Late Victorian Holocausts. (Book Reviews).

Mike Davies 

Verso, 2001, pp. 464 + x

ISBN 1-85984-739-0 [pounds sterling]20.00

Mike Davies is a great writer. His City of Quartz, for instance, is a truly stupendous book and unfortunately for him, probably incomparable. It is one of those small number of books that, along with many other people, I ache to have written. His latest work, Late Victorian Holocausts has been well reviewed elsewhere and one reviewer in Red Pepper has described himself as moved to tears by the dreadful events described in it. I do not feel the same. Perhaps Davies's work has also suffered at my hands because I was concurrently reading Rohan Mistry's great and moving novel about India in the 1970s, A Fine Balance.

Even books of the kind that Davies has written here should not just be tracts or compendiums; they should also be artistic achievements. They, like novels, also need their own kind of beauty and relentless earnestness does not fill this lack. Late Victorian Holocausts is in four parts, each of which reads like a Ph.D thesis. For a book about famine, it is gargantuan, Victorian even, in its intellectual appetite. But, if it had have been a thesis or theses, it contains some passages for which the student's knuckles should have been severely rapped by his or her supervisor. For instance, take the following passage that introduces chapter nine:

'What historians, then, have so often dismissed as 'climatic accidents' turn out to be not so accidental after all. Although its syncopations are complex and quasi-periodic, ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) has a coherent spatial and temporal logic. And, contrary to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's famous (Eurocentric?) conclusion in Times of Feast, Times of Famine that climate change is a 'slight, perhaps negligible' shaper of human affairs, ENSO is an episodically potent force in the history of tropical humanity. If, as Raymond Williams once observed, "Nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history," we are now learning that the inverse is equally true: there is an extraordinary amount of hitherto unnoticed environmental instability in modern history" (p. 279).

In this one hundred and twenty words the reader is given three references to look up and is knowingly nudged to genuflect to two great thinkers, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Raymond Williams, each of whom, however, is put in their place. This is the anal retentiveness to the Ph.D. To tell a tale well one needs to know far more than can be properly told. Narrative depends above all on judicious selection and leaving the reader space to think.

The four parts of the books are entitled 'The Great Drought, 1876-1878', El Nino and the New Imperialism, 1888-1902,' 'Decyphering (sic!) ENSO,' and the 'The Political Ecology of Famine.' The first six chapters, covering the first two parts, describe the fatal meshing of extreme events between the world climate system and the late Victorian world economy.' The development of Victorian imperial capitalism coincided with extreme climatic events which were probably worse than any global catastrophe in the previous 200 years (or even 500 years). Indeed, a famine which killed between 30 and 50 million people both accelerated the semi-proletarianisation of vastmasses of what became the, Third World and facilitated the introduction of rapacious capitalism. Indigenous and old established protection against food insecurity, including remarkable state capacity in China, decayed just when they were most needed.

Those who man that imperial economic systems amply demonstrated the attitude of Senior, the economist attacked by Marx in Capitals Volume I. When told that deaths in the Irish Famines of the 1840s may reach a million people, Senior is reputed to have replied that, 'I fear it will not be enough.'

In the third section of the book, Davies recounts the discovery of the El Nino Southern Oscillation and the scientific understanding of the southern oceans as massive heat engines. This is a curious part of the book (which begins with an oven-extended metaphor in purple prose). It is linked to the rest of the material in the book by recounting how meteorological research was formed within the cultural climate of capitalism. Sir Stanley Jevons, a founding father of neo-classical economics, was profoundly taken with the idea that the booms and slumps of capitalism were the extended results of weather patterns caused by sun-spot cycles. Capitalism, he persuade himself, was not therefore an economic system that was intrinsically flawed.

The modern hero for Davies for the establishment of the ENSO paradigm is Jacob Bjerknes who, in collaboration with his father had been responsible for revolutionising 'meteorology with the modern "frontal" theory of how mid latitude weather is determined by the clash of polar and humid air masses' (p.230). This was seen as analogous to the collision of armies on the Western Front'. Because the meteorological science now becomes 'correct', there is apparently no compelling need for Davies to explain it in terms of its cultural context.

The real worth of this book is in the final section. Davies pays particular tribute to the pioneering political economy of Michael Watts. (1983) on colonial Nigeria's 'drought-famine' (Silent Violence. Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria). The point of Davies's own book is expressed thus: 'There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborer became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 18.50 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries--even sometimes Creole elites as in Brazil--

Perceived as the ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism (p. 288). The incorporation in the world market; however, took the form of a commercialisation that went hand in hand with pauperisation without any silver lining of technical change or agrarian capitalism (p. 290).

There is much of value in this book but it lacks an adequate structure. The form that served Davies so well in City of Quartz a series of inter linked essays where the sum of the parts was greater than the whole has a pale reflection here. This book peters out. There is some way to go in the analysis and Davies refrains from pointing out any way forward. However, it is not easy to grumble these days about a hardback for only [pounds sterling]20.00 and it is perhaps snitty and churlish to blame Davies for not being the peerless writer he was in City of Quartz.

Andrew McCulloch, a member of CSE, is the book review editor of Capital & Class and works at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.