Rating: 
Summary: A staggering indictment of British imperialism
Review: Mike Davis has fired the opening shot of the 21st century: imperialists stand accused of murdering tens of millions. In one magnificent book Davis blasts to pieces the notion that "free trade" existed or will liberate the 3rd World. Far more serious, though, is Davis' charge that imperialists __made__ the 3rd World. Indeed, Davis documents the extraction of wealth from India, China, Brazil, and Egypt; showing how each was reduced to a mere skeleton, and how even their marrows were sucked dry. In times of drought, Britain actually _increased_ taxation and food exports from famine stricken India. He then proves that British imperialists were well aware of the famine, and allowed the policies to continue. Worse still, they offered food relief only in exchange for hard labor, at a caloric ratio slightly worse than that of the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald. By British estimates roughly 20 million Indians died, while their colonial masters spouted racist mantras. In other measures the British merely fostered a devasting blight of globalization, unaware of its cruel consequences. Yet Davis shows that the British mission to "civilize" India curtailed Indian economic growth: Indian incomes were frozen for 300 years, while the British boasted about railroads, telegraphs, and other trinkets of technology ('gifts' which helped the Empire rule and rob India). The book is weakest in its discussions of China and Brazil. One might be served well by reading just his chapters on India. Davis' book shatters the currently relentless propaganda about growth, development, and free trade, and raises serious questions for the 21st century. The book is nothing short of a masterpiece, and deserves a suitably large audience.
Rating:
Summary: A staggering indictment of British imperialism
Review: Mike Davis has fired the opening shot of the 21st century: imperialists stand accused of murdering tens of millions. In one magnificent book Davis blasts to pieces the notion that "free trade" existed or will liberate the 3rd World. Far more serious, though, is Davis' charge that imperialists __made__ the 3rd World. Indeed, Davis documents the extraction of wealth from India, China, Brazil, and Egypt; showing how each was reduced to a mere skeleton, and how even their marrows were sucked dry. In times of drought, Britain actually _increased_ taxation and food exports from famine stricken India. He then proves that British imperialists were well aware of the famine, and allowed the policies to continue. Worse still, they offered food relief only in exchange for hard labor, at a caloric ratio slightly worse than that of the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald. By British estimates roughly 20 million Indians died, while their colonial masters spouted racist mantras. In other measures the British merely fostered a devasting blight of globalization, unaware of its cruel consequences. Yet Davis shows that the British mission to "civilize" India curtailed Indian economic growth: Indian incomes were frozen for 300 years, while the British boasted about railroads, telegraphs, and other trinkets of technology ('gifts' which helped the Empire rule and rob India). The book is weakest in its discussions of China and Brazil. One might be served well by reading just his chapters on India. Davis' book shatters the currently relentless propaganda about growth, development, and free trade, and raises serious questions for the 21st century. The book is nothing short of a masterpiece, and deserves a suitably large audience.
Rating:
Summary: Vital, a brilliant combination of history and ecology.
