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Title: Late Victorian Holocausts Author: Alex Trotter Date: 2004, Spring-Summer Language: en Topics: British Empire,social policies,environmental impact,China,India,Asia,review Source: Scanned from Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed #57, Spring/Summer 2004, p. 12
Reviewed:
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third
World by Mike Davis (Verso, New York, 2001) 464 pp., $27.00
hardcover/$20.00 paper.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a series of devastating
droughts and famines occurred in the monsoon tropics and northern China.
The extreme climatic conditions that brought about these famines were
associated with weather patterns known as El Niño/Southern Oscillation
(ENSO). The worst of these events happened in India, China, and Brazil.
The loss of life was staggering, between 30 million and 60 million
victims of starvation and epidemics in three separate but related global
famines in 1877-1878, 1888-1891, and 1896-1902. Not since the Black
Death of 500 years earlier had there been a disaster of such magnitude.
The mortality rates in some countries were as great as if a nuclear
holocaust had occurred. In telling the story of these forgotten
disasters, Mike Davis shows that it wasn't bad weather alone that killed
so many people, and details how the relationship between global climate
changes associated with El Niño and imperialist policies pursued by
European capitalist regimes resulted in a dramatic division of humanity
into have and have-not regions of the world.
Davis, who calls himself a "Marxist-Environmentalist," sets out in this
work to analyze the convergence of failed economic and political systems
with "ecological poverty," defined as the loss or depletion of the
natural resource base of traditional agriculture. In precolonial times,
the peasants in India and China had been protected from
famine-associated subsistence crises by a kind of bureaucratic or
despotic welfare system practiced by the Mogul and Qing states, which
maintained irrigation systems and stockpiled and distributed food in
times of hardship caused by natural disasters. As the traditional social
and economic systems were undermined by the global laissez-faire economy
centered in London, the peasants were left in the lurch when epochal
drought conditions and crop failures struck, and they perished in the
millions. The British authorities were extremely parsimonious in their
aid, which came with absurd conditions when it came at all.
In 120 years of British rule, there were four times as many famines as
there had been in the previous millennium. The Radical journalist
William Digby, describing the 1876 Madras famine, said, "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." But who remembers
it now? Lords Lytton, Elgin II, and Curzon, the British viceroys of
India during this period, presided over an empire of suffering. Starving
Indians begged the police to arrest them, because at least in jail they
would have something to eat. Stockpiles of food existed, as did
transportation networks to deliver it, but people could not afford to
buy it. In an echo of the Irish famine, grain was exported from India to
Britain while people starved. British relief measures required
applicants to travel to dormitory camps and perform hard labor to "earn"
their rations. Desperation even led some people to cannibalism. Lytton,
whom Davis calls "India's Nero," lavished money on Queen Victoria's
investiture as Empress of India and on military skirmishes with the
Russians on the Afghan frontier in preference to relief efforts for the
famine victims.
In China there was drought followed by floods of the Yellow River during
a time when the country was being overrun by foreign armies, Christian
proselytizers, and cheap goods imported from British India that wrecked
local handicrafts. The weakened Qing dynasty could no longer effectively
fulfill its "mandate of heaven" to control the floods through hydraulic
engineering and provide food relief. As in India, millions fell and
horrors abounded: living skeletons fought over the flesh of their dead
neighbors, children were sold for food, and sick or dying people were
often attacked and devoured by wild animals. Disease epidemics finished
off those weakened by starvation.
In the Sertâo region in the north of Brazil, Britain had no direct
political or military control, but the power of London banks still
called the shots. The Conservative sugar planter-aristocracy of Brazil,
where slavery was abolished only in 1888, followed the reactionary Roman
Catholic church hierarchy, while the Liberal bourgeoisie was deeply
influenced by British utilitarianism and social Darwinism. The Brazilian
elites followed the British example from India of giving relief to
afflicted peasants only in exchange for labor. When starving sertanejos
made an exodus out of drought-stricken areas, looting on the way, they
were forcibly deported into the Amazonian interior. Racism also played a
role in public policy; the elites concentrated on developing the
southern part of Brazil and encouraging immigration from European
countries into that region while neglecting the north, where most of the
population was black.
