384 Review of Radical Political Economics / Summer 2008

ecologically sustainable. The possibility of sustainable human development—as opposed

to sustainable capitalism—may hinge on the merging of these two forms of struggle.2

Paul Burkett
Department of Economics
Indiana State University
Terre Haute, IN 47809
Email: pburkett@isugw.indstate.edu

________________________

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
By Mike Davis. New York: Verso, 2001. 470 pp. $20.00 paper.
DOI: 10.1177/0486613408319853
Accepted March 20, 2007

In Late Victorian Holocausts1 Mike Davis sets out to examine the historical impact of
a series of devastating global subsistence crises in the late nineteenth century across the
non-European world. Rather than treating these as simply a humanitarian crisis, Davis
argues that they had major historical consequences, in particular producing the formative
division between advanced and underdeveloped regions of the world economy, the origins
of the modern Third World.
The first half of the book consists of a vast narrative history of three subsistence crises
that ravaged areas of India, China, Brazil, much of Africa, and South East Asia between
1876 and 1902. Shifting combinations of drought, famine, flooding, and epidemic disease
here resulted in an overall death toll of somewhere between thirty and fifty million,
destroying traditional agricultural economies and communities. Davis vividly brings this
catastrophic era to life through the extensive use of contemporary accounts, modern
research, and some effective photography. For this substantial recuperative effort alone,
Late Victorian Holocausts stands as a valuable text.
However, Davis also wants to explain these events with due regard to both their envi-
ronmental and social causation, this becoming the subject of the rest of the book. His start-
ing point is that subsistence crises are never simply natural disasters, but possess an
irreducible social base. Drought and famine are the results of rainfall variability and food
shortage interacting with existing social hydraulic defenses and entitlements to food
respectively. Their consequences are equally socially significant. In this case they include
a wave of political responses from affected populations taking a millenarian cast (from the
rebellion of the Boxers in China to the secessionist movements of the Brazilian sertão),
and the green light given to imperialist incursions into traditional societies and their
productive lands and labor (from Indonesia to all corners of the African continent). In the
words of David Arnold (1988), famines are “engines of historical transformation.”
These subsistence crises are presented by Davis as part product and part catalyst of
capitalist development and its interaction with the climatic cycle of El Niño. Theoretically

1. A short summary of this book (36 pp.) was prepared and published by The Corner House as “The Origins
of the Third-World: Markets, States and Climate” and is freely available at http://www.thecornerhouse
.org.uk/pdf/briefing/27origins.pdf. It is a valuable text for pedagogic purposes at all levels, from high school
and beyond.
 Book Reviews 385

three interlocking processes are identified as their foundations: changes in world climate,
the expansion of the world economy, and the political dynamic of imperialism. Davis
explores their impact on specific societies (India, China, and Brazil in particular) through
the themes of household poverty, ecological poverty, and state decapacitation.
In general he argues that cash crop agriculture introduced in the nineteenth century
transformed systems of subsistence production and greatly weakened the resilience of
these societies to climate variability, undermining previous defenses against famine, flood,
and drought. The resulting mass mortality and social dislocation allowed the imperialist
powers (who had already opened many of these societies to market-based production) to
expand their control over new lands and labor. A thorough reorganization of production, now
undertaken on a “free market” basis, was the historic result, one achieved through the vec-
tors of war, invasion, the establishment of unequal trading patterns, and financial control.
This reorganization then left non-European societies in a profoundly weakened situa-
tion, members of an expanding world economy without any effective redress to their sub-
ordinate position. Any autonomous manufacture or industry was quickly snuffed out by an
influx of cheap Western imports; their agricultural base severely weakened by the effects
of these subsistence crises on their peoples and means of production; and socially ham-
pered by the rise to prominence within them of parasitic, antidevelopmentalist mercantile
elites. From this basis, says Davis, the world became radically divided into the
advanced/underdeveloped regions still evident today. Clearly there is a fundamental gulf
between this account and prevalent optimistic versions of capitalism as a developing force.
In terms of household poverty, the introduction of cash crop agriculture in British India
illustrates the drastic consequences of the shift from subsistence production to the mono-
cultures of cotton, wheat, and rice. Now incorporated into world commodity markets, the
direct producers found themselves vulnerable to shifting demands (especially during the
global recession after 1873), long-run deteriorating terms of trade and increasing indebt-
edness, becoming subordinate to local merchants and moneylenders, the controllers of
their credit supplies, product distribution, and local collectors of punitive taxation.
This rural immiseration was accompanied by a marked decline in their food security
too. Commercial control over crop distribution (most designated for export) and wild mer-
cantile speculation put locally available food surpluses out of reach of starving peasantries,
while the widespread imposition of enclosure by the British removed the possibility of
supplementary subsistence production.
The end result of this whole process was the widespread loss of lands and means of pro-
duction by the direct producers and their conversion to the status of a “semi-proletariat,”
subordinate to mercantile and landowning elites and without any prospect of urban–industrial
employments in an “underdeveloped” capitalist structure. This was to be the general pattern
for many societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America established in the late nineteenth
century.
Ecologically, cash crop production went hand in hand with practices of overcultiva-
tion, the settling of marginal and unsuitable lands, soil depletion, and erosion. This cumu-
latively brought agricultural decline and ruin, increasing the social vulnerability of
agricultural regions to climate fluctuations. Complementary methods of irrigation and
hydraulic defenses were also displaced. Davis’s discussion of ecological poverty in north-
ern China offers a fascinating illustration of the links between the depletion of the natural
resource base for agriculture and vulnerability to environmental reverses.
386 Review of Radical Political Economics / Summer 2008

