The Third World thus resulted from a conjuncture of natural, political, and socioeconomic processes. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis charts the unprecedented human suffering caused by a series of extreme climactic conditions in the final quarter of the 19th century. The famines in turn provided imperialists with an opportunity for further territorial aggrandizement. Davis teases out the causal linkages among them, painting a new picture of the elements that went into “the making of the Third World.” His thesis is that the late-nineteenth-century globe-spanning droughts in India, China, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia were precipitated by El Niño, but they became massive famines-killing 30 to 50 million people-because of a London-centered international capitalism. Mike Davis examines the relationships among (a) late-nineteenth-century famines in much of what we now call the “Third World,” (b) the climatic effect known as ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation), (c) Western imperialism, and (d) the twentieth-century gap between the wealthiest and poorest countries in the world. (source: Nielsen Book Data) Publisher's summaryĮxamining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history and to sow the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the third world.The dust-jacket blurbs use “stunning,” “eloquent,” “wholly original,” and “first-rate” to describe the author and this work, and the praise is apt. The author, Mike Davis, argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as 'The Third World' were sown in this era of high imperialism, as the price for Capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

The effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. All of these countries were effected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated the populations. 'Late Victorian Holocausts' focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China and North-Eastern Brazil.

So much about Covid-19 feels like what he catalogs: the punitive, racist.

Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p. The story of climate in The Long Winter is told, in a different context, in Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts.

Victorian holocausts