> Is this a common theme of yours or are you reading something about
> this right now? Sounds like Mike Davis's _Late Victorian Holocausts_. If
> so, what do you think of it?
Yes, it's straight from Davis' book, which is quite good. One can always quibble with the sources here and there, but the main argument is compelling - really, it's an extension of Walter Rodney's insight that liberal-era capitalism wrecked the economies of the periphery, which is true, to the realm of peasant nutrition.
I constantly harp on it these days because (1) there's a strong tendency among Anglo-American intellectuals, myself included, to reduce all human evil to the unholy trinity of HSM (Hitler-Stalin-Mao), and (2) a corresponding forgetting of the structural violence of US and British (neo)colonialism.
-- DRR