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

Per capita income in India under British rule stagnated and, in the latter 19th century, dramatically declined. Food was scarce, while bountiful cash crops flowed out of the subcontinent since peasant farming was “radically undercapitalized” (330). Industrial development, like railroads, and India’s entrance into the global economy failed to generate development for much of the country.

In the province of Berar, for example, the British Cotton Supply Association destroyed the local system of production and irrigation management. The imperialist government then enforced the khatedari system on the peasantry (and their lands), creating an Indian equivalent of the yeoman class to act as a reliable labor force for the British colonists. The British Raj acted as “the supreme landlord with peasant tenure” thus extracting revenue from the farmers (331). They taxed local textiles while flooding Berar with imports from England. These practices dismantled the artisan class, which was reduced to working the land “as propertyless laborers.” Furthermore, some “khatedars with more resources attempted to escape from the debt trap by becoming micro-exploiters themselves” thereby fracturing land (332). Poverty throughout the province skyrocketed. Disease spread easily, while cotton growing replaced crops that provided food security, a phenomenon that occurred throughout India’s Deccan. Peasants in India and China were drawn to cotton because it provided greater economic security since it was high-yield, and thus beneficial for those with little cultivatable land.

Craft industries suffered as English cloth flooded into India, causing peasants to turn to wheat exportation in north-central India. Exporters even offered cash to those who agreed to grow wheat instead of other grains. Farmers were therefore producing wheat for English consumption instead of producing crops for their own local sustenance. Moreover, high costs squeezed local farmers out of land ownership, many of whom faced foreclosure. These changes led to a cascade of problems for the peasantry as grain stores fell and there was little “reinvestment in cattle, irrigation or farm equipment” (337). Railroad construction led to deforestation and destroyed pastures. Farming moved into regions with poor soil while the British authorities neglected irrigation. The Central Provinces faced a tax increase of 50% in 1887, as land values increased. Then, the Indian wheat bubble burst when the British began to import from Argentina instead. Drought thus struck peasants amid economic crisis, leading to famine.

The British invested miniscule amounts of their budget into human capital and devoted massive revenues to policing and the military. Authorities prosecuted farmers who refused to pay high taxes from which they received little benefit:

In the late nineteenth-century Bombay Deccan, for example, the annual process of revenue collection began with the impounding of grain in village stockyards. In order to eat from their own harvest, the ryots had to immediately borrow money to pay off the taxes. Typically the moneylenders bought the crop at half the current market value but lent money at a usurious 38% interest. If the peasant was unable to promptly repay the principle, the exorbitant rates of interest ballooned to astronomical dimensions (343).

Land enclosures deprived peasants of resources that they once freely acquired. The British government turned commons into state land or private property that could be taxed. These formerly free resources provided the British with more revenue streams. This process “deeply undermined traditional household ecology” (345). Even manure was now costly. Forest enclosures led to a wood shortage, and the state prevented famine victims from gathering forest resources to use as fuel during the 1899 catastrophe. Fertilizer shortages caused nutrient depletion and soil erosion. Peasants also lost communal access to water. Water rights and land ownership were linked under British rule.

The British Raj neglected irrigation in favor of military spending. Though canals were constructed in some areas to support cash crops, the lack of effective drainage led to soil salinization, collapsing wheat production. These canals also attracted mosquitos that spread malaria. Pre-British, local irrigation methods avoided these problems. High taxes on irrigated lands caused small farmers to resort to cultivating dry fields, and authorities imposed punitive taxation on those who dug wells. The British Raj created an environment ripe for drought-famine. The British fostered new social divisions by enclosing land and restricting access to water resources, fracturing communities.

The southern Yangzi River valley was a vibrant commercial center during the 19th century, while northern China’s subsistence economy stagnated. The late Qing state was dependent on Western powers after the Taiping Revolution, despite the prosperity generated during the 18th century by silk and cotton from the Yangzi valley. Northern Chinese peasants benefited from astute Qing policies in the 1700s that supported small landowners and provided protection against climate devastation, famine, and extreme poverty: “[…] the environmental instability of agriculture was counterbalanced by the deeply anchored monolithic character of the smallholder social order supported by a towering imperial state” (363). However, peasant farmers of the 19th century relied on cash crop cultivation, making them more vulnerable to climate and market shifts. Additionally, imported goods, like cotton thread, displaced local crafts.

