the casual critic

A saying often incorrectly attributed to Joseph Stalin tells us that whereas the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is merely a statistic. While often used cynically, it describes a genuine phenomenon that we find it easier to relate and emphasise to the misfortunes of individuals, and that death or suffering on a large scale becomes literally incomprehensible to our minds. Yet in his book ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’, author Mike Davis fuses statistics and tragedy to describe how the combination of recurring droughts and integration into the capitalist system inflicted a colossal human cost on regions we now call the Global South.

Late Victorian Holocausts centres on a series of famines across the globe that occurred between roughly 1876 and 1902, with many different parts of the world affected simultaneously. One strand of Davis’s book is to identify the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as the climatological driver of crop failures in areas as far apart as Brazil and China. Yet the main strength of Late Victorian Holocausts is Davis’s investigation of how these naturally occurring phenomena were catastrophically exacerbated by the forcible integration of countries into the world capitalist system, either directly as colonies like India, or otherwise through dependency on credit or as the result of war, as was the case with Brazil and China.

After all, Davis points out, the ENSO has been a natural phenomenon for centuries, yet the famines of the late 19th century were of a scale hitherto unimaginable. Davis persuasively argues that, rather than bringing benefits to these countries, integration into the capitalist system fatally weakened their resilience to droughts and other natural disasters. Subsistence farming gave way to cash cropping, with peasant farmers left destitute and without locally grown produce when global prices collapsed. Mechanisms of resilience, such as China’s ‘eternal granaries’ or arrangements of mutual aid in India, were broken down because the market deemed them ‘inefficient’. And even where food was produced locally, integration into the world market meant starving communities saw their produce exported overseas where it could gain a higher price. Nor was this just the unfortunate effect of impersonal environmental and economic factors. Late Victorian Holocausts shows that at every turn, rigid pro-market ideology defeated even the most lacklustre compassion. Especially in India, British colonial administrators deployed openly Malthusian policies, forced marching thousands of starving peasants into work camps, where they had to ‘earn’ rations that were smaller than those provided in Nazi extermination camps.

The descriptions of the impact of famine and imperial policies are where Davis’s brilliance comes through with cold fury, but they are also the ones I most struggled to read. I often found myself having to put the book down for a while simply to process the staggering scale of human suffering inflicted on the world’s poor and marginalised. Late Victorian Holocaust relentlessly documents the death tolls resulting from the famines: regions where 95% of the population starve, canyons filled with skeletons, casualty numbers going up to the tens of millions. It is statistics returned as tragedy with a vengeance.

Yet Late Victorian Holocausts is not simply a polemic. If anything, it is rather academic for a work of ‘popular’ non-fiction. Descriptions of emaciated children sometimes sit incongruently next to tabulations of rice production in northern Chinese provinces. Overleaf from the ideological insanity of 19th century economic liberalism we find a detailed history of ENSO events. The sheer amount of detail can make the book somewhat inaccessible at times, and I was rather surprised there wasn’t more of a conclusion to tie it all together at the end. Instead the book finishes in the way it makes most of its argument: with three in-depth chapters on the long term impacts on India, China and Brazil. Yet while the argument comes through well in the detail, I did think this rather left it to the reader to fully connect the four distinct parts of the book.

Nonetheless, I strongly recommend Late Victorian Holocausts to anyone interested in world history, or who wants to understand why the world now looks the way it does. I cannot pretend it was a pleasant read. The book has no patience for vague notions that ‘colonialism was bad’, and mercilessly confronts you with the actual brutality of it. It most certainly obliterates any notion that peripheral nations somehow benefitted from benevolent integration into the world capitalist system: the railroads were never there to bring civilisation, but to carry away the grain. Hence it makes for essential reading in our times of culture war where the Right vocally claims that ‘Empire was good, actually’. The millions upon millions of starved Indians, Chinese, Brazilians and others would surely argue otherwise, had they actually lived to tell the tale.