New York Times 18 February 2001
Apocalypse Then
The little-known story of drought, famine and pestilence that killed
millions at the turn of the last century.
By AMARTYA SEN
The subject of this gripping book is a series of famines that
devastated many countries in Asia, North Africa and Latin America in
the last quarter of the 19th century. Mike Davis estimates that
between 32 and 61 million people died from these famines in China,
India and Brazil, and there were many other countries in the tropics
that were also badly hit. There is plausibility in the description
on the dust jacket of Davis's book ''Late Victorian Holocausts'' that
these disasters were ''the greatest human tragedy since the Black
Death.''
What exactly happened? Were climatic factors responsible? They
certainly had a role, Davis shows. The droughts associated with the
''El Niño-Southern Oscillation'' led to a chain of large-scale
agricultural crises in the tropics and in northern China, and these
directly contributed to the disasters. Yet, despite the adversity of
nature, it is quite clear that starvation and famine could have been
prevented through counteracting economic and social policies. In
developing this dual account -- what Davis calls ''political
ecology'' (citing Michael Watts's important 1983 book, ''Silent
Violence'') -- he shows how the policies adopted by the authoritarian
governments in the heyday of imperialism exacerbated the famines and
made their impacts more severe. The new economic arrangements that
were closely linked to the 19th-century imperial order left people
peculiarly vulnerable. And this economic insecurity was reinforced
by alienated governance, which withheld the supportive public
measures that could have prevented the worst.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, known by its acronym ENSO,
continues today with varying intensity. While it is important to
understand the climatic patterns of El Niño and other serious natural
hazards better, it is also critical not to see them as inescapable
causes of famine and devastation. ''The power of ENSO events,''
Davis points out, ''indeed seems so overwhelming in some instances
that it is tempting to assert that great famines, like those of the
1870's and 1890's (or, more recently, the Sahelian disaster of the
1970's), were 'caused' by El Niño, or by El Niño acting upon
traditional agrarian misery. This interpretation, of course,
inadvertently echoes the official line of the British in Victorian
India as recapitulated in every famine commission report and
viceregal allocution: millions were killed by extreme weather, not
imperialism.''
Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance as
well as great historical interest. To seize the broader implications
of this grisly history of needless suffering and unnecessary misery,
it is useful to distinguish clearly between two different ways in
which an agricultural disaster like a drought or flood can cause
economic difficulty. A drought or flood may destroy crops. But it
also devastates people's incomes by slashing agricultural employment
and wages. And it can destroy the markets for the modest goods and
services (from haircuts to craft products) by which a great many
other people earn their livings. The economic adversity caused by
droughts or floods far exceeds their direct impact on the food supply.
The distinction between the effects on overall food supply and those
on family incomes is important in explaining why some people are so
severely affected by a natural disaster whereas others -- living in
the same society and facing the same supply of food -- are hardly
touched at all. It helps explain, too, why famines cannot be averted
simply by opening up markets, or by making transportation easier (for
example through the establishment of railways), so that food can
physically be moved to the affected people. Davis rightly presses
the question: ''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?''
The problem lies in the fact that disaster victims do not have the
means to buy the food that the market can deliver and the railways
can fetch. Indeed, sometimes the very opposite happens, as when food
is moved out of the famished area, pulled by the greater purchasing
power of more prosperous regions (well illustrated, for example, by
the persistent shipment of food from starving Ireland to affluent
England during the Irish famines of the 1840's). It is, therefore, a
mistake -- common though it is -- to expect an automatic solution to
famines and hunger through the development of markets and the
establishment of transport arrangements.
The role of incomes and economic means also has an important bearing
on the radical sounding but ultimately conservative claim, which is
often made, that people died in the new economic regimes precisely
because of the decline of the traditional systems of rural self-help
and protective security. Insofar as the new imperial arrangements
had the effect of destroying the earning abilities of people or
undermining the sharing arrangements that had existed, there may be
some truth in this claim. But traditional economic systems typically
do not include enough economic opportunities for all, or protective
arrangements that can effectively shelter the real underdogs of
society. While British India was ravaged by famines (contrary to the
claims of the imperialist apologists), famines were not unknown in
pre-British India either (contrary to romantic nationalist claims).
Nor, for that matter, were they unknown in any substantial part of
the traditional world, including pre-industrial Europe. Davis quotes
approvingly Karl Polanyi's indictment, ''Indian masses in the second
half of the 19th century . . . perished in large numbers because the
Indian village community had been demolished.'' But this is an
enormous exaggeration. In exploding one myth, we have to be careful
not to fall for another.
Davis, the author of ''Ecology of Fear'' among other books, is
entirely justified in disputing the often-repeated claims for markets
and modern transport systems. But it is also necessary to recognize
that if markets and transport systems are combined with the creation
of economic means, this integrated expansion can add to, rather than
subtract from, human security. The crucial factor is the economic
empowerment of the more vulnerable sections of the society. In
particular, in a situation of natural disaster, what is critically
important is the creation of additional incomes through, say,
emergency employment. If the potential victims have the incomes with
which to buy food, then markets and railways can work to get food to
the affected people. The devastations that Davis describes in
illuminating detail should not be seen merely as the result of market
forces, or of a declining village community, but rather as a basic
failure to have an adequately broad economic policy, involving public
action at different levels.
Moreover, it is important to understand the roles of both economic
and political power. We have to distinguish between (1) the limited
reach of economic markets or public distribution systems, and (2) the
limited opportunity of public participation and democratic
governance. Imperial systems were severely guilty of both
limitations (as Davis's investigations clearly bring out), but they
were not unique in their dual failure. Even though Davis's
historical study concentrates on what can be called imperialist
famines, failures of a very similar kind have occurred in independent
countries and even in formally Socialist ones. Indeed, in the 20th
century the biggest famines occurred mostly in countries outside the
domain of liberal capitalism, notably in China during 1958-61 (with
possibly 30 million deaths), but also in the Soviet Union in the
1930's, in Cambodia in the 1970's and in North Korea in the very
recent past (not to mention the dismal record of domestic military
dictatorships in sub-Saharan Africa). Absence of economic power
combined with a lack of political leverage condemned millions of
people to unrelieved destitution and untimely death.
The insightful writer Tariq Ali has described this challenging
monograph as ''a veritable Black Book of liberal capitalism.'' That
it certainly is, but it is more than that. It is an illustrative
book of the disastrous consequences of fierce economic inequality
combined with a drastic imbalance of political voice and power. The
late-Victorian tragedies exemplify a wider problem of human
insecurity and vulnerability related, ultimately, to economic
disparity and political disempowerment. The relevance of this highly
informative book goes well beyond its immediate historical focus.
Amartya Sen is the 1998 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economic Science.
[First Chapter of _Late Victorian Holocausts_ is available at
<http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/davis-victorian.html>.]
