Apocalypse Then
The little-known story of drought, famine and pestilence that killed millions at the turn of the last century.
By AMARTYA SEN
The subject of this gripping book is a series of famines that devastated many countries in Asia, North Africa and Latin America in the last quarter of the 19th century. Mike Davis estimates that between 32 and 61 million people died from these famines in China, India and Brazil, and there were many other countries in the tropics that were also badly hit. There is plausibility in the description on the dust jacket of Davis's book ''Late Victorian Holocausts'' that these disasters were ''the greatest human tragedy since the Black Death.''
What exactly happened? Were climatic factors responsible? They certainly had a role, Davis shows. The droughts associated with the ''El Niño-Southern Oscillation'' led to a chain of large-scale agricultural crises in the tropics and in northern China, and these directly contributed to the disasters. Yet, despite the adversity of nature, it is quite clear that starvation and famine could have been prevented through counteracting economic and social policies. In developing this dual account -- what Davis calls ''political ecology'' (citing Michael Watts's important 1983 book, ''Silent Violence'') -- he shows how the policies adopted by the authoritarian governments in the heyday of imperialism exacerbated the famines and made their impacts more severe. The new economic arrangements that were closely linked to the 19th-century imperial order left people peculiarly vulnerable. And this economic insecurity was reinforced by alienated governance, which withheld the supportive public measures that could have prevented the worst.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, known by its acronym ENSO, continues today with varying intensity. While it is important to understand the climatic patterns of El Niño and other serious natural hazards better, it is also critical not to see them as inescapable causes of famine and devastation. ''The power of ENSO events,'' Davis points out, ''indeed seems so overwhelming in some instances that it is tempting to assert that great famines, like those of the 1870's and 1890's (or, more recently, the Sahelian disaster of the 1970's), were 'caused' by El Niño, or by El Niño acting upon traditional agrarian misery. This interpretation, of course, inadvertently echoes the official line of the British in Victorian India as recapitulated in every famine commission report and viceregal allocution: millions were killed by extreme weather, not imperialism.''
Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance as well as great historical interest. To seize the broader implications of this grisly history of needless suffering and unnecessary misery, it is useful to distinguish clearly between two different ways in which an agricultural disaster like a drought or flood can cause economic difficulty. A drought or flood may destroy crops. But it also devastates people's incomes by slashing agricultural employment and wages. And it can destroy the markets for the modest goods and services (from haircuts to craft products) by which a great many other people earn their livings. The economic adversity caused by droughts or floods far exceeds their direct impact on the food supply.
The distinction between the effects on overall food supply and those on family incomes is important in explaining why some people are so severely affected by a natural disaster whereas others -- living in the same society and facing the same supply of food -- are hardly touched at all. It helps explain, too, why famines cannot be averted simply by opening up markets, or by making transportation easier (for example through the establishment of railways), so that food can physically be moved to the affected people. Davis rightly presses the question: ''How do we weigh smug claims about the life-saving benefits of steam transportation and modern grain markets when so many millions, especially in British India, died alongside railroad tracks or on the steps of grain depots?''
The problem lies in the fact that disaster victims do not have the means to buy the food that the market can deliver and the railways can fetch. Indeed, sometimes the very opposite happens, as when food is moved out of the famished area, pulled by the greater purchasing power of more prosperous regions (well illustrated, for example, by the persistent shipment of food from starving Ireland to affluent England during the Irish famines of the 1840's). It is, therefore, a mistake -- common though it is -- to expect an automatic solution to famines and hunger through the development of markets and the establishment of transport arrangements.
The role of incomes and economic means also has an important bearing on the radical sounding but ultimately conservative claim, which is often made, that people died in the new economic regimes precisely because of the decline of the traditional systems of rural self-help and protective security. Insofar as the new imperial arrangements had the effect of destroying the earning abilities of people or undermining the sharing arrangements that had existed, there may be some truth in this claim. But traditional economic systems typically do not include enough economic opportunities for all, or protective arrangements that can effectively shelter the real underdogs of society. While British India was ravaged by famines (contrary to the claims of the imperialist apologists), famines were not unknown in pre-British India either (contrary to romantic nationalist claims). Nor, for that matter, were they unknown in any substantial part of the traditional world, including pre-industrial Europe. Davis quotes approvingly Karl Polanyi's indictment, ''Indian masses in the second half of the 19th century . . . perished in large numbers because the Indian village community had been demolished.'' But this is an enormous exaggeration. In exploding one myth, we have to be careful not to fall for another.
Davis, the author of ''Ecology of Fear'' among other books, is entirely justified in disputing the often-repeated claims for markets and modern transport systems. But it is also necessary to recognize that if markets and transport systems are combined with the creation of economic means, this integrated expansion can add to, rather than subtract from, human security. The crucial factor is the economic empowerment of the more vulnerable sections of the society. In particular, in a situation of natural disaster, what is critically important is the creation of additional incomes through, say, emergency employment. If the potential victims have the incomes with which to buy food, then markets and railways can work to get food to the affected people. The devastations that Davis describes in illuminating detail should not be seen merely as the result of market forces, or of a declining village community, but rather as a basic failure to have an adequately broad economic policy, involving public action at different levels.
Moreover, it is important to understand the roles of both economic and political power. We have to distinguish between (1) the limited reach of economic markets or public distribution systems, and (2) the limited opportunity of public participation and democratic governance. Imperial systems were severely guilty of both limitations (as Davis's investigations clearly bring out), but they were not unique in their dual failure. Even though Davis's historical study concentrates on what can be called imperialist famines, failures of a very similar kind have occurred in independent countries and even in formally Socialist ones. Indeed, in the 20th century the biggest famines occurred mostly in countries outside the domain of liberal capitalism, notably in China during 1958-61 (with possibly 30 million deaths), but also in the Soviet Union in the 1930's, in Cambodia in the 1970's and in North Korea in the very recent past (not to mention the dismal record of domestic military dictatorships in sub-Saharan Africa). Absence of economic power combined with a lack of political leverage condemned millions of people to unrelieved destitution and untimely death.
The insightful writer Tariq Ali has described this challenging monograph as ''a veritable Black Book of liberal capitalism.'' That it certainly is, but it is more than that. It is an illustrative book of the disastrous consequences of fierce economic inequality combined with a drastic imbalance of political voice and power. The late-Victorian tragedies exemplify a wider problem of human insecurity and vulnerability related, ultimately, to economic disparity and political disempowerment. The relevance of this highly informative book goes well beyond its immediate historical focus.
Amartya Sen is the 1998 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.
[First Chapter of _Late Victorian Holocausts_ is available at <http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/davis-victorian.html>.]