![]() The sheer magnitude of what can rightly be called a holocaust of non-Western peoples has generally been obscured by a persistent metropolitan perspective, by the social distance from mass suffering of colonial administrative elites and by historians incurious about, or dismissive of, such “cycles of Cathay.” It is a signal service of this impressive, eloquent study that the dimension of this human suffering on a global scale has been both exposed and foregrounded in the operation of late-Victorian formal and informal imperialisms. ![]() Estimates of the number who perished range from thirty-one million to sixty-one million people. These phenomena occurred previously, notably in the late eighteenth century, but the late nineteenth century events were extraordinarily severe, and death by starvation and disease was on a staggering, unprecedented scale. ![]() These droughts were the result of what we can now recognize as a more or less regular succession of mega-climatic events known as El Niño. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis charts the unprecedented human suffering caused by a series of extreme climactic conditions in the final quarter of the 19th century. Three great global droughts, in 1876-1879, 1889-1891, and 1896-1900, afflicted much of the most populous part of the tropical world in the late nineteenth century. ![]()
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