Late Victorian Holocausts

I found Mike Davis’s book to be an essential exploration of the historical causes of global hunger. As an aid worker, I found his analysis of the politics of 19th-century hunger relief informative. Food crises often have strong political roots, and this book does an excellent job of putting those into perspective.

It is very well-researched and packed with facts and figures. This book is an essential, magisterial read in a world facing renewed conflict and climate change. 

Welcome to the greatest humanitarian disaster, you’ve never heard of. In the late 19th century, as European imperialism forced the world’s peasantries into global markets, a strong El Niño cycle made the harvests fail across much of Asia and South America.

Besotted by the idea of free markets, the British colonial lords declined to deliver relief. What resulted were famines so horrific that they dwarfed even the monstrous man-made hungers of the 20th century. I read this book as a jolting memento for our heating times: environmental events become disasters only if we allow them to.

We’ve been told ‘the market knows best’ for a long time, and we’re now seeing the economic, political, and environmental breakdown which comes from arranging society around the market’s diktat. Worse, we’ve been here before.

In Late Victorian Holocausts, the late historian Mike Davis documents the most shocking historical consequences of organising societies to please the market. In the heyday of the British Empire, London’s obsession with ‘leaving it to the market’ extended to letting profit dictate who should eat and who should starve.

After the British stripped away traditional social networks on which the majority could depend in times… show more.

This book is best known for its controversial argument that not only did British imperial policies worsen the droughts-famines-epidemics that devastated India from 1876 to 1878 but that Victorian policy-makers could have intervened to save millions of lives but refrained. Yet Davis also provides a wrenching account of Brazilian droughts in 1876-79 and 1896-1900 that left millions dead, particularly in the Sertão, the northeastern hinterland. He shows the connections between climate (El Niño), economic transformations, and mass displacements, and starvation in Brazil, and how European empires, the United States, and Japan took advantage of these crises. 

Some… show more.