Review: Mike Davis' new book is a work of singular importance, offering a valuable new perspective on a disaster of horrifying magnitude. In the late 1870s and the late 1890s somewhere between 30 to 60 million people died in famine in India, China and Brazil. This does not count the many more who died from the Philippines to Angola, from Morocco to Indonesia. To the extent that people remember these famines it has been assumed that they were the result of an unfavorable climate. To the extent that larger social factors were involved, they were a classic Malthusian crisis, too many people on too little land, and they represented the failure of the Third World to adapt the industrial revolution. Davis shows very clearly that the third world was ravaged by the El Nino phenomenon. But that is the only the beginning. They were also ravaged by the new regimes of imperialism and the world market. Had the responsible authorities distributed what food existed, most of the victims would have survived. Davis is well aware of Nobel laureate A. Sen's argument that they key problem with famine is not scarcity but maldistribution. He also point out that whether under the American occupation of the Philippines or the ravages of Mao's Great Leap Forward, the real problem was the lack of democracy and lack of influence of the very poor. Davis starts off with a fascinating and horrific description of the famines, filled with damning facts. For example Lord Lytton and his bureaucrats in 1876 India were obssessed with the idea that relief would just encourage Indian shirking. Readers will not soon forget that the calorie/work regimen that Lytton did impose was worse than that of Buchenwald. Nor will they forget the judgment of the Famine inquiries in the 1880s whom, Davis notes, concluded that with millions of famine dead the main flaw was that too much money was spent on relief. Davis goes into how the famines sparked millenarian movements and political resistance from the Boxer rebellion to the extermination of the Catholic movement at Canudos discussed, inaccurately, in Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World. He also brings a discussion of how scientists found the El Nino phenomenon, and gives a thorough technical account of how it works. He then discusses how the famines solidified European hegemony over the Third World leading to their stagnation and decline. Based on such scholars as Bairroch, Parthsarathi, Gura and Pomeranz, Davis brings forth many facts that shore up his argument. 1) In 1800 India's share of the world manufactured product was four times that of Britain, and China's share was even higher. By 1900 India was fully under British control and the ration was 8-1 in England's favor. 2) In 1789 the living standards of China and Western Europe were roughly comparable and it appeared that China was making even better progress with its ecological problems. Naturally, a century later Europeans and Americans were much better off. 3) Despite all the many claims made on behalf of British rule in India, Indian per capita income stayed the same from 1759 to 1947. And contrary to the Malthusian argument, its population didn't grow very much. 4) Indian and Chinese rulers actually had before 1800 a good record of mitigating famines, and one British statistician suggested that whereas for the previous two millennia there was one major famine a century, under British rule there was one every four years. How had things gone so wrong such that the El Nino famines could have such a devastating effect? Here Davis provides a useful and valuable account. Whereas previously anti-imperialists had crudely claimed that Britain had got where it was by draining the wealth of the Third World, Davis' account is much more nuanced. The problem was not so much the absolute share. Instead, by having a captive markets in Asia, Britain in the late 19th century was able to maintain its balance of payments and its complex system of free trade as surpluses in Asia balanced its increasing trade deficits with Germany and the United States. Davis shows not only how India had to bear the military costs of empire, but also how British irrigation schemes were often poorly funded, inappropriate for local conditions and had pernicious ecological effects. China, by contrast did face a severe ecological crisis which, as Davis points out, it could not escape as the Europeans did by colonizing the Western hemisphere. Moreover the West forced China to keep up the opium trade and forced it into inequitable trading arrangements. This encouraged the Chinese government to concentrate on protecting the ports and its sovereignty while underfunding the collapsing irrigation system. Ecological and political crisis fed off each other, leading to revolution and continued ecological crisis to the present day. The result is a work which provides a valuable alternative to David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. There are some minor flaws (for instance, Czar Alexander III, unlike his father and son, was not assassinated). But it also helps introduce to a larger audience the valuable work of Indian historians that has been too long confined to specialists. It also provides a valuable complement to such works as Sheldon Watts' Epidemics and History and Prasannan Parthasarathi's The Making of a Colonial Economy. In the end this is a very different, but very appropriate sequel to the Ecology of Fear.
Rating: 
Summary: A landmark study of the highest importance
Review: People who enjoy books that are easy to read, as well as entertaining, will not enjoy this one. But everyone who can read English needs to read this book. In a single stroke, it explodes all our myths about the origins and causes of the extreme poverty still found in what we know loosely as the Third World. Its thesis, as I get it, is that these areas were not always impoverished and, when impacted by famine, were capable of reasonable survival. Some of those myths we so long believed, rooted as they were in now discarded theories of race and nationality, have long since deserved their coup de grace, and here they receive it. Although I am not directly familiar with the book's sources for its political-historical claims, they seem to reflect the state of current research, as the author is able to use several secondary sources for many of his assertions. Those who might jump to any hasty conclusions about Davis' political biases should refer to Davis' excoriation of the communist regime in China during Mao's Great Leap Forward, which puts it in at least as bad a light as some of the astonishingly bad planning of the British colonial governments. The importance of a free press (p. 251) is here highlighted. What this book desperately needs is an overall conclusion at the end that incorporates its major themes into a geared-down, layman -friendly statement of general inference. Even some normative comments about what should be done in the future with reference to the areas under consideration would be welcome, although I appreciate the difficulty of such a task. If he wrote some sequel to this book, I would certainly be interested in what he had to say.
