Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

“By official dictate, India, like Ireland before had become a Utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were wagered against dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets overcoming the ‘inconvenience of dearth.’”

The British Raj imposed ideas about social relief on India’s famine victims. Authorities like the viceroy, Lord Lytton, and his successors shunned charity and insisted on tying limited relief to labor. This Utilitarian attitude meant that many who needed aid never received it or the rations doled out where below subsistence levels. This policy caused preventable mass mortality.

“The famine campaign in Lytton’s conception was a semi-military demonstration of Britain’s necessary guardianship over a people unable to help themselves, not an opportunity for Indian initiative or self-organization.”

The British viceroy, Lord Lytton, did not view famine relief through a benevolent lens, nor did his administration seek to empower those afflicted by severe drought through state support. Rather, British aid came with work requirements to discourage victims from seeking it, and those who could not labor for their rations because they were too malnourished were forced into hated poorhouses, which functioned like internment camps, where many perished in squalid conditions.

“The Deccan’s villages were also now rent by desperate internal struggles over the last hoarded supplies of grain. A social chain reaction set in each class or caste attempted to save themselves at the expense of the groups below them.”

The British Raj’s famine policy (or lack thereof) caused social breakdown and hardened formerly porous divisions between castes. Community members turned on one another as they starved and became desperate to cling to dwindling resources to survive.

“During the terrible Shandong winter of 1876-77, however, village mutualism collapsed, bringing permanent discredit to the societies that failed to save their members.”

Social breakdown occurred in China during the first wave of famine, just as it did in India. However, rebellious groups formed here in reaction to the drought crisis in China. In the province of Shandong, for instance, a folk healer claiming descent from China’s Ming dynasty spawned a short-lived uprising that ended when rain returned.

“[…] supporters of the China missions acclaimed ‘famine relief as a heaven-sent opportunity to spread the gospel.’”

Religious imperialism accompanied the West’s informal hold on China.

Western missionaries used natural disasters and the crises that followed them to recruit starving converts to Christianity through aid, just as imperial powers

used these crises to seize land and resources.

“The epidemic phase of the famine had a microbiological momentum that extended mortality far beyond the spatial or social boundaries of starvation per se.”

Starvation was not the only cause of death during the late Victorian drought-famines. Outbreaks of disease like smallpox, cholera, and dysentery, among others, often followed due to squalid living conditions caused by these crises.

“Drought and famine gave foreign creditors, allied with indigenous moneylenders and compradores, new opportunities to tighten control over local rural economies through debt or outright expropriation. Pauperized countrysides likewise provided rich harvests of cheap plantation labor as well as missionary converts and orphans to be raised in the faith.”

“Industry” arose around drought-famines. Landholders and moneylenders, for instance, profited from the misfortune in Brazil as desperate peasants sought loans or work as laborers on cattle ranches to survive. Christian missionaries in Brazil, as in China, embraced these crises as an opportunity to increase their influence through relief assistance and by caring for and indoctrinating children whose families perished.

“Thus from his arrival in South Africa in March 1877, Carnarvon’s special high commissioner Sir Bartle Frere (a former governor of Bombay) moved with extraordinary energy to impose British power on the drought-weakened Bantus and Boers alike.”

Davis notes in his introduction that climate crises facilitated New Imperialist efforts to expand power. One such example comes from southern Africa, where the British used drought-famine to subdue their rivals for power, the Boers (Dutch colonists) and Indigenous people, including Bantu-speakers who were weakened enough that they could not effectively resist the imposition of British power. The British needed African labor to mine the Kimberley diamond mine in South Africa, and they saw the crisis as an opportunity to get it.

“While Asia was starving, the United States was harvesting the greatest wheat crop in world history (400 million bushels), and in California’s Central Valley worthless surplus wheat was burned for fuel.”

ENSO has a seesaw effect. Drought across much of the developing world occurred simultaneously with ideal weather conditions elsewhere. California agriculture produced one of its most abundant harvests in the late 1870s, yet none was exported as famine relief to Asia.

“The Great Drought of the 1870s was merely Act One in a three-act world tragedy. Millions more, likely tens of millions, would die during global El Niño droughts in 1888-91 and especially in 1896-1902. There was first, however, a famous interlude of agricultural expansion and relative prosperity. The decade after the end of the famine in 1878-79 was characterized by well-distributed, plentiful rainfall and abundant harvests in both hemispheres.”

An era of significant prosperity followed the first phase of drought-famine. The 1880s were a period of significant agricultural and economic growth. However, this expansion caused ecological damage that made various regions, like Brazil’s backland, more vulnerable to drought in the future. The increased reliance on cash crops across the Global South also meant that peasant farmers no longer engaged in subsistence agriculture, so that when drought returned, they were more likely to become destitute and starve.

“Perhaps one quarter of the earth’s population, mostly in what would become known as the ‘third world,’ was directly affected by ENSO-related dearth.”