Imperialists took advantage of the weakened condition of stricken
countries to aggrandize their conquests and spheres of influence against
impoverished people who proved no match for Maxim guns. Famine and
drought proved a great help in the carve-up of Africa by European
powers, and also became the allies of the U.S. military against Filipino
rebels, of the Japanese in Korea, and of the French in New Caledonia,
whose brutal pacification was witnessed by the exiled Communard Louise
Michel.
The economic mechanisms of the New Imperialism included the Gold
Standard, initiated by Britain and joined by most industrialized
countries after 1871. The colonial and semicolonial countries still
based their currencies on silver, so when demonetarized silver flooded
the world market, the currencies of India and China were seriously
depreciated, adding to the distress of these countries. The native
industries of India were beaten into submission by outrageously one-way
tariffs that guaranteed the ascendancy of British manufactures.
Domination of one country aided the domination of the other: the drug
pushers of the East India Company forcibly introduced opium from India
into China to create a demand that would yield lucrative taxes on its
export, then used the proceeds to finance military campaigns on the
Indian subcontinent. Forces from the Indian army organized and officered
by the British were then sent on campaigns to participate in the wars
waged to subjugate other countries, including China, Sudan, Egypt, and
Afghanistan.
Starving peasants were not simply victims, but rose up in revolt in
numerous countries. These revolts were often led by charismatic
religious figures and took on a millenarian aspect. In the turmoil that
came on the heels of the Opium Wars, China experienced the greatest
number of such popular revolts, including the Taiping, Nian, and Muslim
rebellions. The Taiping was the most significant, turning into a massive
civil war that left additional millions dead. The Boxer uprising at the
end of the nineteenth century targeted foreigners such as Christian
missionaries. The Qing dynasty was saved at this time only by military
intervention by the Great Powers. In the Sudan the British were
challenged by the followers of the Mahdist jihad. And in Brazil's
Nordeste the impoverished sertanejos gathered around a popular priest
and built a "new Jerusalem" in a remote part of the countryside called
Canudos, which initially repulsed attacks of the Brazilian army, but
eventually it was razed and its defenders slaughtered.
Historically, the forms of social inequality had tended to be more
"vertical" than "horizontal": at the time of the French Revolution, the
gap in material conditions of life among the different social classes
within European societies was by far greater than the overall
differences in wealth of European countries as compared with
civilizations in other regions of the world. After 1850, however, there
was a swift and dramatic decline in the fortunes of the non-Western
world as power shifted decisively to western Europe and its settler
offshoots. By the end of the nineteenth century, the "prisoners of
starvation" referred to in the "Internationale" tended overwhelmingly to
be the peasants in the colonial world who were being violently
integrated into the new global economy.
Late Victorian Holocausts is in many ways impressive; Davis's work is
about as good as leftist scholarship gets. Nevertheless there are bones
to pick in it, having to do with its very leftism. My major problem is
with this term "third world," a concept with a baleful pedigree, but
Davis puts it even into the subtitle of his book, so apparently he feels
that it has some useful validity. This term is pregnant with
obfuscations, however, that serve Davis ill in using it. He seems
vaguely aware of this, because even he places the term in quotation
marks most of the time; he settles on it as a kind of shorthand to
describe the inequality of wealth and incomes, or "development gap,"
among nations that were shaped most decisively in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century. In this schema there is a "first world," or
Western bloc, of developed capitalist states, initially consisting of
western Europe, North America, and Japan, supplemented later by "Pacific
Rim" outposts; a "second world" consisting of a partially industrialized
bloc of Socialist states; and the rest of the world being "third," mired
in barely decolonized and scarcely industrialized poverty, and whose
loyalties are fought over by the first two. This term has been seen with
much less frequency in the last decade or so, since the collapse of the
Soviet Union. If there's no longer a "second world," then this
tripartite descriptive scheme naturally falls apart.
The history of the "third world" concept warrants a closer look. As a
specific term it was invented in 1952 by a French sociologist named
Alfred Sauvy, by analogy with the third estate (i.e., the commoners in
France in the French Revolutionary period and before), and this term,
tiers monde, had become common in the French media by the late 1950s.