Rating:
Summary: Winner of 2002 World History Association Book Award!
Review: The Annual Book Award Committee of the World History Association is pleased to announce that Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts has won its 2002 prize, because it synthesizes scientific and historical data into a highly readable, well-documented and well-researched study of the interplay between the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and global political and economic imperialism in the late 19th century. It thus makes a very significant contribution to transregional history in a way that will and should reach a wider audience than academic historians.
Rating: 
Summary: El Nino Did it
Review: The author makes a good argument that millions of people from India and China died as a result of uncaring policies developed by the British during El Ninos in the nineteenth century. I would have preferred that the author spend less time on British policies and more time on the nature of El Ninos.
Rating:
Summary: El Nino Did it
Review: The author makes a good argument that millions of people from India and China died as a result of uncaring policies developed by the British during El Ninos in the nineteenth century. I would have preferred that the author spend less time on British policies and more time on the nature of El Ninos.
Rating:
Summary: Hard to over rate the importance of this book
Review: There have been droughts and other major agricultural
failures in China, India, and Africa for millennium,
but the accompanying mass starvations and ecological
catastrophes that we tend to associate with these
regions did not start occurring in earnest until
the British Empire imposed its 'free' market discipline
on these societies using the end of the barrel of
a gun as their means of persuasion. Who shaped the glass through which most of us
unconsciously consider India, China, and Africa?
19th century Brits. Their strategy was simple:
paint them as ignorant, progress-resisting savages,
then rob them blind and, when they starve by the millions,
as they also did in conquered Ireland, tell the
world it can't be helped. The episodes Davis writes about are in many ways still ongoing
because the pattern of ecological mismanagement and social
disintegration set off by the British in these regions has become the 'modern' norm. We're just one shift in the weather from even larger catastrophes.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Texts in Recent Memory
Review: Though I agree with other reviewers that Davis is at his best when discussing India, the sections on Brazil, China, and numerous other places (to which he pays insufficient attention, truly) are generally informative. Perhaps it's fair to say that he establishes his argument on the basis of the British genocides in India, and then produces schematic outlines of varying depths for the imperial genocides in China, Brazil, Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and so on. That slight flaw noted, this text has very high quality--fine documentation and a well reasoned, committed perspective. Overall, this text is probably the first step in rationally countering the trash that is *The Black Book of Communism*--call this chapter one of *The Black Book of Capitalism* (perhaps Blum's *Killing Hope* can be chapter 2).
That said, I feel the need to confront the reviewer from London, who--while writing a generally just review--introduces several distortions into the debate.
Hartley: "Davis concentrates on the the massive famines at the end of the nineteenth century in India China and Brazil, and argues that they were a result of El Nino conditions. Well, actually he doesn't, because he goes to great lengths, in good Marxist tradition, to set up a definition of a famine as a political event - ie they're always someone's fault. So in the case of India the late nineteenth century famines were the fault of the British administration. Well....certainly the attitude of the British, of complacency mixed with racism and backed by a laissez-faire ideology which believed it best not to interfere in these situations - a complex of attitudes seen fifty years earlier in the Irish famine - exacerbated the situation. But the same catastrophe, with comparable death tolls, hit China as well. Ah, but the Opium Wars, you know.....China had already been affected by the deadly virus of Western capitalism, so even if China wasn't a colony, it was still all the fault of the British. And Brazil? More catastrophe, more megadeaths. No problem - Brazil was already part of the London-based capitalist system. Enough said."
Me: Several problems here. A) We get a straw man when Hartley suggests it is Marxist tradition to claim someone must be at fault for all things--though proper Marxists will point out that there is a politics to everything--including the weather. Apparently, Hartley doesn't think this is the case--but he should actually refute Davis on this point, rather than churlishly dismissing the point. B) Hartley deploys another straw man when he implies that Davis says "the deadly virus of Western capitalism" infected China; in fact, Davis' reading of the Manchu Qing dynasty and its policies is much more nuanced than that, and considers a host of issues--including ENSO, the Taiping and other rebellions, surely the Opium Wars, the catastrophic shift of the Yellow River in 1855, and numerous others--including indigenous Chinese corruption, and, yes, some of the more familiar brutalities of the capitalist system. C) Hartley's dismissive attitude toward Davis' thesis regarding the integration of India, China, and Brazil into the world capitalist system is of course his perogative--but it is not a useful intellectual response to a serious historical debate. Rather, Hartley should attempt to actually refute Davis by proving that the genocides indeed were not caused, exacerbated, or otherwise enabled by British capitalism & imperialism.
