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

"Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance as well as great historical interest."
-- Amartya Sen, New York Times

"A masterly account of climactic, economic and colonial history."
- New Scientist

"Generations of historians largely ignored the implications [of the great famines of the nineteenth century] and until recently dismissed them as 'climactic accidents'... Late Victorian Holocausts proves them wrong."
- LA Times Best Books of 2001

"David, a brilliant, maverick scholar, sets the triumph of late-nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the context of the catastrophic El Nino weather patterns at that time ... This is groundbreaking, mind-stretching stuff."
- The Independent

"Wide Ranging and compelling ... a remarkable achievement."
- Times Literary Supplement

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. 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.