A massive portion of the global population was subjected to the late Victorian drought-famines that formed today’s “third world.” The West experienced an economic boom at the turn of the 20th century, while much of the non-West slipped into economic decline, fostered by the New Imperialism, from which it has never recovered.

“The mere existence of railroads, moreover, could not bring grain into districts where mass purchasing power was insufficient.”

New industrial technology could not save India’s starving populace, despite the British celebration of the laying of railroad across the subcontinent. Grain was unaffordable to many famine victims, even when it could be transported to areas impacted by drought-famine.

“Financing of the Boer War trumped any ‘philanthropic romanticism’ in India.”

Most British charitable contributions during the late 19th century did not go to famine victims in India, despite the existence of a Famine Relief Fund. Instead, the British public was more concerned with supporting the empire’s war against the Dutch for imperial dominance over southern Africa.

“The corruption and incompetence of the Provinces’ poor houses contrasted with the efficiency of its militarized revenue campaign.”

The British Raj imported the English poorhouse to India. Those who were too weakened by famine to labor for their rations were forced into these camps where conditions were unsanitary and deadly. Davis argues the poor state of the camps was the result of deliberate incompetence. The British administration was not incapable of efficiently operating infrastructure or implementing policy, as their revenue extraction from India’s public indicates.

“Joining the Boxers, moreover, was a sure way of filling one’s belly.”

Those who took part in China’s Boxer Rebellion did so out of frustration with Western meddling and desperation for survival. Many who joined the Boxer movement were peasants who languished in poverty and suffered food scarcity. The Boxers employed violence to seize control of grain stores and feed their members. Their conditions left the Boxers disgruntled with the Qing Dynasty, which was subordinated to informal European colonial powers. This discontent eventually led to rebellion.

“Yet millenarism in the sertão was also a practical social framework for coping with environmental instability.”

The impoverished flocked to millenarian movements like the settlement at Canudos because of their living conditions. Drought-famine drew diverse Brazilians to Canudos because it provided community and stability in the world of the sertão that was otherwise cruel and unpredictable. Moreover, the Brazilian state abandoned the impoverished people of the backland, offering no relief or infrastructure support to alleviate the crisis, so peasants looked elsewhere for help.

“This generation of disaster forever transfigured African society.”

Drought-famine changes Africa forever by incorporating it into the “third world.” Colonial powers used crisis as an opportunity to force people into laboring in emerald and diamond mines, stripping the continent of crop diversity.

“The sunspot cycle, in particular, seemed to be the big wheel that turned all the smaller wheels, regulating fluxes of rain and grain and thereby, as Jevons had shown, exchange rates and grain prices. Political economy was unmasked as a mere province of Solar Physics.”

The flawed 19th-century theory that sunspots regulated climate cycles leading to droughts or floods appealed to liberal capitalism’s proponents. Capitalism was not responsible for cycles of drought and famine, they argued. Rather, weather and environmental changes beyond human control led to economic shifts. The emphasis on the sunspot theory, Davis suggests, potentially delayed scientific inquiry that revealed ENSO’s role in these disasters while upholding New Imperialism and free market economics.

“Although local research is still in its relative infancy, it is clear that ENSO has been one of the major environmental forces shaping Mexican history.”

El Niño’s effects correlate to changes in Mexican politics and current climate conditions influence immigration from Mexico across the US’s southern border. Researchers currently predict that as climate change continues to cause rising temperatures, more climate refuges will enter the United States.

“India and China, in other words, did not enter modern history as the helpless ‘lands of famine’ so universally enshrined in the Western imagination.”

Population and environmental determinism do not effectively explain why India and China experienced severe crises in the late Victorian era. Instead, imperialist powers deprived these places of resources by, for instance, encouraging cash crop cultivation and exporting of grain stores.

“Celebrated cash-crop booms went hand in hand with declining agrarian productivity and food security.”

As impoverished people moved into marginal lands and began growing cash crops for export, instead of crops for local subsistence, they became food insecure. They had to sell cash crops in a volatile world market of boom or bust. During times of bust they had little income to purchase food and land on which they could not produce food for themselves.

“Nature collected the bill for eighteenth-century prosperity in deferred payments of drought, flood, and famine.”

While the 18th century proved to be a productive and profitable time for the non-West, the catastrophes of the 19th century destroyed the advancement that productivity generated. The profitable cotton industry, which led to expansion into the Brazilian sertão, collapsed during the 19th century, worsening impoverishment.

“The abdication of hydraulic control in north China was perhaps the most portentous consequence of the growing imperialist pressure on the Qing.”

Eighteenth-century Qing emperors took on a direct role in resource and infrastructure management, which included hydraulic management. However, by the 19th century, the Qing emperors were weak and abandoned these previous policies. Famine in northern China worsened due to ill-maintained hydraulic infrastructure.