This is the 19th century prelude to Planet of Slums. Davis disrupts the specter of Asian or Third World poverty as that which always has been and always will be, with a hard historical analysis of British Imperialism and market economics and culture. Though Davis looks at the Philippines, China and Brazil, he spends a lot of time on India and British policies that created massive famine and caused millions of deaths. Food produced for the market and not local consumption meant that many had no food to eat when the price of grain on London markets went up. Davis looks at the intersection between policy, weather and food production and the impact it has on populations.

In a stellar (and readable) example of interdisciplinary historical research, Davis lays bare the skeleton underlying many of the popular conceptions regarding the nature of the "Third World" and its economies. Drawing from sources as diverse as scientific accounts of El Nino and La Nina cycles at the turn of the last century, missionary writings, accountancy notes, travelers' journals, newspaper clippings, and other exhaustive primary and secondary works, Davis describes how the British empire, along with other colonial forces, took advantage of periods of what would have been survivable drought in India, China, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Brazil, and used the circumstances of need to crush the local structures of governance and food-sharing networks and create a horror show of poverty, disease, and the starvation deaths of millions upon millions of people, while simultaneously setting the stage for a further century of economic privation and authoritarian control.

RIP Mike Davis, was shocked to hear he passed while I was reading this. Loved the parts of this book about the ways in which Imperial powers 'caused' famine through malicious resource management and drought planning (or rather lack of drought planing.) Was a little less interested in Davis' in-depth analysis of weather patterns, but then I never was a particularly good science student.

Davis is a classic muckraker who does an admirable job of combining social and ecological history while debunking many Western myths about how poor countries got so poor.

He’s also an academic who includes more obtuse shout-outs to other historians and economists than I care to read. I have to admit that I skipped 13 pages of the middle section on El Niño patterns and at times wished I was reading a New Yorker-article version of this book. Still, Late Victorian Holocausts is a great counterpoint to pretty much everything you thought you knew about world history.