Late Victorian holocausts : El Niño famines and the making of the third world / Mike Davis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Davis, Mike, 1946-2022.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Famines--History--19th century.

Famines.

Famines--India--History--19th century.

Famines--China--History--19th century.

Famines--Brazil--History--19th century.

Imperialism--History.

Imperialism.

History.

Economic development--History.

Economic development.

Brazil.

China.

India.

Physical Description:

x, 464 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Verso, 2001.

Summary:

In the last quarter of the Victorian era, epic drought repeatedly devastated agriculture throughout the tropics as well as in northern China. More than fifty million poor rural people perished in ensuing famines and epidemics. Once-verdant countrysides were turned into howling deserts, and mortality in some parts of Ethiopia, China and Brazil was comparable to the effect of a nuclear holocaust. Although this was the greatest human tragedy since the Black Death, its global history -- and lasting impacts on world economic development -- are now analysed for the first time.

Mike Davis recounts the gripping scientific detective story -- the hundred-year quest for the "mystery of the monsoons" -- that has led contemporary researchers to find the fingerprints of "El Nino/Southern Oscillation" all over the catastrophic crop failures of the 1870s and 1890s. Yet nature alone is rarely so deadly. El Nino's murderous accomplices, as Davis shows in meticulous case-studies, were the Gold Standard and the New Imperialism. The lineaments of a future "third world" -- the irreparable division of humanity into haves and have-nots -- was decisively shaped by fatal interactions between world climate and world economy that occurred in the twilight of the nineteenth century.

Contents:

Part I The Great Drought, 1876-1878 23

1 Victoria's Ghosts 25

2 'The Poor Eat Their Homes' 61

3 Gunboats and Messiahs 91

Part II El Nino and the New Imperialism, 1888-1902 117

4 The Government of Hell 119

5 Skeletons at the Feast 141

6 Millenarian Revolutions 177

Part III Decyphering ENSO 211

7 The Mystery of the Monsoons 213

8 Climates of Hunger 239

Part IV The Political Ecology of Famine 277

9 The Origins of the Third World 279

10 India: The Modernization of Poverty 311

11 China: Mandates Revoked 341

12 Brazil: Race and Capital in the Nordeste 377.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1859847390

OCLC:

45636958