Hartley: "So as we turn to the 20th century we should see these trends continue? Well, bit of a problem there actually: two of the greatest 20th century famines were unconnected to El Nino, and were in Russia/Ukraine in the thirties, and China during the Great Leap Forward at the start of the sixties."
Me: This statement is fairly dishonest and perplexing, considering that Hartley otherwise is an articulate and intelligent reviewer. Davis *does* make a case for such developments continuing into the 20th century--and he *does* furthermore consider, briefly albeit, both the Ukranian and Chinese famines mentioned above. Though his treatment overall of Russia is one of the most schematic in the text, he does note that the Volga basin seems to feature a correlation of ENSO to drought/famine, and moreover records the 1930 El Nino as correlated to the 1931 drought crisis (269). This undoubtedly does not explain the fullness of the Ukranian famine, but it certainly will contribute to an explanation that otherwise focuses on Stalinist criminality and bungling. The same goes for the Maoist case, where Davis correlates the famines associated with the Great Leap Forward very specifically to ENSO, an argument certainly to be ignored by unreconstructed Cold Warriors and crypto-mccarthyites (248-251).
Hartley: "Davis mentions the latter: "the scale of this holocaust is stupefying, and for many sympathisers with the Chinese revolution, inexplicable". He doesn't declare himself to be such a sympathiser - it would have been more honest for him to do so - but quite clearly he is. He sneers at Jasper Becker's "Hungry Ghosts" on this episode as a "Robert Conquest-like expose". Ah yes, Robert Conquest - isn't he the guy who insisted that the actual victims of Stalinist excesses, in the famines and the gulags, was much higher than previously thought? And is it not now generally accepted that he was, um, right? So the nineteenth century famines were the result of the inexorable logic of imperialism, while the thirties famine in Russia goes unmentioned and the famine in Maoist China is perhaps down to Mao's personal inflexibility. The problem, declares Davis, was the lack of socialist democracy. Good old socialist democracy, eh.....as practiced where, exactly?"
Me: Again, some fairly obtuse dishonesty here. As noted, Davis does in fact mention the Ukranian famine, however briefly, and the straw man about "Mao's personal inflexibility" is simply puerile--for Davis does attempt to explain the Chinese famine as a result of a complex of factors, including human decisions, meteorology, and the weight of the aggregate of history (the suggestion that Chiang, a victorious Japanese invasion, or an outright US occupation of China would've performed better is quite simply laughable, given the circumstances). Also, the adoration heaped on Robert Conquest and the western Cold War Sovietologists is interesting, as these folks would have us believe that, say, Stalin killed 50 million people in the USSR, but still managed to defeat the Nazis, losing 20 million more in the process-such claims make little sense; indeed, the only people who accept Conquest's exaggerations are pathological anti-communists who don't need any evidence because they've already made up their minds. Finally, his snipe about "socialist democracy" never having existed is both disingenuous and manages to evade Davis' point--which was that the lack of two way communication between Beijing and the Chinese peasant allowed for the true extent of the famine to remain releatively unknown to the state planners. It is disingenuous, for as I think Hartley probably knows, any attempts to pair a socialist economy with a political democracy have been destroyed by the Western powers--consider the destruction of Allende's regime in Chile (1973), to take the most famous example, the sabotage of the Vietnamese general elections in 1955, the low intensity warfare carried out against any number of regimes in Latin America or Africa (Nicaragua? Angola?), resulting in their degeneration and destruction, and the crushing of dozens of movements that struggled against autocratic capitalist regimes all over the world (El Salvador? South Africa? Philippines? Indonesia? everywhere in the Middle East?)--all crimes committed by the US precisely to destroy any potential "socialist democracy" from coming into existence and thereby providing a model of development that counters western militarism and economic hegemony, i.e., the friendly fascism of the US and its allies.
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