Agriculture could not support China’s population growth on the eve of the late Victorian famines: “[…] Wei farmers could barely produce the caloric minimum of grain to maintain their continued labor. In this context, cash crops’ higher value per unit of land made them irresistibly attractive to the poorest strata […]” (365). The land squeeze caused by rising population led farmers to shift to cash crops in a desperate attempt to survive, since their land was too small for subsistence agriculture. Farmers in the Yellow River valley, for example, grew and sold wheat for cash that they used to buy food. Opium and cotton production likewise displaced subsistence farming. Peasants could manufacture yarn from the cotton they grew and increase their meager profits. However, growing cash crops was also expensive. Disasters, like floods or drought, could shatter this risky livelihood.

The north failed to import enough grain from the Yangzi valley to protect its peasantry against famine. The 19th-century Qing state, its revenues devalued by the gold standard, was unable to provide the infrastructure to ensure food security. Financial decline meant decaying administrative capabilities, and China’s grain stores dwindled to alarmingly low levels: “On the eve of the great drought […] northern China was ripe for catastrophe” (373). Transportation infrastructure decayed, too. The Qing had no motive to maintain it after many years of internal turmoil because it behooved them to leave the peasantry isolated. Corrupt officials pillaged food stores to line their own pockets while peasants starved.

Peasants worsened erosion as they cleared lands for cultivation in the valleys of the Yellow, Wei, and Huai rivers, leaving the plains vulnerable to flooding. Simultaneously, the Qing stopped overseeing hydraulic management. Northern farming “was thus exposed to the most severe climate stress in 200 years […] precisely when the state was in full retreat from its traditional ecological mandates” (380). Demographic growth during the 1700s meant that approximately 25,000 square kilometers of uninhabited and uncultivated land was settled. A multitude of peasantry “clung to eroding hillsides or struggled to drain malarial wetlands” by the 1800s (381). The Qing state, however, encouraged migration to northern China, offering tax exemptions for their settlement. Deforestation ensued while crops from the Americas caused soil erosion. Rivers filled with sediment, as did irrigation works. Gullies opened, and the mountains lay stripped. Warfare further ravaged the forests. Peasants struggled to survive as harvests failed and prices rose. Some resorted to foraging, further stripping the land of resources. Deforestation increased soil erosion and vulnerability to drought. Debate over how to best tame the Yellow River’s flooding, combined with corruption, high costs, and “social conflict,” also caused problems. Raising dikes made some areas more vulnerable to diverted waters. The Taiping uprising led the Qing to divert resources away from flood control to quell the rebellion: “Fighting desperately for survival on multiple fronts, meanwhile, the Empire was powerless to control nature in the Yellow River plain” (391).

Qing authorities, during the late 1880s, decided “to keep flood waters channeled throughout the north China plain,” a matter of politics after years of conflict (392). The Qing abdicated hydraulic management of the Grand Canal to focus on flood control at the Yellow River’s mouth, worried that flooding in this area would give Western powers an opening for further imperial intrusion. This choice made food security in northern China more precarious and financially ruined towns along the canal, leaving many former Canal workers and boatmen unemployed and ripe for conscription to the Boxer cause. Land also became scarcer because “marshes formed where the Yellow River dikes bisected local streams, and vast sections of valuable cropland were lost to waterlogging, salinization and sand sedimentation” (394). The Qing also stopped subsidizing irrigation, which undermined surplus production and made lands more susceptible to climate catastrophe. Discontent with inept government, poor policies, and the tragic consequences of human decisions fanned the flames of Communist discontent in modern China, though today’s northern China continues to face environmental instability.

