Late Victorian Holocausts
Mike Davis
464 pages, including index
published in 2001

In the last twenty five years of he 19th century, a series of famines took place in countries like Brazil, India and China, all roughly at the same time. In these famines many millions of people died. Late Victorian Holocausts is an attempt to explain how these famines were caused as well as why these were so unusally severe, which were not just a result of worsening climatological changes.

In fact, what Mike Davis makes clear is that these famines could have been far less destructive, had it not been for the political and economic realities of the countries afflicted by them. Then, as now, famines were seldom the result of not enough food being available. The proximate cause of a famine might be a crops failure, but underlying that are political and economical reasons why that crop failure can not be abnegated.

In the famines of the late 19th century, an estimated thirty to fifty million people died, at a time when technological and scientific advantages had for the first time ever created a truly global economy, in which for example beef from Argentine and corn from the US prairies was shipped to markets in England. Surely in such an integrated system, capable of shipping food worldwide, any famine, even on a continental scale, could be easily combatted by shipping in food from elsewhere? So why wasn't it?

That's the question Davis asks in the first part of Late Victorian Holocausts, by examining in detail three different famines, in India, China and Brazil. What he found was that imperialist policies and laissez-faire capitalism were largely to blame for turning food shortages into a full blown famine. Especially in India, where the colonial administration, led by Lord Lytton, son of Bulmar "Dark and stormy night" Lytton, essentially sabotaged any relief efforts because that interfered with the "natural laws of the free market". Food that could've been used locally was in fact exported throughout the Indian famines, just like in the earlier Irish famine, quite simply because export was more profitable than selling it locally... At the same time, the ancient village based famine relief systems had been undermined by the integration of India into the London centered free market system, so there was no safeguard against crop failures.

Modern technology played a large role in this undermining: big, reliable steamships made it feasible to ship food from continent to continent, the expansion of the telegraph system integrated markets worldwide, so that prices of food in remote Indian villages were still determined by the price of corn on the London markets and the railroads connected every part of countries like India with each other, again making it easier for food surpluses in one part of the country to be shipped not to other parts with food shortages, but to central depots from which it was exported to England. All this did not happen without resistance, with local relief set up in the face of colonial opression, small riots and even large scale uprisings, not just in India, but also in China and Brazil, (the War of Canudos). These were ultimately futile of course...

In the second part of the book, Davis goes into the ecological causes of the famines, to research as to why these natural disasters happened in the first place. It turns out largely to be the fault of an unusual succession of severe El Ninos. As it is such a complex, complicated system, this part of the book is also the most difficult to get through, but necessary to get a full understanding of why these famines occurred.

There are two opposite views on why famines happen: the first is that these are natural disasters, for which nobody can be blamed and which cannot be prevented but can be ameloriated by relief efforts. The other view, the view Mike Davis holds, as should be clear from the above, is that famines are not the results of natural disasters, but caused by deliberate economic policies, which makes countries vulnerable to these disasters.

In all then, I found Late Victorian Holocausts an eyeopener, in both exposing Britain's abysmal 19th century record and making clear the political-economic aspects of famines. This should be required reading for everybody concerned about neo-liberalism, a warning about the awful costs these policies bear.