The statistics are mind-numbing. Except for China's horrific Taipeng Rebellion of the 1860s, which killed 20 million, more people in the tropics died in the late-19th century from famine and famine-related epidemics than in all conventional warfare throughout that century--as many as 50 million--and millions more were debilitated by malnutrition worldwide.
Some say it began with the great drought of 1875-76, which affected northern China, North Africa and the tropical monsoon belt, precipitating famine a little more than 10 years later. A third of Ethiopia's and Sudan's population perished. Famine raged over much of Russia, India and Korea. And in 1896 through 1901, the monsoons failed yet again to bring ample rainfall. Catastrophic epidemics decimated tropical populations from northeast Brazil across the tropics and into northern China.
The great famines of the late 19th century have remained a footnote to imperial history. Generations of historians largely ignored their implications and until recently they dismissed them as "climatic accidents" beyond the control of mere mortals. "Late Victorian Holocausts" proves them wrong. Mike Davis calls these disasters "the secret history of the nineteenth century" and argues that today's poverty-stricken Third World was born of these staggering catastrophes.
Not that the Victorians were completely unaware of these events. In 1898, the celebrated biologist Alfred Russel Wallace compiled a balance sheet for the century. He considered the slum poverty of the industrial cities and catastrophic famines in China and India the "most terrible failures" of the century. Charles Dickens in his novels immortalized the Victorian slum. And yet the imperial authorities in Brussels, London and Paris were unconcerned.
For all their lip service to famine relief and caring about the welfare of rural populations, the British ran India for a brutal profit. Famines were the price of stability in the global grain market; they were thought to be acts of God that could be neither predicted nor ameliorated.
Subsistence agriculture is always a harsh existence. Medieval Europe's farmers lived from harvest to harvest, the specter of hunger always in the background. They farmed at the complete mercy of changing pressure gradients in the North Atlantic, which could bring bitter cold or months of rain, near-tropical summers or mild winters.
