In precolonial times, the peasants in India and China had been protected from famine-associated subsistence crises by a kind of bureaucratic or despotic welfare system practiced by the Mogul and Qing states, which maintained irrigation systems and stockpiled and distributed food in times of hardship caused by natural disasters. In telling the story of these forgotten disasters, Mike Davis shows that it wasn't bad weather alone that killed so many people, and details how the relationship between global climate changes associated with El Niño and imperialist policies pursued by European capitalist regimes resulted in a dramatic division of humanity into have and have-not regions of the world.ĭavis, who calls himself a "Marxist-Environmentalist," sets out in this work to analyze the convergence of failed economic and political systems with "ecological poverty," defined as the loss or depletion of the natural resource base of traditional agriculture.
The mortality rates in some countries were as great as if a nuclear holocaust had occurred. Not since the Black Death of 500 years earlier had there been a disaster of such magnitude.
The loss of life was staggering, between 30 million and 60 million victims of starvation and epidemics in three separate but related global famines in 1877-1878, 1888-1891, and 1896-1902. The worst of these events happened in India, China, and Brazil. The extreme climatic conditions that brought about these famines were associated with weather patterns known as El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a series of devastating droughts and famines occurred in the monsoon tropics and northern China. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis (Verso, New York, 2001) 464 pp., $27.00 hardcover/$20.00 paper.
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