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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.
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| 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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But what occurred in India or China was more the result of colonial, rather than liberal, capitalism. For India, "free trade," a capstone of liberal capitalist theory, was no more free than is the prisoner who is free to trade cigarettes within the confines of his jail, while China, left alone, would have preferred to be free from trade. A fundamental cause of the famines' massive mortality was that rulers, whose interests are frequently not congruent with those ruled, were moreover not accountable to the ruled. In India, especially, differences between rulers and ruled in religion and race was arguably exacerbated by the caste system, which encourages the notion that some groups are born superior to others. |
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While there is some truth to Davis' indictment of the British in India, it strains the evidence with regard to China. Indeed, western powers capitalized on China's weakness to force it into unequal commercial arrangements that only aggravated its problems. But Davis's J'Accuse makes sense for China only if one accepts that absent the European presence, China would have provided for its starving masses, as the Qing Emperor did during the 1740s El Niño. But even if the Europeans are removed from the equation, China in the 1740s makes a poor analogy for China in the 1870s. The population had increased 50 percent in the interim and long before the Opium Wars, peasant rebellions, wars, chronic corruption, and neglect of its transportation canals and flood control systems had already sent China into decline. |
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Davis claims that the present day "development gap" between the developed and developing worlds is the direct legacy of these famines and forced the globalization of the "great non-European peasantries" into the world market. He declares that "if the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: There was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947" (pp. 15–16). This assumes that growth in per capita income is the historical norm, but, as Angus Maddison shows in The World Economy (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2001), the average Indian experienced faster and greater economic growth under the British Raj than under the previous 231 years of Mughal rule. |
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Western Europe's income level, which had been below India's and China's in 1000, had grown three times larger by 1870. Thus, contrary to Davis's thesis, both the origin of the development gap and the gap itself predate the famines and the globalization detailed in this book. |
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Nevertheless, despite Davis' problematic interpretations, this book deserves commendation for its originality, for its concise, yet informative, case studies of the "political ecology" of India, China, and Brazil, and—especially—for its gripping and richly detailed accounts of various famines. And its basic conclusion—droughts are due to nature but catastrophic famines are frequently due to society's poor preparation, mismanagement and, sometimes, sheer callousness—is robust. |
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Reviewed by Indur M. Goklany, who was born in India and currently manages science and technology policy issues for the U.S. Department of the Interior. His book, Extending the Limits: Improving the State of Humanity and the Environment, will be published by the American Enterprise Institute later this year. |
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