Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

474 Pages·2017·10.507 MB·English

by  Mike Davis

Praise for Late Victorian Holocausts
“Generations of historians largely ignored the implications [of the great famines of
the- late nineteenth century] and until recently dismissed them as ‘climatic accidents’ …
Late Victorian Holocausts proves them wrong.” LA Times Best Books of 2001
“Wide ranging and compelling … a remarkable achievement.” Times Literary
Supplement
“A masterly account of climatic, economic and colonial history.” New Scientist
“A hero of the Left, Davis is part polemicist, part historian, and all Marxist.” Dale
Peck, Village Voice
“Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance as well as great
historical interest … this highly informative book goes well beyond its immediate focus.”
New York Times
“Davis, a brilliant maverick scholar, sets the triumph of the late-nineteenth-century
Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time
… is is groundbreaking, mind-stretching stuff.” Independent
“e catalogue of cruelty Davis has unearthed is jaw-dropping … Late Victorian
Holocausts is as ugly as it is compelling.” Guardian
“Controversial, comprehensive, and compelling, this book is megahistory at its most
fascinating—a monument to times past, but hopefully not a predictor of future disasters.”
Foreign Affairs
“Devastating.” San Francisco Chronicle
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Late Victorian Holocausts
El Niño Famines and the Making
of the ird World
MIKE DAVIS
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is paperback edition first published by Verso 2017
First published by Verso 2001
© Mike Davis 2001, 2002, 2017
All rights reserved
e moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-662-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-061-2 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-360-6 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davis, Mike, 1946– author.
Title: Late Victorian holocausts : El Niño famines and the making of the
ird World / Mike Davis.
Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026162 | ISBN 9781784786625 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology—Developing countries—History—19th century. |
Political ecology—Developing countries—History—19th century. | El Niño
Current—Social aspects—Developing countries—History—19th century. |
Famines—Developing countries—History—19th century. |
Droughts—Developing countries—History—19th century. | Developing
countries—Environmental conditions—History—19th century. |
India—Environmental conditions—History—19th century. |
China—Environmental conditions—History—19th century. |
Brazil—Environmental conditions—History—19th century. |
Imperialism—Environmental aspects—History—19th century. | BISAC: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Agriculture & Food. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Economic Conditions.
Classification: LCC GF900 .D38 2017 | DDC 363.809172/409034—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026162
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Steven Hiatt/Hiatt & Dragon, San Francisco
Printed in the USA by Maple Press
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Offended Lands
… It is so much, so many
tombs, so much martyrdom, so much
galloping of beasts in the star!
Nothing, not even victory
will erase the terrible hollow of the blood:
nothing, neither the sea, nor the passage
of sand and time, nor the geranium flaming
upon the grave.
Pablo Neruda (1937)
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
A Note on Definitions
PART Ie Great Drought, 1876–1878
1Victoria’s Ghosts
2‘e Poor Eat eir Homes’
3Gunboats and Messiahs
PART II El Niño and the New Imperialism, 1888–1902
4e Government of Hell
5Skeletons at the Feast
6Millenarian Revolutions
PART III Deciphering ENSO
7e Mystery of the Monsoons
8Climates of Hunger
PART IV e Political Ecology of Famine
9e Origins of the ird World
10India: e Modernization of Poverty
11China: Mandates Revoked
12Brazil: Race and Capital in the Nordeste
Glossary
Notes
Index
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Acknowledgements
An ancient interest in climate history was rekindled during the week I
spent as a fly on the wall at the June 1998 Chapman Conference,
“Mechanisms of Millennial-Scale Global Climate Change,” in Snowbird,
Utah. Listening to the folks who mine environmental history from the
Greenland Ice Sheet and the Bermuda Rise discuss state-of-the-art research
on climate oscillations was a truly exhilarating experience, and I thank the
organizers for allowing a mere historian to kibitz what was intended to be a
family conversation.
e outline for this book was subsequently presented as a paper in
September 1998 at the conference “Environmental Violence” organized at
UC Berkeley by Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts. Vinayak Chaturvedi,
Tom Brass and Gopal Balakrishnan generously offered expert and
luminous criticisms of this project in its early stages. Kurt Cuffey spruced
up some of the physics in chapter 7. Dan Monk and Sara Lipton, Michelle
Huang and Chi-She Li, and Steve and Cheryl Murakami provided the
essential aloha. e truly hard work was done by Steve Hiatt, Colin
Robinson, Jane Hindle and my other colleagues at Verso Books, while
David Deis created the excellent maps and graphics and Tom Hassett
