>From the preface to Mike Davis's newly published "Late Victorian
Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World" (Verso):
After Beijing, Grant continued to Yokohama and Edo, then home across the
Pacific to a rapturous reception in San Francisco that demonstrated the
dramatic revival of his popularity in light of so much romantic and highly
publicized globetrotting. Throat cancer eventually precluded another
assault on the White House and forced the ex-president into a desperate
race to finish his famous Personal Memoirs. But none of that is pertinent
to this preface. What is germane is a coincidence in his travels that Grant
himself never acknowledged, but which almost certainly must have puzzled
readers of Young�s narrative: the successive encounters with epic drought
and famine in Egypt, India and China. It was almost as if the Americans
were inadvertently following in the footprints of a monster whose colossal
trail of destruction extended from the Nile to the Yellow Sea.
As contemporary readers of Nature and other scientific journals were aware,
it was a disaster of truly planetary magnitude, with drought and famine
reported as well in Java, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Korea, Brazil,
southern Africa and the Mahgreb. No one had hitherto suspected that
synchronous extreme weather was possible on the scale of the entire
tropical monsoon belt plus northern China and North Africa. Nor was there
any historical record of famine afflicting so many far-flung lands
simultaneously Although only the roughest estimates of mortality could be
made, it was horrifyingly clear that the million Irish dead of 1845�47 had
been multiplied by tens. The total toll of conventional warfare from
Austerlitz to Antietam and Sedan, according to calculations by one British
journalist, was probably less than the mortality in southern India alone.
Only China�s Taiping Revolution (1851�64), the bloodiest civil war in world
history with an estimated 20 million to 30 million dead, could boast as
many victims.
But the great drought of 1876�79 was only the first of three global
subsistence crises in the second half of Victoria�s reign. In 1889�91 dry
years again brought famine to India, Korea, Brazil and Russia, although the
worst suffering was in Ethiopia and the Sudan, where perhaps one-third of
the population died. Then in 1896�1902, the monsoons again repeatedly
failed across the tropics and in northern China. Hugely destructive
epidemics of malaria, bubonic plague, dysentery, smallpox and cholera
culled millions of victims from the ranks of the famine-weakened. The
European empires, together with Japan and the United States, rapaciously
exploited the opportunity to wrest new colonies, expropriate communal
lands, and tap novel sources of plantation and mine labor. What seemed from
a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century�s final blaze of imperial
glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a
giant funeral pyre.
The total human toll of these three waves of drought, famine and disease
could not have been less than 30 million victims. Fifty million dead might
not be unrealistic. Although the famished nations themselves were the chief
mourners, there were also contemporary Europeans who understood the moral
magnitude of such carnage and how fundamentally it annulled the apologies
of empire. Thus the Radical journalist William Digby, principal chronicler
of the 1876 Madras famine, prophesized on the eve of Queen Victoria�s death
that when "the part played by the British Empire in the nineteenth century
is regarded by the historian fifty years hence, the unnecessary deaths of
millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." A
most eminent Victorian, the famed naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the
codiscoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, passionately
agreed. Like Digby, he viewed mass starvation as avoidable political
tragedy not "natural" disaster. In a famous balance-sheet of the Victorian
era, published in 1898, he characterized the famines in India and China,
together with the slum poverty of the industrial cities, as "the most
terrible failures of the century "
But while the Dickensian slum remains in the world history curriculum, the
famine children of 1876 and 1899 have disappeared. Almost without
exception, modern historians writing about nineteenth-century world history
from a metropolitan vantage-point have ignored the late Victorian
mega-droughts and famines that engulfed what we now call the "third world."
Eric Hobsbawm, for example, makes no allusion in his famous trilogy on
nineteenth-century history to the worst famines in perhaps 500 years in
India and China, although he does mention the Great Hunger in Ireland as
well as the Russian famine of 1891�92. Likewise, the sole reference to
famine in David Landes�s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations� a magnum opus
meant to solve the mystery of inequality between nations � is the erroneous
claim that British railroads eased hunger in India. Numerous other examples
could be cited of contemporary historians� curious neglect of such
portentous events. It is like writing the history of the late twentieth
century without mentioning the Great Leap Forward famine or Cambodia�s
killing fields. The great famines are the missing pages � the absent
defining moments, if you prefer � in virtually every overview of the
Victorian era. Yet there are compelling, even urgent, reasons for
revisiting this secret history.
