Philobiblon

A much shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

It’s an odd recommendation, but a strong one: the copy of Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis is quite the most battered book I’ve ever picked up from the London Library, and the fact that this is down to wide use rather than accident is attested to by the large number of date stamps on the inside cover since its publication in 2001.
And having completed the text, I’d entirely concur with that recommendation, as well as that of Raj Patel in the Guardian, who put me on to it.

In my political science studies I’d encountered the theory that underdevelopment was a process, not a “natural” state of being of certain countries but a degradation inflicted on them by force and geopolitical circumstances, but what Davis does in this book is brings that reality vividly, painfully, awfully to life. But what’s more, he debunks many of the traditional claims of the imperialist apologists – that the crises in India and China were Malthusian in original – the product of uncontrolled human reproduction. And as we hear a lot these days about El Nino and La Nina, he gives them a history back at least to the 17th century (and in a very detailed chapter containing a lot of physics an explanation of them).

Furthermore, much of this history has sharp, frightening relevance today. One of his key points – obvious when you think about it, yet I’ve never previously seen it discussed, is that globalisation of food supplies means globalisation of prices – which means a shortfall in supplies doesn’t just affect one specific area, but the whole of the globe. If prices rise sharply, famine – an inability to buy necessary food supplies – hits the poor everywhere.

So here’s Davis’ picture of India in 1876, a picture that looks in miniature awfully like the world we have today: “The worsening depression in world trade had been spreading misery and igniting discontent throughout cotton-exporting districts of the Deccan, where in any case forest enclosures and the displacement of gram by cotton had greatly reduced local food security. The traditional system of household and village grain reserves regulated by complex networks of patrimonial obligation had been largely supplanted since the Mutiny by merchant inventories and the cash nexus. Although rice and wheat production of the rest of India … had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England… The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise, the telegraph ensued that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation. … food prices soared out of the reach of outcaste labourers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and poor peasants. ‘The dearth,’ as The Nineteenth Century pointed out a few months later ‘was of money and of labour rather than of food’.” (p. 26)

Lord Lytton, in charge of the disaster, when he wasn’t organising the giant pageant that would proclaim Victoria Empress of India, (and suffering from the mental breakdown to which he was prone) was ensuring that no government or even private action was taken to ameliorate the famine’s effects. “He clearly conceived himself to be standing on the shoulders of giants, or at least the sacerdotal authority of Adam Smith … that ‘famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth’.” (p. 31)

So everything possible was done to see what little relief was available couldn’t be claimed. Labourers could only seek help when it was certified that they had become “indigent, destitute, and capable of only a modicum of labour”, and they were made to travel a minimum distance of 10 miles from their home in this reduced state to receive it. Their ration was reduced to one pound of rice a day providing “less sustenance for hard labour than the diet inside the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp and less than half of the modern calorific standard recommended for adult males by the Indian government”. The result was predictable – in the worst months mortality rate in the camps reached the annual equivalent of 94%, and the chief cause of death, post mortems showed, was “extreme wasting of tissue and destruction of the lining membrane of the lower bowel… textbook starvation, with full-grown men reduced to under sixty pounds in weight”.

So why didn’t the Indians rebel? Davis’ explanation is simple: “India .. was still traumatized by the the savage terror that had followed the Mutiny twenty years earlier. Violent protest was everywhere deterred by memories of sepoys blown apart at the mouths of cannon and whole forests of peasants writhing at the noose.” (p. 54)

But the problems of 1873 were far more broadly spread than just British India. “Tens of thousands died from hunger and cholera in the North-West province of Ceylon… comparable horros were reported from north China, Korea, southern Java and Borneo, the Visayas, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Angola, South Africa and northeastern Brazil. Across the vast Indo-Pacific region, barometer readings were ‘characterized by the most extreme departures from normal pressure … since records began’.” But the state of the world wasn’t just, or even mostly, a weather issue… The puncture of a speculative bubble in American railroad stock … rapidly became a worldwide crisis that ‘ushered in an entirely new business environment, one of cutthroat competition and a relentless downward price spiral’. The massacre of fictitious capital on Wall Street was punctually followed by the fall of real prices on Manchester’s Cotton Exchange and soaring unemployment in the industrial centre of Pennsylvania, South Wales, Saxony and Piedmont. Deflation was soon a wolf at the door of tropical agriculturalists as well. The abrupt decline in metropolitan demand for key tropical and colonial products coincided with a vast increase in agricultural exports as railroads opened the American and Russian prairies and the Suez Canal shortened distances between Europe, Asia and the Antipodes. … World market prices of cotton, rice, tobacco and sugar fell to their cost of production in many regions, or even below. Millions of cultivators only recently incorporated into market networks or webs of world trade were thus whiplashed by long-distance economic perturbations whose origins were as mysterious as those of the weather. In western India, Algeria, Egypt, and northeast Brazil, as well as in Angola, Queensland, Fiji and Samoa, where Lancashire interests had orchestrated the conversion of vast acreages of subsistence agriculture to cotton during the American Civil War, the boom had collapsed with the return of Southern cotton exports, stranding hundreds of thousands of small cultivators in poverty and debt.” (p. 62)

