| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. By Mike Davis. London: Verso, 2001. x + 464 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth $27.00, paper $20.00.

In this remarkable though sometimes flawed book, Mike Davis charts how a series of droughts that simultaneously struck India, China, and elsewhere in today's developing world between 1876 to 1902 turned into apocalyptic famines that eventually claimed between 30 and 60 million lives worldwide. He shows that while Mother Nature might have initiated and orchestrated each series of droughts through the El Niño phenomenon, the horrors of the famines that followed were largely man-made. The book's words, its ghastly period pictures, and its conscious use of the word "holocausts" are designed as a J'Accuse of "imperial policies toward starving 'subjects' (which) were the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet" (p. 22). "Millions died," he charges, "in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into (the modern world's) economic and political structures ... in the age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed many were murdered ... by the theological application of Smith, Bentham and Mill" (p. 9).

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