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.
