Booknotes- Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis

A masterful summary of late 19th century world history that manages to link together nature and politics and sophisticated and brutal ways, and also reminds us (as if we need reminding) that there is no such thing as a “natural disaster.”

 Davis, the eminent social(ist) historian wrote this book in the early 2000s, at a time of growing interest in the impacts of the El Nino-Southern Oscilation process on historical events. He doesn’t speak directly to this in the book, but it’s clear that Davis was pushing back against the interpretatation of history as simply an unfolding of weather and climate forces acting on human societies. Instead Davis focuses his attention on the ways in which ENSO events emerged, structured, and elaborated within the regimes of accumulation and violence that characterized European imperialism in the late 19th century. In particular, Davis focuses on the famines that emerged in the wake of ENSO events, in three periods (1876-79, 1889-92, 1896-1902), and across Asia, Africa, and South America, but with a particular focus on India, China, and (to a lesser extent) Brazil.

What Davis ultimately documents is an astonishing confluence of liberal capitalist greed, colonial violence and disregard, and a particularly harsh series of ENSO-derived weather events. Taken together, he argues, they amounted to likely more than 30 million deaths, and probably closer to 50 million, certainly one of the largest concentrated famines in recorded history. Some of this was due to the irregular weather brought on by ENSO processes–long droughts, unstable monsoons or rainy seasons, and other unpredictable processes affecting the predominantly agricultural populations of these regions. But Davis argues that in almost every location, locals had developed adapaptations to unusual weather events–for example, the Qing dynasty who ruled 18th and 19th century China had sophisticated systems of grain storage and dispersal for times of famine, as well as rich and complex irrigation systems to distribute water to drought-prone areas.

What changed in the 19th century was European colonialism, and the brutal logics of capitalist imperialism that were imposed on India, China, and the other locales Davis investigates. Inspired by an almost messianic belief in the power of free markets, English (and French) imperialists forcibly inserted poor farmers into ruthless global markets for food and land which had the effect of placing people in marginal subsistence circumstances (due to the weather) at the whims of prices being set on the other side of the world. This system was brutally installed and supported by colonial powers and people who combined a fierce belief in the efficacy of market capitalism with a racial ideology that blamed non-white people for their own suffering.

The book is essentially divided in three sections. The first two sections document, in horrifying detail, the nature of the famines in the three periods. India, China, and Brazil receive the most focus, but Davis provides starting accounts of famines in the late 19th century from nearly every corner of the world. The famines in India were particularly brutal, due in large part to the British colonial insistence that the market not be meddled with. It was difficult reading, and Davis is unflinching in his accounts of the famished, the diseased and the dying who are largely ignored or outright murdered by colonial officials.

The second section is both an intellectual history of ENSO studies, and also a rich and dense discussion of the phenomena itself. Davis points out that it was the embeddedness of especially British colonialism in tropical places that inspired the study of ENSO events in the first place, and that interpreting and understanding medium-term weather phenomena were of keen interest to major scientists and scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries–the discussions of Stanley Jevons were particularly inspired and fascinating, and especially his dogged belief in the impact of planetary alignment in determining grain prices (!)

The last section of the book takes a deep dive into the socio-ecological history of the three locales (India, China, and Brazil), with a focus on the political economy of these places in the wake of colonization. Each section is fine-grained, and looks at how labor, subsistence, trade, and ecology blended together in cementing the 3rd world in its place in the wake of ENSO famines. Spinning the histories of the three places, he locates their current status as “peripheries” of the Euro-American world as a function not of their tragic happenstance in a location of medium-range weather cycles, but as a deliberate choice to let their populations die, privatize (and extract) their resources, and privelege market ideology over human life and survival.

It is now more commonplace to see so-called natural disasters as a function of societal choices and priorities–last year, I read Paul Kelton’s “Epidemics and Enslavement” which makes a similar argument contra “virgin soil” theories of colonization. But as is so typical of him, Davis charted a course others would follow, and did so with an astonishing depth and detail that is almost peerless in social or historical research. I had a general outline in my head of late 19th century colonial history, but Davis turned that history inside out in a gruesome and almost prosecutorial fashion.

If you want to understand the role of Europe in underdeveloping what we used to call the 3rd world, you could do worse than starting with this book.