Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis, Verso, 拢20, ISBN
1859847390
Globalisers everywhere take note. The last time the world dismantled trade
barriers and bowed before the god of free trade, it coincided with an epidemic
of famines from China to Ethiopia, India to Brazil. Famine came in the final
quarter of the 19th century, when the British Empire dominated world trade as
the US does today. Guess what the empire blamed for those famines, in which
upwards of 50 million people died? Climate鈥攖he whims of the weather in the
shape of what we call El Ni帽o. It was, says Mike Davis in Late
Victorian Holocausts, as phoney an excuse then as blaming famine on the
weather is today.
Davis鈥檚 book, subtitled 鈥淓l Ni帽o famines and the making of the third
world鈥�, is a masterly account of climatic, economic and colonial history. In it
he argues persuasively that both free trade and trade winds caused all these
deaths. 鈥淓ach global drought was the green light for an imperialist landrush鈥�
against hungry people and defenceless governments.
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The 19th century Asian monsoon failed three times: from 1876 to 1879, from
1888 to 1891 and again from 1896 to 1902. But while British colonial
climatologists Henry Blanford and Gilbert Walker tried to understand these
sudden pandemics of drought, Davis says their soldier friends decided to turn
this misfortune to imperial advantage by taking control of land in different
colonies.
Davis argues that the famines were created and sustained by this first golden
age of liberal capitalism. The droughts were undoubtedly serious, he says. But
there was never 鈥渁bsolute scarcity鈥�, except perhaps in Ethiopia in 1889. People
starved because of the collapse of village-based systems of welfare and trade,
which traditionally protected them when harvests failed.
Why did these systems collapse? One reason is that they clashed with the
priorities of empire. British viceroys wrecked indigenous Indian agriculture to
create grain fields to feed Europe. Then they built railways to transport the
harvest back home. Millions lost their traditional livelihoods.
What does free trade have to do with famines? Thanks to free markets, the
price of wheat reflected the world market price. Too bad if you lived in
Lahore, where the wage is still a fraction of that in Liverpool. This is what
Davis calls the 鈥減olitical ecology of famine鈥�.
This book is an impressive achievement from an author with a growing
reputation for clear thinking. But why review Late Victorian Holocausts
in a science magazine? For one reason: his description of how science stumbled
on the phenomenon of El Ni帽o is the best I have read. Davis explains that
colonial meteorologists stumbled on oscillations in pressure systems across the
Pacific Ocean while trying to explain the vagaries of the Indian monsoon.
The coming century will likely see climate change, in the form of global
warming. It will unleash further rounds of drought. Just as before,
globalisation will be the cause of the ensuing famine and pestilence and it will
hit the people of the Third World worst. But this time, empire won鈥檛 be to
blame. And nor will we be able to blame the weather.