Hard on the heels of Naomi Klein's No Logo, dissecting corporate cunning and greed in today's global market, comes this account by Mike Davis of imperial arrogance and rapacity in the making of the liberal economy at the end of the 19th century.
From 1876 to the end of the Victorian era, over 30 million Indians, Chinese and Brazilians died in a terrible carnage of famine and disease, attributed to God, nature, and market forces, and wiped from the chronicles of social history. Whereas Ireland has recovered the memory of its starved one million, these other colonies have their dead consigned to the footnotes of economic history, pushed to the margins by tales of Kipling's "glorious imperial half-century". Who has heard of the Madras famine of 1876, or of mothers selling their children to buy food in ChinKiang in 1877?
Mike Davis is an unattached historian who has written a trilogy of books on the horrors of modern Los Angeles, two of which - City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear became best-selling texts of contemporary urban society. Now in this scholarly, readable, and harrowing account of the forgotten objects of colonialism, he shifts focus to sift the archives and relicts of far-flung places visited by the awful twins of climatic change and imperial design.
For Davis, the colonial experiment in economic liberalism of the last quarter of the 19th century merits the harshest indictment. He concludes that this was "a new dark age of colonial war, indentured labour, concentration camps, genocide, forced migration, famine and disease." It was not a question of famine-prone territories, becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world history, fated to starve periodically when the heavens and the earth conspired to dry up the sources of life. As Davis notes, we are dealing with the fate of tropical humanity "at the precise moment (1876-1914) when its labour and products were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centred world economy".
The book is organised in four parts. In the first two sections, Davis outlines the malign interaction between climatic changes and economic processes. Drought is never simply a natural disaster. The most devastating of the 19th-century occurrences were accompanied by land-degradation, neglect of traditional irrigation systems, demobilisation of communal labour, and state failure to invest in water storage facilities.
The third section leaves politics aside to offer a technical account of weather patterns and their impact on the natural conditions of famine. From meteorological data and diary records of the time, scientists have recently amassed the material evidence which links the famines in India, northern China and north-eastern Brazil. We learn the difference between El Nino and La Nina events - warm or cold phases which usually happen around Christmas, hence the name - and their key role in laying a natural foundation for these climatic events.
But who starved, who died, was not determined by nature, and the final part of the book, titled `The Political Ecology of Famine', is given to uncovering the human choices which turned drought into famine, food shortage into starvation. The central thesis is expressed in Davis's brutal claim: "what we today call the Third World is the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalities that were shaped most decisively in the last quarter of the 19th century, when the great non-European peasantries were initially integrated into the world economy."
This is a powerful and disturbing book, a persuasive account of a forgotten history. It is a manual for all who look to history's lessons to explain the present and who intuitively feel uneasy at the altar of deregulation and the free-market economy which has been erected anew after the collapse of socialism. Other times, other mores? Perhaps, but it is prudent to recognise the sins of the fathers if their children are to address the consequences more humanely.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin