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

"Late Victorian Holocausts" focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China and North-Eastern Brazil.

All of these countries were effected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated the populations.

The effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.

The author, Mike Davis, argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as "The Third World" were sown in this era of high imperialism, as the price for Capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.