The areas of the world described by this term were generally meant to
include most of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, containing in
the aggregate more than 70 percent of the world's population and,
following decolonization, a quantitative preponderance at the United
Nations. The real emergence of third worldism as an ideology, or
constellation of ideologies, took place at the Bandung Conference held
in Indonesia in 1955, animated principally by China and India and
seeking to unify all the "developing" nations of the world who declared
themselves to be nonaligned in the "superpower" confrontation of the
Cold War. This neutralism turned out to be a chimera, however, as the
"nonaligned" nations could not avoid being drawn into the orbit of one
power bloc or the other.
Before Bandung, the third world as an ideological prototype can be
traced to National Bolshevism and Strasserite fascism in Germany (i.e.,
the anti-imperialist "proletarian nation" thesis) as well as the 1920
Baku "Peoples of the East" congress convened by the Bolsheviks in Soviet
Azerbaijan with delegates from nations oppressed under the tsarist
empire, which proposed that the colonized nations everywhere should
follow the Bolshevik example. After the colonial empires became unhinged
by World War II, this is what many countries did, although the model
they followed was a further degeneration even from Bolshevism. As the
Third International decomposed, through Stalinism and into
Stalino-nationalism, the People's Republic of China under Mao became the
father-image of revolution in the poorest countries. Third worldism came
into full flower through the dissolution of the monolithic facade of
Marxism-Leninism upon China's break with a Soviet Union that no longer
had any use for Stalin. A few years after that, Cuba appeared to provide
another alternative model. In India, where the first nationalist groups
in the nineteenth century had looked to the Irish Home Rule movement as
their example, the Soviet-style development model was fused with
parliamentary democracy inherited from the British.
Third worldism generated numerous rival variants of national socialism
(in the generic sense of that term), the basic common element being the
worship of economic development, most often administered by a police
state, as the cure for everything. Hypothetical unity among the tiers
monde nations was belied by the war fought by India and China along
their Himalayan border in 1962. Identity politics pivoting around race,
religion, and nationalism can be said to have had its origins at
Bandung, with the various pan-ethnic movements, such as pan-Arabism and
pan-Africanism, that it embraced.
China's abandonment of Maoism and the collapse of the Soviet bloc threw
the ideology of third worldism into deep crisis as its link with Marxism
withered, but it hasn't disappeared; the World Social Forum of today
calls for a vague "Asia-Africa solidarity" and invokes the principles
enunciated at the original Bandung conference. An alternate term often
encountered is the "Global South," which has been in use since the 1970s
and is a favorite of U.N. bureaucrats. In the world of academe its
complement is "postcolonial identity" studies.
Those who view the predicament of the poor countries as a development
gap tend to be committed to an idea of progress that implicitly sees the
entire world eventually industrializing up to "first world" or "G-7"
levels. Russia got shoehorned into the exclusive club of wealthiest and
most politically powerful countries to make it a G-8, and it's
conceivable that within a few years China will make it a G-9. The
Situationists, in their critique of Marxist third worldism, described
this as "catching up to capitalist reification." Even if this could be
universally done it would be utterly unsustainable environmentally.
Davis points out how the industrial supremacy of Europe was accomplished
in part through the deindustrialization of Asia and tribute extracted
from colonies (and before that through the African slave trade and New
World plantations). The paradigmatic case was that of India, which had
early manufactures such as textiles that rivaled those of England at the
outset of the Industrial Revolution. British economic weapons such as
tariffs then destroyed the competition and placed India in a dependent
position. Part of the apology for the British Raj was that it was
bringing modern medicine, a free press, and technology such as railroads
and telegraphy to a land stagnating in Oriental despotism. This view was
initially shared by Marx, who saw a progressive role for the British
Empire in India and even looked forward to that country's complete
Westernization. After the great mutiny of the sepoys in 1857, however,
his views on India started to evolve in a direction more critical of
imperialism. It became clearer that it was British despotism, built on
top of native despotism and making use of it, that was holding India
down in every way and causing much destruction but little regeneration.
