Imperialism and the Weather – Revisiting Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis
20 Jul
Chuck did a great interview with Fred Kaufman on July 10th about his article in Harpers’ magazine on the “food bubble” of 2008. In the interview, Chuck wondered if the price hikes in basic food commodities in 2007-8 were unprecedented, and much of the interview went into detail about how the newfangled financial products on Wall Street, invented by folks like Goldman Sachs, caused the massive run up in prices in that year. But as Chuck pointed out, scholars such as Amartya Sen have argued that famines rarely come about because of lack of food. Instead, the political and economic institutions that are supposed to deliver food to where it is needed often fail, even while adequate food is available.
In this context, I want to recommend Mike Davis’ overlooked 2001 book, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Davis’ book (which I just read) is a tour de force of political, economic, and environmental history. He describes a series of famines that decimated China, India, Brazil, Egypt, and numerous other states in the global South during the late 19th century. Was it a coincidence that millions died across the world at the same time, and at this particular time? Davis persuasively argues that the imperial policies of European powers on their colonies, including a Whiggish belief in the power of free markets and the suction of capital from the South to the North, destroyed the institutional capacities of these states to deal with large scale droughts that recurred in this period due to El Nino global weather patterns.
Tens of millions died, and the book is partly an attempt to show the gruesome, near apocalyptic results of the New Imperialism of the latter 19th century. Not surprisingly, millenarian movements from Latin America to Africa to China, forerunners of the nationalist movements in the 20th century Third World, popped up everywhere. Furthermore, Davis incorporates the most recent scholarship on Indian and Chinese economic history during the pre-colonial era and argues that these states were not static, backward Oriental despotisms (which European imperialism then “brought progress to” a la Niall Ferguson), but competitive in productivity with Europe and often possessing higher living standards than Europe during the 18th century. The “Third World” did not come about, then, by European colonialism incorporating the backward lands of the tropics into a world market invented by English entrepreneurs, but by active destruction of states and their institutional capacities through gunboat diplomacy. China, for instance, had the most sophisticated grain distribution system of the entire world, and in the 18th century famines were prevented by the Qing empire, even while weather fluctuations caused by earlier El Nino fluctuations were no less fierce than in the late 19th century.
Davis’ book is barely read today (published in 2001, natch), but it is written for a general audience and I encourage everyone to check it out. Amartya Sen himself reviewed it in the NYT.
