The Way the Wind Blows

The statistics are mind-numbing. Except for China’s horrific Taipeng Rebellion of the 1860s, which killed 20 million, more people in the tropics died in the late-19th century from famine and famine-related epidemics than in all conventional warfare throughout that century--as many as 50 million--and millions more were debilitated by malnutrition worldwide.

Some say it began with the great drought of 1875-76, which affected northern China, North Africa and the tropical monsoon belt, precipitating famine a little more than 10 years later. A third of Ethiopia’s and Sudan’s population perished. Famine raged over much of Russia, India and Korea. And in 1896 through 1901, the monsoons failed yet again to bring ample rainfall. Catastrophic epidemics decimated tropical populations from northeast Brazil across the tropics and into northern China.

The great famines of the late 19th century have remained a footnote to imperial history. Generations of historians largely ignored their implications and until recently they dismissed them as “climatic accidents” beyond the control of mere mortals. “Late Victorian Holocausts” proves them wrong. Mike Davis calls these disasters “the secret history of the nineteenth century” and argues that today’s poverty-stricken Third World was born of these staggering catastrophes.

Not that the Victorians were completely unaware of these events. In 1898, the celebrated biologist Alfred Russel Wallace compiled a balance sheet for the century. He considered the slum poverty of the industrial cities and catastrophic famines in China and India the “most terrible failures” of the century. Charles Dickens in his novels immortalized the Victorian slum. And yet the imperial authorities in Brussels, London and Paris were unconcerned.

For all their lip service to famine relief and caring about the welfare of rural populations, the British ran India for a brutal profit. Famines were the price of stability in the global grain market; they were thought to be acts of God that could be neither predicted nor ameliorated.

Subsistence agriculture is always a harsh existence. Medieval Europe’s farmers lived from harvest to harvest, the specter of hunger always in the background. They farmed at the complete mercy of changing pressure gradients in the North Atlantic, which could bring bitter cold or months of rain, near-tropical summers or mild winters.

Millions died of hunger and famine-related disease at the start of the Little Ice Age in 1315 through ’21. Food-related dearths were a reality of life until major innovations in agriculture and stock breeding, also such new crops as the potato, changed the subsistence equation. Even then, more than a million Irish peasants perished in the great potato famine of the 1840s.

A revolution in climatology has revealed just how much environmental instability there has been in Europe alone over the last thousand years. The same revolution, with its satellites and deep-water buoys, has chronicled the complex and powerful syncopations of El Ninos in the tropics, arguably the most powerful climatic engine on Earth.

El Ninos were first identified in 1895, but it wasn’t until 1966 that they were linked to broader temperature changes in the western Pacific. Today, ocean buoys, satellites and myriad land observations provide us with the raw material for computer models that enable us to predict the phenomenon, which we know assisted in the collapse of Moche civilization on Peru’s north coast between AD 600 and AD 700, played a role in the collapse of Classic Maya civilization in the southern Yucatan and, in the 1870s and 1890s, had such devastating impacts on impoverished tropical farmers. It was the official line of the British in Victorian India: that millions were killed by extreme weather and no other cause. Davis, however, paints a much more complex, even sinister picture.

As long ago as 1944, economist Karl Polyani argued that the sources of the great 19th century famines were as much economic and political as they were natural. Davis agrees. He believes that monsoon failures and the fluctuations of El Nino and its counterpart, La Nina, lay behind what he calls “climates of hunger.” He argues that the poverty-stricken subjects of his book were “ground to bits” between the teeth of “implacable” cogwheels by the congruence of major climatic fluctuations and the emerging Victorian global economy.

The holocaust stemmed from deliberate policies adopted thousands of miles away and implemented at the local level by colonial officials. The New Imperialism of the late Victorians thought nothing of exploiting people weakened by natural disaster and epidemic disease. Each famine, each catastrophe was a green light for the grabbing of more territory, more agricultural land.

The economic, political and social consequences of globalization were catastrophic to the tropical world. In 1786-87, a great El Nino caused widespread famine in northern China. The Chinese authorities of the day organized highly effective famine relief. At the height of the drought, the authorities supported more than 2 million people with grain imported from elsewhere in the country. But they could not do the same in the late 19th century, when a combination of flood control failures in the Yellow River Valley and huge price increases caused by world market forces caused millions to perish.

In India, the relatively flexible rule of the Moguls and Marathas gave way to the rigid dogmatism of the British Raj. The inexorable demands of the global marketplace and of British taxation took precedence over any degree of human suffering. The victims were traditional societies in the countryside, which functioned on the basis of kinship and reciprocity.

As small holders were forced into larger commodity and financial circuits, marginal subsistence producers were devoured by the new market realities. Their safety net of kin and mutual obligation died on the vine. Railroads and other infrastructural improvements were introduced not to provide famine relief but to simplify the export of foodstuffs. Loss of sovereignty meant increased vulnerability, the creation of a Third World, millions of have-nots.

By 1900, Davis argues, the forces of imperialism and a new global economy, reinforced by drought and famine, had created a yawning gap between the industrialized nations and a new, poverty-stricken Third World, which encompassed much of the tropical globe.

