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Book Review
| Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. By MIKE DAVIS. London: Verso Books, 2001. x + 464 pp. $27.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).
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While writing Ecology of Fear about natural and political disasters in Los Angeles, maverick historian Mike Davis stumbled across a reference to famines in Asia that were related to El Niño (ENSO) weather patterns. Researching further in both scientific and humanities literature, Davis began to unravel a relationship between the El Niño phenomenon, climate change, capitalism, imperialism, and global famines during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Following the footprints of concomitant famines in India and China, Davis began searching for other food shortages during this time. The results were staggering. As the body count of famine victims mounted into the tens of millions in India, China, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, Korea, New Caledonia, and so on, Davis knew that he was on to one of the "darkest secrets of the Victorian Age." Between thirty and fifty million people perished and a new, disturbing division of wealth was created: the so-called "developed" and "undeveloped" or "third" worlds. |
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Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World paints a haunting and sweeping portrait of these human-made famines and the making of these global class divisions. The book begins with a colorful narrative about Ulysses S. Grant's bobbling and glutinous sojourn around the world in 1877. Citing reports of the New York Herald's journalist John Russell Young, Davis notes that from the Nile to Bombay to Beijing, everywhere the Grants "supped" they stumbled upon famines. |
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