52 pages • 1 hour read
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
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Key Figures
Michael (Mike) Davis (author)
Mike Davis (1947-2022) was a Marxist urban and environmental historian and winner of the highly competitive MacArthur Fellowship. He published 20 well-received monographs on topics dealing with the interconnected phenomena of urban development, political ecology, and social inequality. Davis’s working-class roots and activist background imprint his work, which challenges colonialist and capitalist tropes and ideologies.
Davis spent time in the 1960s and 70s doing manual labor and social justice activism before enrolling at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned an undergraduate degree and began a doctorate in history. Davis did not complete the degree, as his dissertation was rejected. The rejected dissertation later became his first book, the bestselling and enormously influential history of Los Angeles City of Quartz (1990). The success of City of Quartz led UCLA to offer Davis an endowed chair, though they soon withdrew the offer because of Davis’s support for striking campus workers. He went on to author Ecology of Fear (1998), a critical study of LA developers and political actors whose choices contribute to environmental disasters such as wildfires, floods, and droughts. Davis became interested in concurrent drought-famines, and their related epidemics of various diseases, while researching and writing Ecology of Fear. This interest led Davis to produce Late Victorian Holocausts in 2001. In his 2005 book, The Monster at Our Door, Davis analyzed the political and social factors with potential to spawn new pandemics, particularly avian flu, likewise predicting future disaster in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, his final book, published months before his death in 2022, is titled The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism. He taught history at UC-Irvine and creative writing at UC-Riverside, where he was a professor emeritus.
Robert Bulwar-Lytton (Lord Lytton)
Robert Bulwar-Lytton (1831-1891) was the first Earl of Lytton, a poet beloved by Queen Victoria, and a British diplomat. He served as the British viceroy to India from (1876-1880) during which time Victoria became “Empress of India” while the sub-continent faced widespread drought, famine, and epidemics. Lytton did little to relieve the suffering, adhering to a strict laissez-faire economic policy. Indeed, this policy’s architect, Adam Smith, argued that government intervention caused or worsened famine. Lytton refused to regulate rising grain prices or stockpile grain to protect the Indian public from starvation. In honor of Queen Victoria, he organized what Davis calls “the most expensive meal in world history” (33) as millions of Indians starved. He also oversaw the implementation of work camps where famine victims were forced to labor for meager rations.
Lytton was more concerned with what the British termed the “Great Game”—their competition with czarist Russia for the upper hand in neighboring Afghanistan—than he was with the wellbeing of the people he governed. When he failed to negotiate favorable relations with local Afghan rulers, Lytton launched an invasion, thus sparking the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880). This war squandered financial resources that could have gone to famine relief. Millions of Indian people died during his tenure as viceroy because of his disinterest in famine relief and refusal to implement effective relief regulations. His policies and attitude established a precedent that his successors, the viceroys, Lords Elgin and Curzon followed in the latter decades of the Victorian period.
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