Reflection On Victorian Holocausts By Mike Davis: History Of The Most Terrible Famines In History

Mike Davis' Victorian Holocausts was a real eye opener to me. Davis gives us a powerfully researched history of El Nino and La Nina droughts which set the stage for some of the most terrible famines in human history. The weather set the stage, but we humans turned terrible situations into awful famines. To begin with the first aspect, Davis succeeds very well in indicating the inhumane environment of British imperialism. While it may be approved that he is hardly a disinterested and entirely objective spectator but rather writing with a definite agenda in mind, as he freely admits -- "The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations not illustrations" (p. 22) -- the sources he uses are further than reproach, and the figure they paint is one which thoroughly justify the book title. In the great Indian famines of 1876-79 and 1896-1902, not fewer than 12 million Indians perished, and rather possibly twice this number or even more. And the starvation was caused by government policy, which in the style Stalin shortly copied in the 1930s took away the very last food of the hungry as taxes and dues. Indeed, at no time was there a total lack of food in India; millions of tons of grain were exported to press down food price in Britain, even though as millions of people starved. The desperate victims were used by the British government as cheap labor, placed in enormous firm labor camps to work on roads, railways and other transportation.

As Davis shows, the food rations presented in these camps were in fact smaller than those provided in the Nazi concentration camps some decade’s later (p. 39), producing depression and fatality on a colossal scale. Our author heartlessly elucidates the human consequences, making it likely that his work will alarm and sorrow the heart. Some of the "accusations not illustrations" included illustrate piles of human skeletons, dead and alive, unsurpassed in terror by something submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial. Similarly haunting are the descriptions of contemporaries, quoted at some length. One work site "bore the appearance of a battlefield," literally "strewn" with dead and dying workers, wrote one British official. Another, argumentative when the starvation rations were to be implemented, "suggested that 'it would be better to shoot down the wretches than to prolong their misery in the way proposed. '" (pp. 38-40) It was not criminals or rebels who were so treated, but ordinary Indians whose livelihoods had been shattered by cruel assumption by grain merchants and confiscatory taxation by the government.

The second part describes the global effects of weather fluctuations, with many brief sub-studies of various localities. Here, Davis attacks the major argument of apologists for the British policy, namely that famines are the creation of weather, which is further than the power of any government to police. By examining the consequences of weather-caused poor harvests across the world, he forcefully shows that while governments are not accountable for droughts or floods, they are certainly able to manage their consequences, which fluctuate according to the government's reaction. For example, backward Russia also faced agricultural disaster due to drought in 1891, threatening millions, but unlike the British, the government of absolute monarch Alexander III intervened forcefully to relieve his subjects. While there was still great suffering, mass death by starvation was (at great cost) avoided (pp. 125-26). It is fascinating that the least economically and politically developed of the great powers of the age, widely despised as a tyranny by more democratic countries, should care more for its peasants than the mighty British Empire, the superpower and leading democracy of its times. A generation later, the "progressive" government of Stalin, a man greatly more in the pragmatic political tradition of Disraeli than the monarchic one of Czar Alexander, would apply a more remorselessly economizing policy, sacrificing his surplus rural population slightly than his budget and balance of trade when called upon to make that option.

