Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
- ISBN-10
- 1781680612
- ISBN-13
- 9781781680612
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 480
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2002-06-17
- Publisher
- Verso Books
- Author
- Mike Davis
Description
Bestselling, magisterial melding of global environmental history and global political history. Winner of the World History Association Book Award. Examining a series of El Niño-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. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects 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 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.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2017-01-01
- 367 pages
- Paperback
- Verso Books
-
- 2002-06-17
- 470 pages
- Paperback
- Verso Books
Similar books
-
Planet of Slums
By Mike DavisCelebrated urban theorist Davis provides a global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor.
-
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
By Mike DavisEcology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
-
Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-century America's Aesthetics of Alienation
By Rochelle JohnsonBy uncovering the roots of a cultural alienation from nature, Passions for Nature explains how the United States came to be a nation that simultaneously reveres the natural world and yet remains dangerously distant from it.
-
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
By Mike Davis, Daniel Bertrand MonkEvil Paradises, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, is a global guidebook to phantasmagoric but real places—alternate realities being constructed as “utopias” in a capitalist era unfettered by unions and state regulation.
-
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire
By David Cannadine155, 231, 313- 14. A. N. Porter, 'Introduction', in OHBE iii, p. 18; J. Tosh, Clan Leaders and Colonial Chiefs in Lango: The Political History of an East African ... 250-51; J. Lonsdale, 'East Africa', in OHBE iv, ...
-
Silent Violence: Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria
By Michael J. WattsSiri Rustad, Power-Sharing and Conflict in Nigmia (working paper, Center for the Study of Civil War, Peace Research Institute, Oslo, 2008). 36. The Nigerian zonal (or regional) system is as follows: North West (Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, ...
-
Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine
By Alex de WaalIn Mass Starvation, world-renowned expert on humanitarian crisis and response Alex de Waal provides an authoritative history of modern famines: their causes, dimensions and why they ended.
-
A Victorian Holocaust: Iran in the Great Famine of 1869–1873
By Mohammad Gholi MajdUsing a variety of primary sources, including American missionary reports, this book describes and quantifies the devastation of the Great Famine of 1869–73 that killed 10–12 million Iranians, amounting to two-thirds of the population.
-
Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City
By Mike DavisMark Ellis and Richard Wright , " The Industrial Division of Labor Among Immigrants and Internal Migrants to the Los Angeles Economy . " International Migration Review 33 : 1 ( Spring 1999 ) , p . 50 . 155. Richard Wright , Mark Ellis ...
-
Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West
By Chip WardAn account of the years the author and his family lived on the edge of the Great Basin Desert in Grantsville, Utah, and how an idyllic life was interrupted by tales of sickness and death and a hidden history of ecocide