Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. By Mike Davis. London and New York: Verso, 2001. Pp. x, 464. $27.00

The dust-jacket blurbs use “stunning,” “eloquent,” “wholly original,” and “first-rate” to describe the author and this work, and the praise is apt. Mike Davis examines the relationships among (a) late-nineteenth-century famines in much of what we now call the “Third World,” (b) the climatic effect known as ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation), (c) Western imperialism, and (d) the twentieth-century gap between the wealthiest and poorest countries in the world. Davis teases out the causal linkages among them, painting a new picture of the elements that went into “the making of the Third World.” His thesis is that the late-nineteenth-century globe-spanning droughts in India, China, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia were precipitated by El Niño, but they became massive famines—killing 30 to 50 million people—because of a London-centered international capitalism. The famines in turn provided imperialists with an opportunity for further territorial aggrandizement. The Third World thus resulted from a conjuncture of natural, political, and socioeconomic processes.