Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (review)

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. By Mike Davis. London and New York: Verso, 2000. Pp. x+464. $27.

Three waves of drought, famine, and disease devastated China, India, and Brazil in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. At least thirty million people died, perhaps as many as sixty million. At issue in Mike Davis's polemic "is not simply that tens of millions of rural poor people died appallingly, but that they died in a manner, and for reasons, that contradict much of the conventional understanding of the economic history of the nineteenth century" (p. 8). In this staggering study of human tragedy, historians will again be confronted with the reality that "progress" is double-edged. Why, Davis asks, at the precise moment when famine disappeared from Western Europe, and when "smug claims about the life-saving benefits of steam transportation and modern grain markets" were being advanced, did millions die "alongside railroad tracks" and "on the steps of grain depots" (p. 9).

Three phenomena converged to produce widespread misery: radical climatic change, the expansion of the world economy, and the new imperialism. In the first two parts of Late Victorian Holocausts, Davis explores the conjuncture of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) episodes with the social and cultural practices of the early phase of globalization. In spite of widespread crop failures and water shortages, which proceeded from droughts and flooding effected by ENSO, food surpluses were common. Yet millions perished. European colonizers and merchants, aware of the human costs of their choices, avoided providing for the withering masses. Instead, driven by their faith in liberalism, the agents of "free trade" directed food surpluses to European markets and the heart of the industrial machine. Indigenous actors were neither oblivious to their diminishing fortunes nor stripped of agency. Davis argues that widespread famines, "engines of historical transformation," galvanized anticolonial resistance and helped fuel the millenarian movements that swept the "future third world" in the late nineteenth century.

In the third part of his book Davis examines the science of meteorology and the attempts by Europeans to explain the sudden shift in the global climate with its attendant human misfortune. Those interested in the intellectual history of science will find this part of the book most interesting. The scientific debate about what caused global climatic change—and therefore famine—raged from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, with the epistemological "breakthrough" about ENSO coming in the 1960s. Regardless of scientific understanding, however, Davis laments that advances in climatology "were purchased at the price of a narrowed and depoliticized scope of scientific inquiry" (p. 219).

The fourth part investigates the social and economic contexts that were invaded by nature, markets, and imperialists. Here Davis analyzes the political-economic and environmental conditions (the "political ecology") that dominated the pre- and post-European expansionist era. He explains that millions died only after colonizers toppled the protectionist measures that precolonial/peripheral polities had worked to secure. Though railroads and steam engines are not part of Davis's story of devastation and death, he implies that they had a lifesaving potential, a potential for warding off colossal human loss. His analysis demonstrates the extent to which humans, science, machines, nature, and colonialism profoundly influenced one another.

As is often the case with sweeping comparative studies, Davis's work demands close scrutiny. Such scrutiny indicates, for one thing, that he fails adequately to examine the flows of capital and the histories of capital formation that underpinned global famine. That is, he presents the reader with a world in which global capitalism and colonialism were autonomous forces proceeding according to an inexorable Eurocentric logic. In his view, their emergence and function require little explanation: capitalism, colonialism, and tragedy were phenomena created and driven solely by irresponsible Europeans. Davis mostly dismisses the role of...