Development economists have long argued that drought need not lead to famine well-stocked inventories and effective distribution can limit the damage. Yet it's hard to disagree with them after reading Davis's harrowing book. Their imposition of free-market economics on the colonial world was tantamount to a "cultural genocide". The chief culprit, according to Davis, was not the weather, but European empires, with Japan and the US. The death tolls were staggering: around 12m Chinese and over 6m Indians in 1876-1878 alone. Drought and monsoons afflicted much of China, southern Africa, Brazil, Egypt and India. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis charts the unprecedented human suffering caused by a series of extreme climactic conditions in the final quarter of the 19th century. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." Who now remembers the Madrasis? Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians.
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