Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Winner of the World History Association Book Award

Blending global environmental history with political history, this bestselling book explores "late-nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time" (Independent)

Examining 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.

Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.

Davis 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.

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso
Published: 01/17/2017
Pages: 480
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.10w x 1.50d
ISBN13: 9781784786625
ISBN10: 1784786624
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | Political Economy
- Political Science | Political Ideologies | Radicalism
- Social Science | Agriculture & Food (see also Political Science | Public Poli

About the Author
Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, Buda's Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego.