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| Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
| | Mike Davis
| Examining a
series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned
around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis
discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance
and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst
tragedies in human history.
Late Victorian Holocausts
focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India,
Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same
global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all
experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the
effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly
destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.
Davis
argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as
the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price
for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of
peasants' lives.
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