Combining political economy, climatology and ecology with vivid narrative, Davis makes a persuasive, if sometimes controversial, case for linking late 19th century famines directly to Western Europe’s increasing economic and political dominance of the tropical world. Davis makes the recent revolution in the study of climatic change an integral part of his closely argued synthesis. We see El Nino and other climatic events not as simple causes of disaster or prosperity but as subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle players on the historical stage, manipulated by powerful interests for their own ends.

El Nino is not the only extreme climatic event to have an impact on history. Louis Perez Jr. leaves us in no doubt of the power of great hurricanes to change the course of the past in economic, political and social ways. His “Winds of Change” is a short but elegant discourse on the powerful role of hurricanes in Cuban history. Early-19th century Cuba had enjoyed stunning economic growth from the coffee and sugar trade, which brought great wealth to many islanders and poverty and exploitation to African slaves. However, the well-being of the island was always subject to the unpredictable forces of global markets.

Wars, prices, declines and external political forces could wreak havoc on Cuba’s prosperity, so the local Creole elites opted for prosperity over independence from Spain, economic security over national sovereignty. Despite many grievances, they were unwilling to risk economic ruin for political gain.

Then in September 1842, October 1844 and October 1846, Cuba was struck by three destructive hurricanes that permanently changed many features of the colonial economy, including land tenure, labor organization and production systems. The destruction was near-universal. The island was devastated, coffee and sugar plantations leveled, tobacco seedlings destroyed. Hundreds of ships were wrecked, entire towns leveled and subsistence crops and fruit trees annihilated. The coffee industry was decimated. The great storms rearranged Cuban life completely--and its relationship with world markets.

The mid-19th century storms arrived just as sugar was about to become the dominant commodity produced on the island. Thousands of slaves were being transferred from coffee plantations at a time when the supply of captives was declining sharply. Simultaneously, world commodities prices were declining in an atmosphere of increasing international competition. There was no incentive to revive coffee production after the great hurricanes, even if the planters had the desire or means to do so.

Later storms intruded into the wars of independence between 1868 and 1898, sometimes giving strategic advantage to the insurgents, who took advantage of the disruption caused by extreme weather conditions. Apart from military and political developments, the economic fallout was unrelenting.

In 1898, a violent hurricane in the Oriente region decimated local banana plantations. Vast areas of land now came under the new ownership of the huge United Fruit Co., which planted the new acreage under sugar cane. Just as in China and India, Cuba’s hurricane-harassed economy became even more dependent on global markets, as it is today.

Hurricanes were also a social experience, testing ties of kin, a source of solidarity, of working for the common good. The experience of the great storms became a shared past, part of cubanidad, of what it means to be Cuban, a condition of the soul.

“The very notion of nationality, no less than the idea of nation,” evolved in part from the hurricane experience, contributing in decisive ways to the people Cubans have become and will be in the future. Fidel Castro invoked cubanidad only days after the passing of Hurricane Flora in 1963: “A Revolution is a force more powerful than Nature. Hurricanes and all those things are trivial when compared to what a revolution is.” Like Davis, Perez is in no doubt that climatic events interact with economic, political and social conditions to create history.

The 10 most costly natural disasters in the United States have all occurred since 1989, seven of them being hurricanes. In the sobering “Acts of God,” environmental historian Ted Steinberg surveys more than a century of losses from weather and seismic events and exposes the fallacy of assuming that such catastrophes were random events.

Steinberg examines the human dimension of such well-known disasters as the Florida hurricanes that have transformed the state into what he calls a “Do-It-Yourself Deathscape,” where developers and government have encouraged frenzied building on low-lying and storm-prone lands. For example, the intense hurricane of 1935, which hit the Florida Keys, would have done much less damage had it not been for the humanly placed barrier of a railroad from Miami to Key West, which blocked many of the natural channels through the islands.

Steinberg chronicles decisions made by business leaders, developers and state and local governments throughout the United States, which have paved the way both for actual, and potentially far greater, losses of life than in the past--from earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and other relatively commonplace disasters. Coastal overbuilding, shoddy construction, population growth, even public relations policies--all have contributed to a society in which the poor and elderly are far more vulnerable to disaster than more prosperous Americans.

“Remember,” Steinberg writes, “that there is no iron law of calamity, that disaster is not destiny, and above all, that one person’s act of God is--viewed from the perspective of history--just one more instance of man’s inhumanity to man.”

These three books leave us in no doubt as to the powerful role that environmental instability has played in recent history. They also provide us with a sobering lesson in humanity’s vulnerability to extreme climatic events, especially the impoverished farmer and the urban poor.

If Davis is right, and the Third World developed as a result of the late Victorian holocaust, then we have a heavy responsibility a century later. With more than 200 million subsistence farmers around the world living on marginal lands and millions more in urban slums, we seem to have learned nothing about altruism and the responsibilities of global interdependence from history. We forget that the forces of climate walk softly but carry a mighty stick.

It would be very easy for us to lose another 50 million people to drought, famine and disease because of myopic, draconian and inhumane policies originating from far away.