This is a book that in some ways could simply have descended into a parade of horror, and in some respects that’s just what it is: in eastern Shandong, hit by three years of drought before the full horror of 1876, peasants who’d burnt their homes to keep warm crowded together in giant underground pits. The Welsh missionary reported that in four of these “as many as 240 people huddled for warmth. One-third of these succumbed within six weeks, leaving eagerly sought-after vacancies.” In Sudan, in the Jaalin tribe, described as unusually proud, a Western observer reported “several fathers of families, seeing that escape from death was impossible, bricked up the doors to their houses, and, united with their children, patiently awaited death. I have no hesitation in saying that in this way entire villages died out.” (p. 136)

But what Davis makes clear is that the severity of the suffering was almost everywhere linked to colonial depredations, the new ties to the world economy, and the forcible destruction of traditional support mechanisms. In Java, where the “Cultivation System (culturrelsel)” had forced villages to produce export crops for the benefit of the Netherlands rather than subsistence crops, crucial to the colonisers 19th-century economic recovery, saw a massive cholera epidemic linked to dearth that allowed the Dutch to claim starvation wasn’t really the problem. In New Caledonia, the kanaks saw European cattle, whose fields were bare, allowed to stray into their crops (on land that had been taken from the native population): “Colons did all they could to avoid the capital expenditure involved in constructing effective enclosures. Their attitude was that if the Kanaks wanted proper protection, they should build their own. One Kanak replied to a stock-raiser who made such a suggestion: ‘When my taros go and eat up your cattle, then I’ll put up a fence.’” In Egypt, European creditors were allowed to override an ancient tradition of peasant tenancies for life, gaining direct attachment to their property. “Regiments of tax collectors, with moneylenders following them … imposed a reign of terror throughout the Nile Valley. Peasants who hid cattle or resisted confiscation of their property were brutally flogged in front of their neighbours.”

But Davis isn’t just interested in the detail – he’s trying to bring together a total picture – so he finally estimates the weather-related, but economically and politically driven, toll of the late 1870s to 20 to 25 million. But “the Great Drought of the 1870s was merely Act One in a three-act world tragedy”. But first came a false boom, a decade of well-distributed, abundant rainfall that saw almost every corner of the globe incorporated into one giant food system (the one we still have today).

“By mid-decade, British redcoats had defeated Riel’s utopian-socialist Northwest Rebellion in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, while the Argentine army crushed the last Indian resistance in the pampas. .. A dramatic expansion of irrigation in the Irrawaddy delta .. guaranteed rice supplies for peasants in Bengal and Java who were turning from subsistence farming to the cultivation of export crops like jute and sugarcane. The French meanwhile coerced additional rice exports from the Mekong Delta. …. In North American what an earlier generation had seen as hopeless desert was now christened a ‘rain belt’ by eager immigrants from northern Europe. This was equally an era of wheat bonanzas and peasant expansion in the Russian steppe and the frontier farmlands of Manchuria. In Australia, meanwhile, former sheep walks were ploughed and planted in wheat .. there was widespread optimism, endorsed by leading scientists and agricultural experts, that ‘rain follows the plough’ and that cultivation, especially by white pioneers, was improving the climate.” (p. 121.)

