5/13/2023 0 Comments Victorian holocaustsChapters brilliantly reconstruct the political, economic, ecological and racial climate of the time, as well as the horrific deaths by hunger and thirst that besieged the peasantries of the afflicted c0untries. Davis dives into the data and journalism of the period with a vengeance, showing that the seemingly unprecedented droughts across northern Africa, India and China in the 1870s and 1890s are consistent with what we now know to be El Ni o's effects, and that it was political and market forces (which are never impersonal, Davis insists), and not a lack of potential stores and transportation, that kept grain from the more than 50 million people who starved to death. Its subject is nothing less than the creation of what we now call ""The Third World,"" through a complex series of seemingly disparate natural and market-related events beginning in the 1870s. While this book will not have the impact of Davis's City of Quartz-a scathing indictment of L.A.'s environmental ravagement, economic disparity and racial divides-in a perfect world, it would.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |