Late Victorian Holocausts

This is a difficult book to get through on account of the overwhelming amount of horrible deaths described in detail during the first third of the book. However, the payoff is worth it. Part one describes the settings and the suffering engendered by famine-driven starvation during the last 2 - 3 decades of the 19th century, in painful detail. It focuses primarily on Brazil, India, and China. It emphasizes the human suffering and the callousness of most of the official responses by British officials, who were in the position to the most (or, more typically, the least) to help those affected. In part two, the author takes us along on a ride through scientific history, explaining how climatologists came to understand, partially anyway, the mechanisms of ENSO (or El Nino/La Nina). Part three combines these and takes us back to the antecedent conditions in Brazil, India, and China, demonstrating how the capitalist need to force peasants around the world into participating in the global market economy made mass starvation likely, and how the British official response contrasted mostly negatively with those of the respective native rulers in similar events in the past. The conclusion: drought or flooding caused by El Nino or La Nina was the proximate cause, but without capitalism, the death toll, reckoned at around 100 million for the entire 3-decade era focused on in the book, would surely have been far lower. Famines are never purely ecologically caused, they always have a political dimension.