Yet the idea of Oriental despotism, which Davis mentions in passing
dismissively, and the "Asiatic mode of production" associated with it,
might offer a better way of studying the problem of imperialism and
"underdevelopment." The industries of Asian countries such as India had
a handicraft basis and were rooted in the ancient village-community. But
there was no capitalism (i.e., the reign of autonomous exchange value)
in Asia per se and no city-state bourgeoisie arising out of a feudal
society as had occurred in western Europe. Marx initially thought that
the dissolution of the "patriarchal" rural village-community, which was
the foundation of the despotic regime (Indian caste system, Chinese
emperors, Russian tsars) by capitalism could not arise from within such
a society and would have to be instigated from outside by the
imperialist intervention of a more "advanced" foreign power. Eventually,
through exposure to the Russian populist movement, he abandoned this
notion and decided there was a possibility to avoid the necessity of a
capitalist stage of development; the peasant-artisan community could
move directly from being the foundation of Oriental despotism to being
the foundation of a communist society-with the important condition that
it could only succeed with support from the insurgent working classes in
the Western countries.
It's possible, of course, that Marx was wrong about this too. One of the
main questions in history is what accounted for the rise of the West.
One explanation points to favorable geographic and climatic conditions
(see, for example, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel). There were
other civilizations of the Old World including China, India, and the
Islamic realm that had some proto-capitalist features (e.g., extensive
trading networks by land and sea). Given the anomalous example of
Japan's swift accession to capitalist modernity following the Meiji
Restoration, it is perhaps not impossible that a true capitalism could
have developed somewhere in Asia before it did in Europe; in that case
it would still have expanded globally through imperialism, only it would
be an Indianor Chinese-centered rather than a European-centered empire.
Today capital has no more need for revolutions; the cycle of revolutions
is finished, and, as Camatte says, there is a convergence of capitalism
and the Asiatic form. All candidates are now Manchurian. Instead of
Oriental despotism, however, it is the despotism of capital.
Davis acknowledges that the term "third world" is of Cold War vintage.
Its use therefore inevitably summons a range of themes associated with
the Cold War that Davis doesn't often spell out explicitly, although
these themes lurk in the background. For example, because of the
emphasis given them by the Cold War, the multimillion-mortality famines
in Soviet Ukraine under Stalin and in China during Mao's "Great Leap
Forward" are relatively well known by many people in the West who know
nothing at all about the millions of victims of British and other
Western great-power imperialism in the course of all the late (and
early) Victorian holocausts. Davis has set out to redress this lacuna by
writing a "Black Book" of Western capitalism, and he does a good job of
it. He does actually discuss the Chinese famine of 1958-1961 under
Communist rule, which according to him also had an El Niño origin
exacerbated by political determinants.
Davis unfortunately defers to Indian nationalist and Chinese Communist
interpretations at several points. He refers to the Chinese Revolution
as the "Liberation" and praises the PRC regime, even under Mao, for its
"impressive commitments to food security and disaster mitigation." Here
Davis's leftism shows; he's too deferential to a regime well known for
its authoritarianism and brutality, even if he does criticize its
"absence of socialist democracy." The indispensability of the
bureaucracy is taken for granted, but it is not understood for what it
really is-the expression of a state-capitalist French Revolution of the
East.
Imperialism is not the only enemy we face, any more than fascism is.
These evils won't disappear except through the overcoming of the
totality of modern civilization of which they form particularly
gangrenous aspects. If the modern Leviathan remains imperialist, it's no
longer Victoria's or the Kaiser's imperialism as critiqued by Lenin and
Luxemburg. Similarly, if it continues to generate strains of fascism,
they no longer sport brown shirts and swastikas. Anti-imperialism, like
anti-fascism, as a one-dimensional crusade only gets trapped in a
feedback loop that reinforces the whole system: Lord Lytton's Raj or the
Khmer Rouge-pick your poison. Overdevelopment of the West is as much a
problem as underdevelopment of the rest. Davis presents a powerful
historical analysis and indictment of the imperialist crimes that built
the wealth and the poverty of the modern world, but his uncritical
employment of the concept of "third world" helps to give bureaucratic
national liberationism a new lease on its sorry career.