Here, in addition to the problems associated with cash cropping, the peasantry of
northern China confronted the legacy of their forebears’ agricultural expansion into marginal
lands (mountains, foothills, and wet lowlands) and their mass deforestation. Cultivation
proved to be unsustainable in the long run: enormous soil erosion, sedimentation, and
falling water retention created environmental mayhem for existing irrigation systems and
land fertility, a fatal combination that also devastated croplands farther downstream in the
province of Shaanxi.
Furthermore, the imperial state could no longer afford to maintain its system of
hydraulic management that gave crucial support to northern agriculture. Battered by rising
flood control costs and forced to channel funds into quelling mass social rebellion in the
south, the Qing state effectively lost control over the ever-erratic flow of the Yellow River.
Vast layers of cumulative sediment eventually prompted the river to dramatically change
its course, flooding the farmlands of Shandong province and placing vast areas of the north
at the mercy of El Niño events.
That illustrates one aspect of the process Davis calls state decapacitation. Compared
with the activity of the eighteenth century state in both India and China, later rulers lacked
both financial means and political will to provide effective famine defense. The Qing
empire had established a support system for peasant agriculture, combining a network of
county granaries (to relieve periodic hunger) with waterborne transportation and imperial
control over crop prices. As Davis points out, this defense system coped well with the 1743
to 1744 El Niño famine. A century later, no such coverage remained, and the state was
reduced to providing ineffective monetary relief. The shift followed the fiscal crippling of
the Qing state by both internal costs and those incurred in response to Western imperialist
pressures: the Opium Wars, the pattern of its international trade with Britain and India, and
depreciation of its currency under the international regime of the Gold Standard.
In India it was the imposition of colonial rule that left its peasantries environmentally
exposed, establishing economic control over the subcontinent taking precedence for the
British over securing agricultural sustainability. What we can conclude from this, says
Davis, is that the social shaping of vulnerability to climate variability is the decisive
moment in explaining the scope and extent of famine, flood, and drought. In the words of
Michael Watts (1983), famines are social crises, representing the failures of certain politi-
cal and economic systems.
What then of the major environmental agent behind these catastrophic episodes: the El
Niño phenomenon? This is a complex entity with a variable impact on world history; how-
ever, as Davis says, it is the key to explaining the recurrence of periodic and synchronous
drought and famine across the non-European world in the late nineteenth century. At its
simplest, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) consists of a shifting mass of air pres-
sure and ocean temperature in the Pacific that radically alters the normal spread of rainfall
and aridity in the tropics and beyond. Monsoons in the western Pacific zone give way to
severe drought across India, China, Southern Africa, and (further afield) Brazil in an El
Niño phase of its oscillating motion.
This whole pattern is neither uniform nor a unilateral determinant of changing climate
conditions. There are complex interactions between ENSO and other regional climate pat-
terns, such as the levels of Himalayan snow cover in relation to the occurrence of mon-
soons in India, with differential phasing and durations involved. Causally these are
described as “teleconnections.” ENSO itself has a variable periodicity and shifting geo-
graphical spread and teleconnections, always producing distinctive events. Therefore,
 Book Reviews 387

Davis argues, we can only grasp its impact on world history by attending to geographically
specific “climates of hunger,” which he tries to do by summarizing research into ENSO
and drought/famine in regions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Michael Watts (2001) has
suggested that Davis takes ENSO too far, attributing it too readily as cause of drought and
famines. Even if there is something in that criticism, Davis’s extension of Watts’s work on
the social basis of “natural disasters” back into nineteenth century history, and their role in
the origins of the modern Third World, is surely an impressive achievement, a readily
accessible book for students from many disciplines, at all levels of university and even for
high school courses.

Richard Leitch
15 Acomb Ave., Wallsend
Tyne & Wear, NE28 9QE
United Kingdom
Email: safrel.null@virgin.net

References

Arnold, D. 1988. Famine: Social crisis and historical change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Watts, M. 1983. Silent violence: Food, famine, & peasantry in northern Nigeria. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
———. 2001. Black acts. New Left Review 9: 125–139.

________________________

Marxian Reproduction Schema: Money and Aggregate Demand in a Capitalist Economy

By Andrew B. Trigg. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 130 pp. £60.00 cloth.
DOI: 10.1177/0486613408319854
Accepted March 24, 2007

Andrew Trigg has written a short, elegant introduction and discussion of a selection of
models related to Marx’s schemes of reproduction. In this book Trigg puts the monetary and
aggregate demand aspect of these models in the forefront, which provides fresh insights and
a welcome alternative perspective to more traditional supply-oriented Marxist expositions.
The book also puts a healthy emphasis on the structural similarities of models arising from
different heterodox schools of thought. Trigg makes a good case for regarding Keynesian,
Kaleckian, Marxian, Leontief input–output, structuralist, Harrod–Domar, Sraffian, circuitist,
under-consumptionist, and falling-rate of profit theories as variations on a central theme of
understanding the structural financial and aggregate demand conditions for capital accumula-
tion. Despite the methodological ecumenicism of his approach, Trigg also puts forward a def-
inite vision of the stylized pattern of capital accumulation, based on multiplier analysis,
Kalecki’s principle that capitalist outlays determine capitalist revenues, the need for new bor-
rowing to finance expanded reproduction, the class division of capitalist society, and the cen-
tral roles of money and the distribution of income between wages and profits.
Trigg begins by introducing Marx’s schemes of reproduction, the Keynesian multi-
plier, and Leontief’s input–output analysis as the basic building blocks of the subsequent
discussion. He then introduces Kalecki’s stylized picture of a capitalist society in which