Mike Davis

Late Victorian Holocausts

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Examining aseries of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawnedaround the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davisdiscloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arroganceand natural incident that combined to produce some of the worsttragedies in human history.
Late Victorian Holocaustsfocuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India,Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the sameglobal climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and allexperienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But theeffects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularlydestructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.
Davisargues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known asthe Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the pricefor capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions ofpeasants' lives.
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Quotes

  • bblbrxhas quoted6 years ago
    On the expenditure side, a colonial budget largely financed by taxes on farm land returned less than 2 percent to agriculture and education, and barely 4 percent to public works of all kinds, while devoting a full third to the army and police.
  • bblbrxhas quoted6 years ago
    In Russia, poor harvests during the dry years of 1888–90 were prelude to the catastrophic drought in spring and summer of 1891 that brought famine to the black soil provinces of the Volga valley as well as the Orenburg wheat-belt south of the Urals (epicenter of drought during the 1997–98 El Niño). Seventy percent of the rye crop, the chief subsistence of the muzhiks, was lost.
  • bblbrxhas quoted6 years ago
    He vehemently opposed a proposal from Hume, whom he forced to resign, that would have imposed a modest income tax “on the ground that it would affect the higher income groups, both European and Indian.” His own preference was for a famine tax on potential famine victims (that is, a new land cess on the peasantry) – a measure that would have inflamed the entire country and was therefore rejected by Salisbury and the Council of India. As an alternative, Lytton and John Strachey drafted a scheme that was almost as regressive, reviving a hated license tax on petty traders (professionals were exempt) in tandem with brutal hikes in salt duties in Madras and Bombay (where the cost of salt was raised from 2 to 40 annas per maund).

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