It couldn’t last and it didn’t. “We now know that an extraordinary clustering of El Nino events – 1896/7, 1899/1900 and 1902 – was largely responsible for global agricultural catastrophe. The wet intermission of 1898, perhaps the 19th centuries most powerful La Nina, brought its own horror in the form of devastating floods in the basic on the Yellow River. Perhaps one quarter of the world’s population, mostly in what would become known as the ‘third world’ was directly affected.” (p. 139)

But it was perhaps in India that the suffering, and the culpability of the western coloniser, was greatest. In 1897 grain stocks had been depleted by exports to make up for a disastrous British harvest the year before, the much-vaunted Famine Fund largely used to pay for an Afghan war, and improved distribution by railways merely meant that prices rose quickly everywhere. All of this was impossible for an immiserated, over-taxed, already hungry peasantry. In Bombay in a pattern all to familiar today, an economic boom had not been shared widely among a feast growing population. “The wages of unskilled laborers increased only five percent in 35 years while grain costs rose 50% and land values and rents tripled.” One-fifth of them were to die from plague, cholera and hunger. (p. 149)

Total Indian toll, on Davis’ estimate, from 97-8, was 12 to 16 million. Then came 1899-1902, far worse, even though, “as the official Report … in the Bombay Presidency would emphasise, there was a surplus of grain in Bengal and Burma sufficient to compensate even such gigantic shortfalls in westerns and central India. The Report anticipated modern theories of famine as ‘entitlement crisis’ by asserting that it was the regional deficiency of employment and income … not an all-India food shortage, that posed a mortal threat to millions.” (p. 161) Britain, enmeshed in the Boer War scarcely noticed, and this was regarded by officialdom as a far more important issue.

In 1901 The Lancet gave a conservative estimate of excess mortality in India in the previous decade (not including plague deaths) at 19 million, which Davis says is a figure most modern historians would agree is of the right magnitude. They were the victims of market ideology, of colonial depredations and sheer, unmitigated cruelty and greed of Britain. Yet astonishingly, an official report in 1901 concluded, despite barely a fifth of victims having received any assistance at all that “relief distributed was excessive”.

Elswhere the story was much the same – China, and Korea, which was still reeling from the repression of the Tonghak Revolution by the Japanese in 1894-5. In Java, rice consumption locally fell, and a backlash in the Netherlands from socialist and Calvinist parties led to the famous investigation into “the declining prosperity of the Javanese people” (1902-5) that led to the ‘Ethical Policy’ supposed to make education, irrigation and emigration priorities. Davies concludes, however, that this “did little to reduce exploitation or increase the food-security of ordinary Javanese. Their real ipact, rather, was to shift government investment towards the pacified outer islands in support of Royal Dutch Shell and other private interests who were exploiting lucrative oil and rubber bonanzas. “ (p. 197)

In the Philippines, a rinderpest epidemic that killed most draught animals led to the spreading of mosquitos and malaria, and 112,000 invading American troops brought new diseases, including hookworm, smallpox and venereal diseases. It’s a horrendous but now familiar story:
“The Americans… exceeded even the cruellest Spanish precedents in manipulating disease and hunger as weapons against an insurgent but weakened population. Beginning with the outbreak of war in February 1899, military authorities closed all ports, disrupting the vital inter-island trade in foodstuffs and preventing the migration of hungry labourers to food-surplus areas. Then, as drought began to turn to famine in 1900, destruction of rice stores and livestock in areas that continued to support guerrilla resistance… Increasingly unsure who was enemy and who was friend, American soldiers on patrol did not agonize over such distinctions. They shot and burned indiscriminately… As one soldier wrote back home to Michigan: ‘We burned every house, destroyed every carabrao and other animals, all rice and other foods.’… As peasants began to die of hunger in the fall of 1900, American officers openly acknowledged in correspondence that starvation had become official military strategy. .. De Devoise concludes: “it appears that the American war contributed directly and indirectly to the loss of more than a million persons from a base population of about seven million”.” (p. 199)

Across much of Africa, colonisers who continued to demand taxes, and engagement in an impossible (for peasants) monetary economy, created conditions for the decay of previously relatively stable economic systems. To give just one of Davis’ examples:
“In Tanganyika the murderous drought of 1898-1900 (following locust famines in 1894-6) … combined with rinderpest and the colonial iron heel to threaten the very survival of peasant society. The introduction of monetary taxation in 1898, as elsewhere, was designed to hammer autonomous pesaants into malleable wage-labourers on German plantations. When famished villages in the Nguu highlands refused to pay the new tax, German military patrols pillaged their grain stores and randomly murdered local people. Terrorized farmers were thus forced to sell their remaining grain reserves to coastal merchants and missionaries, who promptly hiked prices 100% or more. A decade earlier, during the long ‘comet drought’ of 1884-86, many highlanders had relied on grain supplied by patrons who were, in turn, enriched by the ivory trade. Now the Germans had gained control of the trade…with the destruction of village patrimonialism, the only option for villagers now reduced to ‘walking skeletons’ was flight to the coastal towns or major inland administrative centres, where congestion favoured smallpox epidemics that wiped out nearly half of the population. As ethno-historian James Giblin has shown in a remarkable case study of the Uzigua region, this temporary abandonment of the countryside unleashed a nightmare biological chain reaction. The collapse of vegetation control – the constant brush-clearing practiced by local farmers – allowed tsese fly and tick-bourne epizootics to take hold over a vast area of Tanganyika’s lowlands, which they still rule more than a century later.” (p. 204)