Finally, Davis provides an additional in-depth case study of the relations between policy and ecology, now of Qing China. The Qing, or Manchu, Dynasty ruled the final and best of the pre-Communist Chinese empires, which as late as the 1700s impressed such European reformers as Voltaire with its efficient administration and (fairly) non-corrupt political ethnicity. Unlike most other Asian countries, China never became a colony, even though suffering much other humiliation. By the 19th century, however, decline was noticeable and catastrophe imminent. Lagging behind in technological development, China lost the famous Opium Wars against Britain, and was subsequently forced not merely to allow unlimited importation of the drug by British companies, but to reimburse them for the huge amounts of it the Chinese authorities had previously confiscated from their smugglers and destroyed. To pay off the debts, China fell beneath the influence of the London City bankers and financiers; by the 1860s, the British "monopolized fully 80 percent of China's foreign trade" (p. 300). Under the combined pressure of this parasitism as well as the huge costs of putting down a variety of rebellions which arose against a government that seemed to acquiesce in foreign exploitation, the Chinese authorities faced fiscal disaster. An alarming situation developed which some might find harshly familiar today, with inflation elevated and trade deficits ballooning, even as infrastructure (roads, canals, etc) perished from lack of new investment and government services became ever more inefficient. Thus, when famines and floods struck China (like India) in the late 19th century, the authorities were mainly unable to alleviate the victims. Tens of millions died of starvation and epidemics, and as well in the civil wars which these developments caused. Here, unlike in India, mass death was for the most part not intentional, but the result of a state poorly drunk on debt as well as drugs, unable of providing its citizens with the basic necessities of life. Davis's final words analyze the global economics of the 19th century. His thesis is that Western (meaning mainly if not exclusively British) democracy and capitalism were responsible for unparalleled loss of life in Asia, especially, by two main mechanisms.

First, the pressures of wars, unequal treaties and unfair competition shattered the economies of the relatively advanced Asian states, from little Korea to huge China, impoverishing governments and peoples alike and thus making them critically weak to the natural disasters: now living marginally, they could handle no additional pressures of any sort. Second, Western capitalists made deliberate use of such disasters to remove even more concessions from the stricken victims, ranging from even more loans, debt and unequal treaties to annexations and the straight and brutal use of anxious colonial subjects as forced labor. (In his model, China represents the main example of the first approach and India that of the second, though there were elements of both in either. ) Taken together, the picture portrayed is that of the British Empire as one of history's the majority destructive entities, easily on par with the more well-known Nazis and Soviets of the 20th century in terms of holocausts.

This will almost certainly strike good number reviewers as wrong, if not offensive. Certainly Davis's argument, if correct, invites very upsetting comparisons. While he does not say as much outright, it appears obvious that he is implicitly asking us to re-evaluate our past. The 20th century was the battlefield of Fascism, Communism and Democracy; the first two were defeated by the third. We think this to have been the victory of morality over evil, largely because of the genocides of the fascists and communists. What, then, does it mean if our own system has also been responsible for genocides of comparable or even greater magnitude than those Hitler and Stalin brought about? The question may be painful, but in view of the historical facts, it would seem it must be asked. An answer will not be attempted here. Of course, it is also true that not all historians have the same opinion with every part of the nightmare that "Late Victorian Holocausts" conjures. For example, there now exist a considerable and still rapidly growing literature by together British and Indian scholars debating the exact extent and circumstances of the British genocides in India. Some (British, in the main) favor more conservative estimate of the relevant quantity of fatality, pain and malice than those Davis offer; others (mainly Indians) would say that, if anything, he soft-pedals his indictment. Who is more in the right still remains to be eventually settled. But the fact that millions of innocent people were killed by the British government, through incompetence and malign neglect at greatest and active malevolence and greed at least in a few degrees, is beyond argument. we have to confront, if we wish to remain intellectually sincere.

While facts are objective matters of truth, how we have to respond to them is not. Most would agree that a few opinions are better than others (though not necessarily on which), but opinion they remain. We can only present some of our own, hoping that others will not find them awkward. This reviewer is not a supporter in collective historical guilt. clearly, British people of today are not accountable, individually or as a people, for atrocities committed by their ancestors' government, any more than current-day Germans are accountable for the extremes of Nazism. Such ideas do not further historical truth, understanding or a enhanced present or future. While some recognizable elements ("the usual suspects") have leaped upon Davis's book to bash Britain or support hatred of the West and its institution more normally, this is to be regretted. At the same time, other self-righteous souls have equally predictably dismissed all of our author's rough claims out of hand. To our mind, neither answer to Davis's challenge is the right one. It is left to thoughtful persons of all nations to learn and keep in mind the Indian tragedy, as well as the more well-known European ones of the last century; not to feed the fires of any species of chauvinism, but in order to learn from the past and hopefully avoid the recurrence of similar events.