrowth as decolonization: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-Ecosocialist intro to Earth Systems Science: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

Here is the historical background of the "global economy" and the distribution of wealth and power. A snapshot of who is going to suffer as global warming and rising seas bring us ever greater not-so-natural disasters. A book I wish I could persuade everyone to read.

A necessary book that highlights how the structures of a global order shaped by colonialism and free-marking capitalism exacerbated periods of scarcity using India, China and Brazil as case studies.

Davis specifically lays waste to the idea that Britain was a civilising or modernising force in India arguing persuasively that at best the ecology and food security of the sub-continent was stagnant under the British and was almost certainly worsened by British policy. He is it at pains to show the callous disregard the British had for its colonial subjects at their most desperate. Given the focus on famines in the Deccan plateau it makes for an interesting response to the ideas that Britain forced the princely states to modernise given the shear devastation of the regions around the princely state of Hyderabad it raises serious questions about this. It would be interesting to compare the response of the Indian 'princes' to famine in comparison to the British.

The book doesn't have a conclusion however, which means it ends quite abruptly.

Overall an important and necessary ready especially given the ever growing danger of climate change driven crisis.