Late Victorian Holocausts

Winner of the World History Association Book Award

Blending global environmental history with political history, this bestselling book explores “late-nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time” (Independent)

Examining a series of El Niño-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