At issue is not simply that tens of millions of poor rural people died
appallingly, but that they died in a manner, and for reasons, that
contradict much of the conventional understanding of the economic history
of the nineteenth century. For example, how do we explain the fact that in
the very half-century when peacetime famine permanently disappeared from
Western Europe, it increased so devastatingly throughout much of the
colonial world? Equally how do we weigh smug claims about the life-saving
benefits of steam transportation and modern grain markets when so many
millions, especially in British India, died alongside railroad tracks or on
the steps of grain depots? And how do we account in the case of China for
the drastic decline in state capacity and popular welfare, especially
famine relief; that seemed to follow in lockstep with the empire�s forced
"opening" to modernity by Britain and the other Powers?
We not are dealing, in other words, with "lands of famine" becalmed in
stagnant backwaters of world history but with the fate of tropical humanity
at the precise moment (1870�1914) when its labor and products were being
dynamically conscripted into a London-centered world economy. Millions
died, not outside the "modern world system," but in the very process of
being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.
They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were
murdered, as we shall see, by the theological application of the sacred
principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill. Yet the only twentieth-century
economic historian who seems to have clearly understood that the great
Victorian famines (at least, in the Indian case) were integral chapters in
the history of capitalist modernity was Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book The
Great Transformation. "The actual source of famines in the last fifty
years," he wrote, was the free marketing of grain combined with local
failure of incomes":
"Failure of crops, of course, was part of the picture, but despatch of
grain by rail made it possible to send relief to the threatened areas; the
trouble was that the people were unable to buy the corn at rocketing
prices, which on a free but incompletely organized market were bound to be
a reaction to a shortage. In former times small local stores had been held
against harvest failure, but these had been now discontinued or swept away
into the big market.... Under the monopolists the situation had been fairly
kept in hand with the help of the archaic organization of the countryside,
including free distribution of corn, while under free and equal exchange
Indians perished by the millions."
Polanyi, however, believed that the emphasis that Marxists put on the
exploitative aspects of late-nineteenth-century imperialism tended "to hide
from our view the even greater issue of cultural degeneration":
"The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid
and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim (whether
force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether relevant).
These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is
foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land
are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the
liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society....
Indian masses in the second half of the nineteenth century did not die of
hunger because they were exploited by Lancashire; they perished in large
numbers because the Indian village community had been demolished."
Polanyi�s famous essay has the estimable virtue of knocking down one
Smithian fetish after another to show that the route to a Victorian "new
world order" was paved with bodies of the poor. But he simultaneously
reified the "Market" as automata in a way that has made it easier for some
epigones to visualize famine as an inadvertent "birth pang" or no-fault
"friction of transition" in the evolution towards market-based world
subsistence. Commodification of agriculture eliminates village-level
reciprocities that traditionally provided welfare to the poor during
crises. (Almost as if to say: "Oops, systems error: fifty million corpses.
Sorry We�ll invent a famine code next time.")
But markets, to play with words, are always "made." Despite the pervasive
ideology that markets function spontaneously (and, as a result, "in
capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility,
things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms"), they in fact
have inextricable political histories. And force � contra Polanyi � is
"altogether relevant." As Rosa Luxemburg argued in her classic (1913)
analysis of the incorporation of Asian and African peasantries into the
late-nineteenth-century world market:
"Each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a
relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the
natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and
labour power. Any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital exclusively
to "peaceful competition," i.e. to regular commodity exchange such as takes
place between capitalist producer-countries, tests on the pious belief that
capital ... can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating
natural economy. Accumulation, with its spasmodic expansion, can no more
wait for, and be content with, a natural internal disintegration of
noncapitalist formations and their transition to commodity economy, than it
can wait for, and be content with, the natural increase of the working
population. Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of
capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent
weapon..."
The famines that Polanyi abstractly describes as rooted in commodity cycles
and trade circuits were part of this permanent violence. "Millions die" was
ultimately a policy choice: to accomplish such decimations required (in
Brecht�s sardonic phrase) "a brilliant way of organising famine." The
victims had to be comprehensively defeated well in advance of their slow
withering into dust. Although equations may be more fashionable, it is
necessary to pin names and faces to the human agents of such catastrophes,
as well as to understand the configuration of social and natural conditions
that constrained their decisions. Equally it is imperative to consider the
resistances, large and small, by which starving laborers and poor peasants
attempted to foil the death sentences passed by grain speculators and
colonial proconsuls.
Louis Proyect
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