Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

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Title

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Description

Examining aseries of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davisdis closes the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arroganceand natural incident that combined to produce some of the worsttragedies in human history.

Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India,Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the sameg lobal climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But theeffects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.

Davis argues 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 of peasants’ lives.
--from Verson Books

Creator

Mike Davis

About the Author

Class

Planet Earth

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Citation

Mike Davis, “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World,” Trinity College Library, accessed March 29, 2024, https://tclibrary.omeka.net/items/show/172.