proofread the galleys with care. A MacArthur Fellowship provided
unencumbered opportunities for research and writing.
e real windfalls in my life, however, have been the sturdy love and
patience of my compañera, Alessandra Moctezuma; the unceasing delight of
my children, Jack and Roisín; and the friendship of two incomparable
rogue-intellectuals and raconteurs, David Reid and Mike Sprinker. David
took precious time off from 1940s New York to help weed my final draft.
Mike introduced me to the impressive work of South Asian Marxist
historians and provided a decisively important critique of the book’s
original conception. His death from a heart attack in August 1999, after a
long and apparently successful fight against cancer, was simply an
obscenity. He was one of the genuinely great souls of the American Left. As
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José Martí once said of Wendell Phillips: “He was implacable and fiery, as
are all tender men who love justice.” I dedicate this book to his beloved
wife and co-thinker, Modhumita Roy, and thank her for the courage she
has shared with all of us.
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Preface
e failure of the monsoons through the years from 1876 to 1879
resulted in an unusually severe drought over much of Asia. e impact of
the drought on the agricultural society of the time was immense. So far as
is known, the famine that ravished the region is the worst ever to afflict
the human species.
—John Hidore, Global Environmental Change
It was the most famous and perhaps longest family vacation in American
history. “Under a crescendo of criticism for the corruption of his
administration,” the newly retired president of the United States, Ulysses S.
Grant, his wife Julia, and son Jesse left Philadelphia in spring 1877 for
Europe. e ostensible purpose of the trip was to spend some time with
daughter Nellie in England, who was married (after the fashion that Henry
James would celebrate) to a “dissolute English gentleman.” Poor Nellie, in
fact, saw little of her publicity-hungry parents, who preferred red carpets,
cheering throngs and state banquets. As one of Grant’s biographers has put it,
“much has been said about how Grant, the simple fellow, manfully endured
adulation because it was his duty to do so. is is nonsense.” Folks back
home were thrilled by New York Herald journalist John Russell Young’s
accounts of the “stupendous dinners, with food and wine in enormous
quantity and richness, followed by brandy which the general countered with
countless cigars.” Even more than her husband, Mrs. Grant—but for Fort
Sumter, a drunken tanner’s wife in Galena, Illinois—“could not get too many
princely attentions.” As a result, “the trip went on and on and on”—as did
Young’s columns in the Herald.1
Wherever they supped, the Grants left a legendary trail of gaucheries. In
Venice, the General told the descendants of the Doges that “it would be a
fine city if they drained it,” while at a banquet in Buckingham Palace, when
the visibly uncomfortable Queen Victoria (horrified at a “tantrum” by son
Jesse) invoked her “fatiguing duties” as an excuse to escape the Grants, Julia
responded: “Yes, I can imagine them: I too have been the wife of a great
ruler.”2 In Berlin, the Grants hovered around the fringes of the great Congress
of Powers as it grappled with the “Eastern Question” as a prelude to the final
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European assault on the uncolonized peoples of Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Perhaps it was the intoxication of so much imperialist hyperbole or the vision
of even more magnificent receptions in oriental palaces that prompted the
Grants to transform their vacation into a world tour. With James Gordon
Bennett Jr. of the New York Herald paying the bar tab and the US Navy
providing much of the transportation, the ex–First Family plotted an
itinerary that would have humbled Alexander the Great: up the Nile to
ebes in Upper Egypt, back to Palestine, then on to Italy and Spain, back to
the Suez Canal, outward to Aden, India, Burma, Vietnam, China and Japan,
and, finally, across the Pacific to California.
Vacationing in Famine Land
Americans were particularly enthralled by the idea of their Ulysses in the
land of the pharaohs. Steaming up the Nile, with a well-thumbed copy of
Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad on his lap, Grant was bemused to be
welcomed in village after village as the “King of America.” He spent quiet
afternoons on the river reminiscing to Young (and thousands of his readers)
about the bloody road from Vicksburg to Appomattox. Once he chastised the
younger officers in his party for taking unsporting potshots at stray cranes
and pelicans. (He sarcastically suggested they might as well go ashore and
shoot some “poor, patient drudging camel, who pulls his heavy-laden hump
along the bank.”) On another occasion, when their little steamer had to pull
up for the night while the crew fixed the engine, Grant’s son Jesse struck up a
conversation with some of the bedouin standing guard around the campfire.
ey complained that “times are hard,” forcing them far from their homes.
“e Nile has been bad, and when the Nile is bad, calamity comes and the
people go away to other villages.”3
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