Some thoughts on Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts.

Everyone should know about the events that Mike Davis chronicles in this book. Worldwide famines beginning in 1877 killed tens of millions in India, China, Brazil and Africa; altogether around fifty million people died for starvation or disease. Famines with comparable death tolls occurred again around 1890, and periodically through the following decades.

Great Famine 1876-78: ‘Forsaken’

Davis looks at the climate science behind the famines (PRO TIP: El Niño is bad news in the tropical zones of the world) and the political structures that controlled human reactions to adverse climactic developments. He draws conclusions from that study which are important for the historiography of that time, but also more general conclusions about society and politics.

The narrow conclusion is that European imperialism, and above all British imperialism under Victoria, are inescapably culpable for many millions of the famine deaths in this period. It’s true that the El Niño/La Niña effects of those years were enormous, among the worst in the last five hundred years; dislocation and suffering was inevitable.

But in almost no cases was there such a dearth of food that famine was a necessary result. In particular, while India experienced huge losses to drought and flooding during the famine years, British-ruled Burma produced huge rice surpluses, and many other regions of India had excess food available. Nor can the famine deaths be blamed on the difficulties in transporting relief grain to starving people. Davis shows devastating evidence that areas connected to British-built railroads fared far worse than their counterparts with no railroad access. Modern transportation and communication did nothing to bring food to the starving masses. Instead, telegraphs caused grain prices in the afflicted areas to rise along with the world market prices, and railroads let their grain be shipped out expeditiously to Europe.

Lord Lytton, on why mortality in Gujarat was high: “The Gujarati is a soft man…
accustomed to earn his good food easily. In the hot weather, he seldom worked at all
and at no time did he form the habit of continuous labour. … They lived by watching
cattle and crops, by sitting in the fields to weed, by picking cotton, grain and fruit, and
by… pilfering.”(To be fair, that dude knew something about pilfering.)

The deaths from famine in India in those years is due to the particular combination of free-market fundamentalism and good old-fashioned racialism that prevailed among the British leadership at home and in India. A few government relief efforts were initiated, but they required that anyone seeking relief had to walk to a relief center at least ten miles from their home, and they had to work at hard labor all day to earn their bread — which they received at an amount below the level given to convicts, and prorated to less for anyone who could not complete a whole day’s work in the sun. Because otherwise, obviously, people might just be shirking. Meanwhile the government actively moved to close down private relief centers that some Europeans tried to set up, because those would interfere with the free market’s optimal distribution of goods.

So that’s the immediate concrete conclusion. It’s important, and people should know about that — just one of multiple famines created by colonialism (British in particular) which resulted in death tolls comparable to those of World War II or any of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century.

But there’s another point that comes out when we look across the whole tropical band of the world. Although the whole world was being impacted directly by European imperialism at this time, different political systems prevailed in different countries. India was a hodgepodge of different governments — including British-ruled areas and many independent local fiefdoms or principalities, but all dominated by the British. In China the Qing dynasty held power, although it was already shaken by the Opium Wars with the European powers, the Taiping rebellion (leading to the bloodiest civil war in world history) and environmental catastrophes in the North China plain by the time the 1877 famine began. Across Africa, famine struck alike at lands ruled by Europe and independent nations like Ethiopia and the Sudan. Brazil was a Portugese colony and then an independent republic, though always effectively controlled by British financiers.

Rebels beheaded by Europeans after the failure of the anti-imperialist Boxer rebellion

What we find looking across all of those countries is that in some circumstances all of those political systems behaved exactly the same. Nature, in the form of El Niño, made it inevitable that significant scarcity would occur. Societies had to decide whether that scarcity would be shared, and social resources spent to save the most affected populations. And what happened instead, in every case, was that power ruled the day. When food became scare, the rich and the connected made sure they got theirs; the next rung down on the social ladder did the same; and so on down to the lowest levels, when there was no one left to squeeze, and those people were left to die like animals. Which they did: mortality reached 70% or more some counties in Shanxi, China; the Brazilian sertão was desertified and nearly deserted.

The lesson I took from this is that there’s no shortcut or substitute for liberation. Technology is not a cure for famine. In fact, “famine” itself is a social and not a natural ailment. It is a social response to natural conditions. It’s not a failure to deal with those conditions — it is a response that ususally succeeds in doing what it aims to do, which is to protect the profits and security of the socially powerful. The solution to famine is not technical or managerial. The only solution for famine is the creation of an egalitarian society that can produce sufficient surplus during good climactic times and share scarcity during bad ones.

Antonio Conselheiro, founder of the utopian socialist city of Canudos,
murdered by the republican government of Brazil

Other Fun Facts:

* Along with the famine induced by El Niño, Ethiopia suffered from an epidemic of rinderpest that was intentionally introduced by Italy, to soften the country up for an invasion. The rinderpest killed something like 95% of the cattle in the country, devastating an agricultural society that depended on plows pulled by oxen.

P.S.: For a fun time, don’t do a google image search for ‘rinderpest’.

* Despite a famine killing tens of millions of British subjects in the subcontinent, Indian production of opium to sell to China peaked in 1879.

* Unless and until we can rely on social storage of food surplus and social distribution in times of poor harvests, we’re all only a few weeks away from cannibalism. Whee!

September 7th, 2009 | Category: bibliophilia, politics | Comments (1)