I don’t remember the last time I cried while reading a book. Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, an experiment in bringing together environmental history and Marxist political economy, is a path-breaking treatise that reveals how late-Nineteenth-Century climatic events were both preconditioned and amplified by colonial-capitalism-induced vulnerabilities shared by cultivators across South Asia, China and Brazil. It’s a story of what made droughts possible and how they converted into the kinds of famines unprecedented in the respective regions’ histories. Particularly chilling is the story of South Asia, which experienced three sustained drought-famines after the British consolidated their control over India: 1876-79; 1888-91; and 1896-1902. Travelling from Madras to Mysore to Bombay, Deccan to North-West Province to the Punjab, the famines (and the inseparable cholera, plague and malaria epidemics) killed 30 million Indians (30 million!), a majority of whom happened to be poor cultivators and lower-caste folks.

In Nellore district and other parts of Madras Deccan, in September 1877, the only well-nourished living beings were “the pariah dogs, “fat as sheep,” that feasted on the bodies of dead children.” In Rajputana (today’s Rajasthan), in 1899, pigeons had more grain to eat than children, whose stomachs were so sunken that their bowels seemed to have been removed altogether, singing the “song of famine” at railway stations across the province. Across the famine-ravaged regions, and across all the late-Nineteenth-Century famines, mothers sold their children for a loaf of bread. In Mysore, in the summer of 1877, when children and their mothers tried to steal from gardens or fields, they had their noses cut off. In Mysore again, “one madman dug up and devoured part of a cholera victim; another killed his son and ate part of the boy,” a practice (cannibalism) alien to pre-British India. In rural Deccan, in 1877, a woman ate a dead dog. Throughout the three socio-biological calamities, poor farmers pleaded with authorities to arrest them, as jails were the only sites offering food to inmates. In the so-called relief camps in Madras and beyond (the petri dishes for epidemics), the emaciated folks received “less sustenance for hard labour than the diet inside the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp” (famine victims had to work, and work hard, to qualify for relief – again a practice unknown to pre-British India).

Yet the poet-Viceroy Lord Lytton, Queen Victoria’s favourite poet and the overseer of the Great Famine (1876-79), was unmoved when he visited “relief” camps in southern India and witnessed protruding knees and hunger-induced downy hair all over the bodies of victims. The next Viceroy, Lord Elgin (who oversaw much of “the famine of the century,” 1896-1902) was equally unswayed by the spectacle of ubiquitous misery; he rather imported to India “the old disciplinary cornerstone of utilitarianism,” the poor houses. These poor houses, which Davis refers to as the ‘charnel houses,’ had children with eyeballs gone and five-year-olds liftable with thumbs and forefingers, weighing no more than seven pounds. Even those, the missionaries, who were otherwise actively buying the young to-be-converts, could not withstand the torment and reported that “half of the horrors have not, cannot, be told.” One British official analogised the 1877 Mysore with scenes out of Dante’s Inferno. Those, including the dissident bureaucrats, who initiated relief efforts, were reprimanded (for context, see the Anti-Charitable Act of 1877, the legacy of which was strongly upheld by the next two famine-Viceroys, Lord Elgin and Lord Curzon).

The story of colonial drought-famines in the subcontinent is full of so many firsts, greatests, worsts and mosts that the facts start to appear as fiction in a dystopian, apocalyptic tale choreographed by non-Earthly, anti-human, anti-ecological protagonists. Yet, all the architects of the late Victorian holocausts were Earthly, European and British, ideologically and economically informed by Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. To the point that the first chapter of Davis’s book, Victoria’s Ghosts, could easily be renamed as “Smithian-Malthusian Ghosts.” Smith, having been taught at the East India Company’s Haileybury College for years, was more of a textbook figure, informing the Raj’s famine policy – from letting the unregulated (strictly laissez-faire) market decide the grain prices to criminalising community relief efforts. The Famine Commission (1878-80) even argued that a government-led relief effort would set a bad precedent for future governance, likely turning the “lazy” Indians into perpetual dependents on state welfare. Similarly, the Malthusian perspective not only attributed famine-induced holocausts to demographic factors but also implicitly justified the three holocausts by enunciating that the Indian population would grow faster than the crops they raised. (Almost as if to say, imitating Davis’s humour: Oops, 30 million corpses. Sorry. But millions more will erupt out of vaginas perpetually at work.) One fact should, however, suffice to dismantle the Malthusian myth: neither land was under great pressure, nor was the grain in short supply. In fact, the wealth of data Davis mobilises makes it clear that both during the Great Famine and “the famine of the century,” India produced millions of tonnes of surplus grain to be exported to England: in both instances, to make up for the bad harvests in England. In a time when the cultivators in the grain belts of India were dying in front of granaries, Londoners were eating bread made from cheap Indian wheat. Throughout the late Nineteenth Century, India fed its conquerors at its own peril.

Half of the horrors have not, cannot, be told.

Indian village economy was violently incorporated into the world commodity market through a two-fold process: rural India (especially the wheat, rice, opium, indigo and cotton belts) becoming export-oriented and urban and semi-urban India becoming import-absorbent (Lancashire’s cotton; Sheffield’s steel; London’s moneylenders’ control over prices in cahoots with the Indian moneylender-merchant-zamindar classes; and shipbuilders and other manufacturers from across England). Amidst millions perishing, the ports of Madras and Bombay were shipping grains to Europe and importing industrial goods, simultaneously bringing about skeletonisation and de-industrialisation.

So, what are the ghosts that haunt Davis? And what haunts us as thinkers from South Asia today, amidst recurring, apocalyptic flooding – the dominant climatic change phenomenon in the region? Mike Davis makes it clear that it is the combination of violently imposed ecological poverty – the colonial dismantling of common property resources, “social overhead capital” and community institutions – household poverty and state decapacitation (read extractive state in case of India and an imperialistically decapacitated late-Qing state in case of late-Nineteenth-Century China) that made possible the emergence of a Third World and its perpetual vulnerability to extreme climatic events. Scholars from the Anthropocene narrative tradition might have an ahistorical habit of tracing the origins of the ecological collapse to the moment when humanity, “as a monolithic species,” discovered fire as a mechanism of human control over nature. Thinkers from certain world-systems perspectives, such as Andre Gunder Frank, might like to conjoin the origins of capitalism, Third World underdevelopment and ecological vulnerability all the way back to the origins of trade, some 5,000 years ago (confusing pre-capitalist mercantile operations with capitalist trade).

What Mike Davis does so brilliantly is the following: One, he obviously makes the ecological dimension integral to both the origins of capitalism and its more spectacular, violent unfolding in the colony. Two, by doing so, he brings the integral Marxian connection between labour and nature back to the centre of the debate. Three, he puts to rest the optimism surrounding the death of indigenous commons and community institutions as the only way forward to emancipatory, abundance-laden, post-capitalist futures. Lastly, Late Victorian Holocausts appears to offer some grounds for a useful synergy between the otherwise fissured Immanuel Wallerstein and Robert Brenner around the question of the origins of capitalism.

While the Late Victorian Holocausts might not have anything to directly do with the Brenner debate (the origins of capitalism in the production and productivity sphere), the fact that Davis brought colonial capitalism, environmental history and the surplus transfer together speaks volumes to both the circuits of production and circulation (while being mindful of the ecological circuits).

We might not be able to go deeper into these debates here, but the co-constitutive evolution of ecological poverty, colonial capitalism and parasitic extraction (in concert with local moneylender-merchant-zamindar classes), as foregrounded by Davis, set in motion ecological vulnerabilities that were further accentuated by the post-colonial South Asian states, especially Pakistan, which, like its forerunners, remained extractive – with the difference that the surplus now was not being siphoned out but accumulated within the echelons of the local ruling elite.

Some of the laments that Davis expresses toward the end of the book, that is, the disintegrations initiated and consolidated by the colonial state – well collapses, systematic marginalisation of kharif crops, “destruction of peasant-managed irrigation systems,” the crumbling of reciprocative community institutions and the near-total ecological breakdown – might sound like a sobbing yearning to go back to a pristine past characterised by human-nature harmony. But Davis is neither a pre-capitalist romantic nor a post-modernist. He backs up his claims with scientific evidence validating the sustainability of indigenous irrigation systems (especially in India), which offer stable yields, minimal salinisation and significantly greater productivity and efficiency compared to industrial irrigation. It is only the synergy between the re-capacitated traditional mechanisms and modern agro-ecological approaches (led by grassroots, mass-based political projects sympathetic to both) that can help us overcome some of the ecological vulnerabilities the Third World has been historically and systemically thrown into. Perhaps only then will we be able to not hide “half of the horrors” induced by capital-made famines and floods.

The writer is a PhD student in the graduate programme in social and political thought at York University, Canada, the editorial director of Folio Books, and a member of Haqooq-i-Khalq Party.