Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of

the Third World (review)

Toby Jones

Technology and Culture, Volume 43, Number 2, April 2002, pp. 463-464 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2002.0066

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/33916

[ Access provided at 1 Jun 2021 10:09 GMT from Vienna University Library (+1 other institution account) ]
 B O O K R E V I E W S

or the European space center and its Ariane rockets. Those tasks will fall to
other scholars.
WILLIAM K. STOREY
Dr. Storey is assistant professor of history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and the
author of Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius (1997) and Writing History (1999).

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of

the Third World.
By Mike Davis. London and New York: Verso, 2000. Pp. x+464. $27.

Three waves of drought, famine, and disease devastated China, India, and
Brazil in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. At least thirty
million people died, perhaps as many as sixty million. At issue in Mike
Davis’s polemic “is not simply that tens of millions of rural poor people
died appallingly, but that they died in a manner, and for reasons, that con-
tradict much of the conventional understanding of the economic history of
the nineteenth century” (p. 8). In this staggering study of human tragedy,
historians will again be confronted with the reality that “progress” is dou-
ble-edged. Why, Davis asks, at the precise moment when famine disap-
peared from Western Europe, and when “smug claims about the life-saving
benefits of steam transportation and modern grain markets” were being
advanced, did millions die “alongside railroad tracks” and “on the steps of
grain depots” (p. 9).
Three phenomena converged to produce widespread misery: radical
climatic change, the expansion of the world economy, and the new imperi-
alism. In the first two parts of Late Victorian Holocausts, Davis explores the
conjuncture of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) episodes with the
social and cultural practices of the early phase of globalization. In spite of
widespread crop failures and water shortages, which proceeded from
droughts and flooding effected by ENSO, food surpluses were common. Yet
millions perished. European colonizers and merchants, aware of the human
costs of their choices, avoided providing for the withering masses. Instead,
driven by their faith in liberalism, the agents of “free trade” directed food
surpluses to European markets and the heart of the industrial machine.
Indigenous actors were neither oblivious to their diminishing fortunes nor
stripped of agency. Davis argues that widespread famines, “engines of his-
torical transformation,” galvanized anticolonial resistance and helped fuel
the millenarian movements that swept the “future third world” in the late
nineteenth century.
In the third part of his book Davis examines the science of meteorology
and the attempts by Europeans to explain the sudden shift in the global cli-
mate with its attendant human misfortune. Those interested in the intel-

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T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U LT U R E

lectual history of science will find this part of the book most interesting.
The scientific debate about what caused global climatic change—and there-
fore famine—raged from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth
century, with the epistemological “breakthrough” about ENSO coming in
the 1960s. Regardless of scientific understanding, however, Davis laments
that advances in climatology “were purchased at the price of a narrowed
APRIL
and depoliticized scope of scientific inquiry” (p. 219).
2002 The fourth part investigates the social and economic contexts that were
VOL. 43
invaded by nature, markets, and imperialists. Here Davis analyzes the polit-
ical-economic and environmental conditions (the “political ecology”) that
dominated the pre- and post-European expansionist era. He explains that
millions died only after colonizers toppled the protectionist measures that
precolonial/peripheral polities had worked to secure. Though railroads and
steam engines are not part of Davis’s story of devastation and death, he
implies that they had a lifesaving potential, a potential for warding off colos-
sal human loss. His analysis demonstrates the extent to which humans, sci-
ence, machines, nature, and colonialism profoundly influenced one another.
As is often the case with sweeping comparative studies, Davis’s work
demands close scrutiny. Such scrutiny indicates, for one thing, that he fails
adequately to examine the flows of capital and the histories of capital for-
mation that underpinned global famine. That is, he presents the reader
with a world in which global capitalism and colonialism were autonomous
forces proceeding according to an inexorable Eurocentric logic. In his view,
their emergence and function require little explanation: capitalism, colo-
nialism, and tragedy were phenomena created and driven solely by irre-
sponsible Europeans. Davis mostly dismisses the role of indigenous inter-
mediaries and compradors in determining the character of colonial politics
and peripheral economies.
Late Victorian Holocausts also serves to reify the binaries of European/
Other and colonizer/colonized, binaries that colonial and postcolonial
studies have sought to disarm. Yet, even though Davis misses the complex-
ity that characterized colonialism and the emergence of the world capital-
ist system, his book is immensely valuable. As a critical and overtly politi-
cal text, Late Victorian Holocausts provides an opportunity to engage with
important polemical issues that are, or should be, at the forefront of the
history of technology.
TOBY JONES
Mr. Jones is a doctoral candidate in history at Stanford University.

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