But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.ĭavis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants’ lives. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China and Northeastern Brazil.

Winner of the World History Association Book Award.Įxamining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Available from » Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop, in central London. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.ĭavis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants’ lives.Bestselling, magisterial melding of global environmental history and global political history. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino, Famines and the Making of the Third World, by Mike Davis. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. that he was personally in favor of railways and telegraphs but unfortunately his. El nino famines and the making of the third worldĪ magisterial melding of global ecological and political history, disclosing the nineteenth-century roots of underdevelopment in what became the Third WorldĮxamining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history.

Victorian holocausts