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benji_dw's review
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
Everyone of British descent should read
chandler_daversa's review against another edition
5.0
A stunning indictment of liberal-free market dogma and it’s devastating effect on the victims of the British colonial project. This book is how the third world came about.
eliaszuniga's review against another edition
5.0
An interesting book that makes the argument that famines of the late 19th century in Brazil, India, and China (and perhaps all others) had a social component to them. In essence, people starve each other, not the environment! (As evidence, the author cites plenty of droughts when corresponding famines have not occurred. (Think of our current one in California.)) This amounts to a simple argument: If droughts cause famine, then when droughts happen, famine will occur. But droughts happen without famine. Therefore it is not the case that droughts cause famine. There's also a couple of secondary arguments: a. that so called advancements of Western societies (like technology for example) actually made famines worse. And b. that citing "backwardnes" or overpopulation of those societies for those famines is wrong. The book is difficult to read, for both the gruesome descriptions of brutality, and for tediously detailed information on global weather patterns. For both research and original argument, this book gets an A.
zachcarter's review against another edition
4.0
This was a tough read. In the introduction, he makes the claim that, just in India, China, and Brazil, drought and famine killed somewhere between 30-60 *million* people in the late 19th/early 20th century. He then goes on to show exactly how the imperial British government exacerbated the crises, denied aid, and therefore assume responsibility for a great number of these deaths. The dehumanization of the British "subjects" is clearly demonstrated. There is a long section in the middle of the book that defines a bunch of scientific phenomena like El Niño/La Niña, ENSO, and a variety of other climate events that, even as a scientist, became sort of hard to keep up with. Though important to understanding the devastating droughts/famines, it is fairly complex.
ptune's review against another edition
4.0
an inundation of data that produces a mostly-clear picture. maybe sometime I will get through one of these books and think ‘yes, I understand this completely, thank you Mr Davis.’ this was not that book. still a big fan!
ajkhn's review against another edition
4.0
This was the first Mike Davis book I've read. It is very dense. The subject matter: how linkages to global capitalist market exacerbated famines caused by weak political systems during El Nino events, is not breezy.
It's also nearly 400 pages. Dense pages, full of reiterating historians of 19th century India, Brazil and China describing political breakdown and the starvation it caused. There are only a couple true antagonists (Lytton, mostly) and a lot of descriptions of the bleakest of all worlds. Cannibalism, starvation, and apocalyptic landscapes.
It is really impressive how he builds his case from all of this. Demonstrating the genesis of despair is a very difficult thing to do, and is very open to screeds, but Davis patiently builds a detailed argument of how markets in western Europe created a new economics that made traditional antidotes to famine (giving people food whether they can afford it or not) impossible. And that this new economics and the famine it caused was not an incident of capitalism, but the entire point — immiseration and destruction of surplus persons.
For me, the most impressive part of the book is his description of how devastating British imperial rule was. The statistics showing how not-bad of a place India was to live, until the Brits got there and exhausted markets to benefit Britain, is pretty remarkable. The way Davis demonstrates the lies the British told themselves about their rule is eye-opening.
It is a book full of good arguments, and the only reason I'm docking it a star is because he spends so much time building his case – often from secondary sources – and very little time collating those sources into an analysis. He really trusts the reader to follow him along, but there were times when all of that respect could be an overreach — I often went back a few pages while I was reading to make sure I was catching everything. And Davis is not an Asianist or a South Americanist, which is fine and great but means that he relies on a lot of secondary sources which can also mean for tricky reading.
It's a necessary book in a lot of ways. I wasn't surprsied to hear that many of my friends have already read it. It also deserves a larger audience, but the way it is written can make that difficult.
It's also nearly 400 pages. Dense pages, full of reiterating historians of 19th century India, Brazil and China describing political breakdown and the starvation it caused. There are only a couple true antagonists (Lytton, mostly) and a lot of descriptions of the bleakest of all worlds. Cannibalism, starvation, and apocalyptic landscapes.
It is really impressive how he builds his case from all of this. Demonstrating the genesis of despair is a very difficult thing to do, and is very open to screeds, but Davis patiently builds a detailed argument of how markets in western Europe created a new economics that made traditional antidotes to famine (giving people food whether they can afford it or not) impossible. And that this new economics and the famine it caused was not an incident of capitalism, but the entire point — immiseration and destruction of surplus persons.
For me, the most impressive part of the book is his description of how devastating British imperial rule was. The statistics showing how not-bad of a place India was to live, until the Brits got there and exhausted markets to benefit Britain, is pretty remarkable. The way Davis demonstrates the lies the British told themselves about their rule is eye-opening.
It is a book full of good arguments, and the only reason I'm docking it a star is because he spends so much time building his case – often from secondary sources – and very little time collating those sources into an analysis. He really trusts the reader to follow him along, but there were times when all of that respect could be an overreach — I often went back a few pages while I was reading to make sure I was catching everything. And Davis is not an Asianist or a South Americanist, which is fine and great but means that he relies on a lot of secondary sources which can also mean for tricky reading.
It's a necessary book in a lot of ways. I wasn't surprsied to hear that many of my friends have already read it. It also deserves a larger audience, but the way it is written can make that difficult.