Davis seeks to put this in context – in the middle of the 18th century living standards in Europe were a little lower than in most of the rest of the world. India produced one-quarter of the world’s manufactures, Chinese life expectancy (and nutrition) was higher than European even in the late 1700s. (And Chinese fertility rates were lower than Europe’s between 1550 and 1850). Until 1850 China and India generated around 65% of global GDP, declining with increasing rapidity for the rest of the century – to 38% in 1900 and 22% in 1960. So why didn’t they match European competition, when they started ahead. Davies’ answer? “The looms of India and China were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs… from about 1780 or 1800 onwards, every serious attempt by a non-Western society to move over into a fast lane of development or to regulate its terms of trade was met by a military as well as an economic response from London or a competing imperial capital.” (p. 291)

The story of the key patterns of world trade as Davies tells it has a huge echo today. Britain from 1873-1896 “began a dramatic slowdown. She remained tied to old products and technologies while behind their tariff barriers Germany and the United States forged leadership in cutting-edge oil, chemical and engineering industries. … starving Indian and Chinese peasantries were wheeled in as unlikely saviours. For a generation they braced an entire system of international settlements, allowing England’s continued financial supremacy to temporarily coexist with its relative industrial decline.” (p. 297) India being a captive market “was forced to absorb Britain’s surplus of increasingly obsolescent and noncompetitive industrial exports”. The rentier strata was rescued by Indian army and civil service jobs, while the middle classes enjoyed government –guaranteed interest on railroad debentures and Indian bonds.

“But how, in an age of famine, could the subcontinent afford to subsidize its conqueror’s suddenly precarious commercial supremacy. In a word, it couldn’t., and India was force-marched into the world market…. By revenue and irrigation policies that compelled farmers to produce for foreign consumption at the price of their own food security. This export drive was the hallmark of the new public finance strategy introduced by James Wilson – founder of The Economist – in the first years of direct rule. … India’s seabourne foreign trade increased more than eightfold between 1840 and 1866, In addition to opium cultivation in Bengal, new export monocultures of indigo, cotton, wheat and rice supplanted millions of acres of subsistence crops. Part of this production, of course, was designed to assure low grain prices in the metropolis after the debacle of English agriculture in the 1870s. Between 1875 and 1900, years that included the worst famines in Indian history, annual grain exports increased from 3 milllion to 10 million tons: a quantity that as Romesh Dutt points out, was equivalent to the annual nutrition of 25 million people. By the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britain’s wheat consumption as well as allowing London’s grain merchants to speculate during shortages on the Continent.” (P. 299)

Additionally, India and China were hit hard by the new international monetary system, the gold standard. Keeping the rupee tied to silver, meant Britain’s exports to India rose in (gold) value, while imports based on silver values fell. “As Sir William Wedderburn pointed out: ‘Indian peasants in general had three safeguards against famine: a domestic hoards of grain, by family ornaments [in silver] and credit with the village moneylender, who was also the grain dealer.” British actions destroyed or depreciated all of these.

Yet looking back, there had been systems in these countries that previously had largely prevented famine, even in times of severe drought. On China, Davies looks at the official response to the 1743-4 drought, which in a dual failure of the monsoon saw wheat crops devastated, yet there was no mass mortality from either starvation or disease. Reflecting the “social contract” between the Qing state and the peasantry (at a time when European peasants could expect to starve in times of crop failure, as they did in the arctic winters and summer droughts in their millions in France, Ireland and Calabrian from 1740-3), local gentry first set up soup kitchens, then the great Confucian administrator Fang Guancheng ordered the ‘ever-normal’ granaries opened to all, with no forced labour attached to the supplies, then when these were insufficient, used the Grand Canal to move vast quantities of grain and rice from national stores into the afflicted south. Eventually 85% of the necessary supplies came from out of the region. (p. 281)

In India the Mughal administration may not have been as administratively sophisticated as the Chinese, or the British, but it “relied on a quartet of fundamental policies: embargoes on food exports, antispeculative pricing regulation, tax relief and distribution of free food without a forced-labor counterpart – that were anaethema to later British utilitarians.” (p. 286)