Late Victorian Holocausts
Book by Mike DavisWikipedia
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Search complete. 8 mentions across 5 episodes found for "Late Victorian Holocausts".
Oct 26, 2026
Rebecca KarlGUEST
I'm having trouble even addressing it because I can't wrap my mind around it.
Rebecca KarlGUEST
I think any system that leads to this kind of mass death, whether it is, I just happened to be rereading Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocaust.
Rebecca KarlGUEST
I was going to
Richard HamesHOST
say, I was going to bring it up.
Rebecca KarlGUEST
I can't answer the question as posed.
Rebecca KarlGUEST
Sorry.
Richard HamesHOST
So just to say what we're looking at here on the map is, so these are what Mike Davis describes as the late Victorian holocausts.
Richard HamesHOST
So this collection of famines down here in India and the collection of famines here in India as well.
Gareth ReynoldsHOST
He did two episodes.
Dave AnthonyHOST
It's called Late Victorian Holocaust, El Nino Famines, and the Making of the Third World.
Dave AnthonyHOST
And let me tell you something.
Dave AnthonyHOST
Light read.
Isabella WeberGUEST
And when that happens, then the question is, do you enforce the market order by violence, which is basically the fascist route? Or do you have a counter movement that is a democratic and progressive counter movement that allows for market interventions in the name of protecting livelihoods and protecting the material foundations of everyone's life? And I mean, this is kind of a theoretical argument, but there are also some very important historical examples.
Isabella WeberGUEST
One of them is the El Nino famines in the late 19th century, which Mike Davis has covered in his brilliant book, Late Victorian Holocaust, and actually in the introduction.
Isabella WeberGUEST
Mike Davis acknowledges Polanyi as one of the very few thinkers that have discussed these El Nino famines.
Isabella WeberGUEST
And in the El Nino famines, what happened is that the colonial administrators in India and China and Latin America basically insisted that they should not provide famine relief, because if they were going to provide famine relief, they would make people live who actually should be dying because in a Methusian sense, the balance between food and population had been unsettled.
Aaron RegunbergHOST
Yeah.
Isabella WeberGUEST
Yeah, and I mean, if we look at what's happening with the energy crisis right now, then, you know, saying that in an energy crisis, energy prices are supposed to be purely market-based can reside in... very devastating outcomes.
Isabella WeberGUEST
I'm not saying El Nino famine, late Victorian Holocaust, but still like literally putting people's livelihoods on the line, right? I mean, we have seen that already in the spring, fishermen in the Philippine couldn't go out because they couldn't afford diesel.
Isabella WeberGUEST
I don't know where these folks are at now, but I would imagine that their savings might last a week or two, but not more than that.
Isabella WeberGUEST
And then in Polanyi's analysis, capitalism brings about crises of livelihoods existential crises in a recurring fashion and when that happens then the question is do you enforce the market order by violence which is basically the fascist route? Or do you have a counter movement that is a democratic and progressive counter movement that allows for market interventions in the name of protecting livelihoods and protecting the material foundations of everyone's life? And I mean, this is kind of a theoretical argument, but there are also some very important historical examples.
Isabella WeberGUEST
One of them is the El Nino famines in the late 19th century, which Mike Davis has covered in his brilliant book, Late Victorian Holocaust, and actually in the introduction.
Isabella WeberGUEST
Mike Davis acknowledges Polanyi as one of the very few thinkers that have discussed these El Nino famines.
Isabella WeberGUEST
And in the El Nino famines, what happened is that the colonial administrators in India and China and Latin America basically insisted that they should not provide famine relief, because if they were going to provide famine relief, they would make people live who actually should be dying because in a Methusian sense, the balance between food and population had been unsettled.
Aaron RegunbergHOST
But it's the exact same logic that still rules our society.
Isabella WeberGUEST
Yeah, and I mean, if we look at what's happening with the energy crisis right now, then, you know, saying that in an energy crisis, energy prices are supposed to be purely market-based can reside in... very devastating outcomes.
Isabella WeberGUEST
I'm not saying El Nino famine, late Victorian Holocaust, but still, like, literally putting people's livelihoods on the line, right? I mean, we have seen that already in the spring, fishermen in the Philippines couldn't go out because they couldn't afford diesel.
Isabella WeberGUEST
I don't know where these folks are at now, but I would imagine that their savings... might last a week or two, but not more than that.
James MeadwayHOST
There's only so far we can stretch away from our grubby material reality.
James MeadwayHOST
This point is hammered home by Nick in his use of two seminal texts of nineteenth century history, Karl Pomeranz's The Great Divergence and Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocaust.
James MeadwayHOST
I've not seen the two bracketed together like this, and whilst very different books written from different perspectives, they make sense.
James MeadwayHOST
Pomeranz argues that what were some of the richest parts of the planet by the late eighteenth century, the Yangtze River Delta in China, Bengal in India and England, with very similar living conditions, had by the nineteenth century's end been forced onto radically different paths, which Pomeranz attributes primarily to colonialism.