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A review by ajkhn
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis
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.