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

MIKE DAVIS

This paperback edition first published by Verso 2017

First published by Verso 2001

Mike Davis 2001, 2002, 2017

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-662-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-061-2 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-360-6 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Davis, Mike, 1946 author.

Title: Late Victorian holocausts : El Nio famines and the making of the
Third World / Mike Davis.

Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016026162 | ISBN 9781784786625 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Human ecologyDeveloping countriesHistory19th century. |

Political ecologyDeveloping countriesHistory19th century. | El Nio

CurrentSocial aspectsDeveloping countriesHistory19th century. |

FaminesDeveloping countriesHistory19th century. |
DroughtsDeveloping countriesHistory19th century. | Developing
countriesEnvironmental conditionsHistory19th century. |
IndiaEnvironmental conditionsHistory19th century. |
ChinaEnvironmental conditionsHistory19th century. |
BrazilEnvironmental conditionsHistory19th century. |
ImperialismEnvironmental aspectsHistory19th century. | BISAC: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Agriculture & Food. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Economic Conditions.

Classification: LCC GF900 .D38 2017 | DDC 363.809172/409034dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026162

Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Steven Hiatt/Hiatt & Dragon, San Francisco

Printed in the USA by Maple Press

Offended Lands

It is so much, so many

tombs, so much martyrdom, so much

galloping of beasts in the star!

Nothing, not even victory

will erase the terrible hollow of the blood:

nothing, neither the sea, nor the passage

of sand and time, nor the geranium flaming

upon the grave.

Pablo Neruda (1937)

An ancient interest in climate history was rekindled during the week I spent as a fly on the wall at the June 1998 Chapman Conference, Mechanisms of Millennial-Scale Global Climate Change, in Snowbird, Utah. Listening to the folks who mine environmental history from the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Bermuda Rise discuss state-of-the-art research on climate oscillations was a truly exhilarating experience, and I thank the organizers for allowing a mere historian to kibitz what was intended to be a family conversation.

The outline for this book was subsequently presented as a paper in September 1998 at the conference Environmental Violence organized at UC Berkeley by Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts. Vinayak Chaturvedi, Tom Brass and Gopal Balakrishnan generously offered expert and luminous criticisms of this project in its early stages. Kurt Cuffey spruced up some of the physics in . Dan Monk and Sara Lipton, Michelle Huang and Chi-She Li, and Steve and Cheryl Murakami provided the essential aloha. The truly hard work was done by Steve Hiatt, Colin Robinson, Jane Hindle and my other colleagues at Verso Books, while David Deis created the excellent maps and graphics and Tom Hassett proofread the galleys with care. A MacArthur Fellowship provided unencumbered opportunities for research and writing.

The real windfalls in my life, however, have been the sturdy love and patience of my compaera, Alessandra Moctezuma; the unceasing delight of my children, Jack and Roisn; and the friendship of two incomparable rogue-intellectuals and raconteurs, David Reid and Mike Sprinker. David took precious time off from 1940s New York to help weed my final draft. Mike introduced me to the impressive work of South Asian Marxist historians and provided a decisively important critique of the books original conception. His death from a heart attack in August 1999, after a long and apparently successful fight against cancer, was simply an obscenity. He was one of the genuinely great souls of the American Left. As Jos Mart once said of Wendell Phillips: He was implacable and fiery, as are all tender men who love justice. I dedicate this book to his beloved wife and co-thinker, Modhumita Roy, and thank her for the courage she has shared with all of us.