Brazil was also subjected to British economic imperialism while local economic progress stagnated during the 1800s. The Nordeste became a “periphery of hunger” while other parts of the country profited from coffee exports (397). Yet it was not a site of revolutionary grievance.

The British and Portuguese crown signed the Commercial Treaty in 1827, which made the Portuguese Empire, including Brazil, economically subordinate to Britain: “Chronic trade deficits were repeatedly financed by punitive British loans whose interest payments generated permanent budget deficits which, in turn, were financed by yet more foreign bonds” (398). Brazil’s major importers and exporters were British; its financiers in London, and the railroads laid across the country were British-backed or owned. Moreover, foreign bank loans did not support agriculture, while Brazilian banks were weak. These factors combined to stunt “the developmental autonomy of the Brazilian state […]” (399). Europe’s gold standard established imbalanced exchanges that deprived the Brazilian economy.

The Paulistas’ nationalist “revolution” in 1899-1900 did not alter this relationship between Brazil and the British. Paulista power did, however, encourage increased reliance on coffee as the dominant export. The north was excluded from coffee production, and consequently fell further into agricultural and economic decay as the export of sugar and cotton declined. Per capita income in the Nordeste fell by 30%. The regions experienced severe crisis in the 1890s, when drought coincided with economic decline: “By 1897, for example, the transport price of sugar exceeded the selling price offered by brokers […]” and bankruptcy ensued (491).

The gold standard increased the value of Brazil’s coinage, the gold milreis, so that cotton and sugar prices became “uncompetitive” (402). Northern plantation “oligarchs” gained dominance over the region’s agricultural output, leaving poorer farmers to cultivate inferior land or labor in the Amazon’s rubber industry. Northerners, however, did not migrate southward, where production prospered, because the Brazilian state encouraged European immigration, thus supplanting northerners’ ability to find work in the south. Indeed, the southern coffee planters preferred white laborers to Afro-Brazilians, which the state backed. Racism became “public policy” (403), and “European immigration became the deliberate substitute for either developing the sertão and/or letting the northern poor move southward” (404). This practice also depressed wages for the rest of the laboring Brazilian populace.

The sertão’s ecology was not naturally favorable to cattle ranching or cultivation. Numerous small farmers and laborers flocked to the region, however, during the 1800s when sugar production was “stagnant” (405). The farming methods they implemented were not appropriate to the environment. Soil fertility depleted swiftly, and many of the new arrivals ended up as sharecroppers on cattle ranches with limited resources. Moreover, overgrazing destroyed the land. The region was especially vulnerable to El Niño’s fluctuations, and the potential for drought was high. The Brazilian state did not invest in infrastructure, like irrigation, which would have alleviated some of the area’s problems, since the sertão was not central to the state’s economy and its residents lacked significant political influence.

During the 1860s farmers in the sertão grew a profitable, drought-resistant strain of cotton. The success of this production and lack of drought created a “mirage of prosperity” (409). The cotton boom, however, encouraged more farmers to come to the region to enjoy the industry’s prosperity. Moreover, Manchester’s Cotton Supply Association encouraged cotton production’s expansion in Brazil. But soon, cotton from the US South supplanted other varieties, causing prices to crash. British importers no longer wanted Brazilian cotton, which they deemed of poor quality. Cattle ranching grew alongside cotton farming during the 1860s in the Nordeste. Its expansion left less land for subsistence agriculture and led to soil erosion. When the railroad bubble burst, ushering in a global depression, prices for products from Brazil’s sertão decreased further, and local administrations grew impoverished due to decreased revenue.

Elites in the sertão “embraced their own underdevelopment” welcoming migrants to the region even as they stripped the land of resources because these poor newcomers provided ranches with a consistent supply of labor:

Thus while the coroneis had the most avid interest in “drought relief” (which they largely intercepted), they were little disposed toward any real development or ecological stabilization of the sertão (413).

Elite political and economic forces left the backlands underdeveloped, though national efforts appeared encouraging irrigation relief for the area. By the 1940s, a mere 500 hectares had been irrigated.