Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World
By Mike Davis
Verso 2002
464 pages, $48
REVIEWED BY DAVE RILEY
While drought is considered a natural phenomenon, famine is not so easily blamed on the elements. It may be the done thing to wonder how much the environment is changing nowadays but linking meteorological events to the level of imperialist expansionism is something else again.
Ultimately, it comes down to a question of determinism: of deciding what created the world we inhabit today. And the world we inhabit today rests on the economic relationship between nations.
But is that the whole story? Was the Third World created by the relentless economic exploitation of the poor countries by the Western imperialist powers alone? Mike Davis says it is more complex than that.
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Davis explores the history of the recurrent famines in India, China, Indonesia and Africa, as well as in Brazil in the years 1876 to 1901. He sifts through them to work out the part played by weather patterns, imperialism and the doctrine of free trade.
"If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed to a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", writes Davis. Indeed, not only were the surpluses that were wrenched from India crucial to delaying the decline of British economic dominance, but the forced march into the global economy demanded of India and China drained their wealth and exhausted their infrastructure.
At the time of the 1789 French Revolution, the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still the Yangzi River delta in China and Bengal. Even as late as 1850, the average standard of living in Europe was lower than the rest of the world.
Between 1850 and 1900, the per capita income of the average Indian fell by 50%. By the first decade of the 20th century, there had been a complete and unassailable turnaround — and that unequal relationship continues to the present day.
The El Nino Southern Oscillation is not normally integrated into historical explanations of how the Third World came to be poor. But extreme El Nino — the weather pattern that generates drought in Australia — coincided with the quickening of capitalist exploitation. The failure of the wet seasons during these years resulted in famines in China, Brazil, Indonesia and Africa. Davis estimates that 50 million people died from starvation and related pandemics — many more people than in all conventional warfare throughout the 19th century.
This may seem like an unlucky coincidence, but while crop failures and water shortages have occurred throughout the histories of these societies, there were almost always grain reserves available to rescue drought victims. Drought relief in many of these societies had previously been built into the local infrastructure. Even absolute scarcity of food, except perhaps in Ethiopia in 1889, was never the issue. Davis argues that these famines "were not food shortages per se, but complex economic crises induced by the market impacts of drought and crop failure".
Just as during the better-known Irish potato famine of 1845-50 (during which more than 1 million people died), India was exporting food to England while its population starved to death. 1877, a year in which millions died as a result of famine, was a record year for India's grain exports to Britain. Small landholders were forced into commodity production, while marginal subsistence producers were devoured by the new market realities.
The traditional safety net of kin and mutual obligation was usurped. Railroads and other infrastructure projects were being built at the height of these famines, not to facilitate relief, but to simplify the export of foodstuffs. Telegraph technology allowed prices to be centrally coordinated and, inevitably, raised in thousands of small towns at the same time.
The droughts of the late 19th century intensified the impoverishment of these countries as they were being subjected to massive economic restructuring along free market lines. Indeed, the droughts presented an opportunity for the market to triumph — as the local peasantry were outbid by the export demand for food produced within their own borders.
During the 1786-87 El Nino famine, China's authorities were able to support more than 2 million people with grain imported from elsewhere in the country. But when flooding destroyed crops in Yellow River valley in the late 19th century, huge price increases caused by world market forces caused millions to perish.
In the late 19th century, the Third World was being systematically created as methodically as any Nazi holocaust. It was, says Davis, "a new dark age of colonial war, indentured labour, concentration camps, genocide, forced migration, famine and disease".
From Green Left Weekly, September 17, 2003.
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