[I'll be away for a few days. Tom Warren is minding the store. Mark]
Mike Davis tells how western empires wrought destruction in Late Victorian
Holocausts
Sunday February 11, 2001
The Observer
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niqo, Famines and the Making of the Third World
Mike Davis
Verso #20, pp464
Driven to insurrection by the drought of 1877, the native Kanak people of New
Caledonia rose against their French colonists in a desperate and ultimately tragic
revolution. In a meeting with the Governor, Olry, the rebel leader Atai acted out a
graphic explanation of his people's grievances. He carried with him two sacks, the
contents of which he emptied at the Frenchman's feet. The first contained soil.
'This,' said Atai, 'is what we had before you came.' The second contained pebbles.
'And this is what we have now.' By June of 1878 Atai's rebellion was over after a
slash and burn policy had reduced hundreds of Kanak villages to ash. Atai himself
was captured and decapitated by the French, his head sent back to Paris as a trophy
of war.
It is a grim irony that many of those who fought in the war of extermination against
the Kanaks were themselves exiles from the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871. But
Louise Michel, The Red Virgin of Paris, took the Kanak side and even gave half her
famous red scarf to two rebel friends.
In her memoirs Michel wrote movingly of the failed rebellion: 'The strength and
longing of human hearts was shown once again, but the whites shot down the rebels as
we were mowed down in front of Bastion 37 and on the plains of Satory. When they
sent the head of Atai, I wondered who the real headhunters were; as Henri Rochefort
had once written to me, "the Versailles government could give the natives lessons in
cannibalism".'
Atai's simple but dramatic demonstration before the French governor and Michel's
more conventional colonial narrative both express the central argument of Mike
Davis's book.
He maintains that the droughts that struck across Asia, Africa, South America and
the Pacific at the end of the nineteenth century were at best exacerbated by the
colonial powers and at worst turned into vehicles of extermination by European
governments blinded by the yoked ideologies of neo-Darwinism and free-market
capitalism.
Since the French invasion of 1853 the indigenous Melanesians of the Pacific island
of New Caledonia had been driven off the fertile land on the west coast into
reserves in the mountainous interior. In a policy developed first in Algeria, the
French replaced potentially troublesome local chiefs with pliant placemen loyal to
the new regime. Within two years the French had thrown the Kanaks off 90 per cent of
the best land and destroyed the tribal culture. The famine and its aftermath did the
rest.
Late Victorian Holocausts is two great books in one. The first is a political
history of the droughts and famine that killed millions in the colonial world just
as it was being wiped out in western Europe. The second is the scientific history of
the phenomenon that became known as the El Niqo Southern Oscillation (Enso): the
cyclical pattern of extreme weather conditions that created the droughts in the
first place. This part of the book celebrates the work of scientists, culminating in
that of Jacob Bjerknes of University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1960s who
studied the inner workings of El Niqo, the rapid warming of the tropical Pacific
that leads to drought, and its equally deadly twin La Niqa, which causes torrential
rain and flooding
Davis draws together these meteorological and social phenomena to produce a picture
of what he calls 'the malign interaction between climactic and economic processes'.
Between 1876 and 1902 as many as 60 million people died as a result of famines in
India, China and Brazil. The earliest official examination of the causes of mass
death in India by the Famine Commission of 1899-1902 found that it had been caused
by high prices and not a shortage of food. In fact 1877, when millions died as a
result of famine, was also a record year for Indian grain exports to Britain.
According to Davis, the Third World was created at this moment. Late Victorian
Holocausts will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project. After
reading this, I defy even the most ardent nationalist to feel proud of the so-called
'achievements' of empire.
------------------
Hunger strike
Sukhdev Sandhu on Late Victorian Holocausts - the famines that fed the empire - by
Mike Davis
Saturday January 20, 2001
The Guardian
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World
Mike Davis
464pp, Verso, #20
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future
is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the
radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently
asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is
regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of
Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." Who now remembers the
Madrasis?
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis charts the unprecedented human suffering
caused by a series of extreme climactic conditions in the final quarter of the 19th
century. Drought and monsoons afflicted much of China, southern Africa, Brazil,
Egypt and India. The death tolls were staggering: around 12m Chinese and over 6m
Indians in 1876-1878 alone. The chief culprit, according to Davis, was not the
weather, but European empires, with Japan and the US. Their imposition of
free-market economics on the colonial world was tantamount to a "cultural genocide".
These are strong words. Yet it's hard to disagree with them after reading Davis's
harrowing book. Development economists have long argued that drought need not lead
to famine; well-stocked inventories and effective distribution can limit the damage.
In the 19th century, however, drought was treated, particularly by the English in
India, as an opportunity for reasserting sovereignty.
A particular villain was Lord Lytton, son of the Victorian novelist Edward
Bulwer-Lytton ("It was a dark and stormy night...") after whom, today, a well-known
bad writing prize is named. During 1876 Lytton, widely suspected to be insane,
ignored all efforts to alleviate the suffering of millions of peasants in the Madras
region and concentrated on preparing for Queen Victoria's investiture as Empress of
India. The highlight of the celebrations was a week-long feast of lucullan excess at
which 68,000 dignitaries heard her promise the nation "happiness, prosperity and
welfare".
Lytton believed in free trade. He did nothing to check the huge hikes in grain
prices, Economic "modernization" led household and village reserves to be
transferred to central depots using recently built railroads. Much was exported to
England, where there had been poor harvests. Telegraph technology allowed prices to
be centrally co-ordinated and, inevitably, raised in thousands of small towns.
Relief funds were scanty because Lytton was eager to finance military campaigns in
Afghanistan. Conditions in emergency camps were so terrible that some peasants
preferred to go to jail. A few, starved and senseless, resorted to cannibalism. This
was all of little consequence to many English administrators who, as believers in
Malthusianism, thought that famine was nature's response to Indian over-breeding.
It used to be that the late 19th century was celebrated in every school as the
golden period of imperialism. While few of us today would defend empire in moral
terms, we've long been encouraged to acknowledge its economic benefits. Yet, as
Davis points out, "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to
1947". In Egypt, too, the financial difficulties caused to peasants by famine
encouraged European creditors to override the millennia-old tradition that tenancy
was guaranteed for life. What little relief aid reached Brazil, meanwhile, ended up
profiting British merchant houses and the reactionary sugar-planter classes.
The European "locusts" did not go unchallenged. Rioting became common. Banditry
increased. In China, drought-famine helped to spark the Boxer uprising. In Europe,
the fin de sihcle was largely an opportunity for pale-faced men to wear purple
cummerbunds and spout rotten symbolist poetry; for colonized peoples it genuinely
seemed to presage mass extinction. It was, says Davis, "a new dark age of colonial
war, indentured labour, concentration camps, genocide, forced migration, famine and
disease."
Davis's attention to the importance of environment may recall the work of the
Annales school of historians, but he is far more radical than any of them. His
writing, both here and in such classic books as City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear,
is closer to that of Latin American intellectuals such as Ariel Dorfman and the
Urguayan, Eduardo Galaeno, who for decades have spotlighted capitalism's casual
abuse of the third world and who have sought to champion the poor and dispossessed.
Such commitment, forcefully and lucidly expressed, is unfashionable these days.
"Class" may be passi in academic circles, yet the catalogue of cruelty Davis has
unearthed is jaw-dropping. A friend to whom I lent the book was reduced to tears by
it. Late Victorian Holocausts is as ugly as it is compelling. But, as Conrad's
Marlow said in Heart of Darkness : "The conquest of the earth, which means the
taking away from those who have a different complexion and slightly flatter noses
than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much."
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