(P/B) LATE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUSTS

Παρουσίαση

A magisterial melding of global ecological and political history, disclosing the nineteenth-century roots of underdevelopment in what became the Third World.

Examining a series of El Nino-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.
Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.
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.
Winner of the World History Association Book Award. (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

Acknowledgements
Preface
A Note on Definitions
PART I - The Great Drought, 1876-1878
1. Victoria's Ghosts
2. 'The Poor Eat Their Homes'
3. Gunboats and Messiahs
PART II - El Nino and the New Imperialism, 1888-1902
4. The Government of Hell
5. Skeletons at the Feast
6. Millenarian Revolutions
PART III - Decyphering ENSO
7. The Mystery of the Monsoons
8. Climates of Hunger
PART IV - The Political Ecology of Famine
9. The Origins of the Third World
10. India: The Modernization of Poverty
11. China: Mandates Revoked
12. Brazil: Race and Capital in the Nordeste
Glossary
Notes
Index