Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Driven by El Niño and exacerbated by a global economic depression, similar disasters occurred in East and southeast Asia, parts of Africa, and northeastern Brazil. The US railroad bubble burst and cotton prices fell, while demand for exports from the colonized tropics dropped. Unemployment soared in industrialized areas: “The result everywhere was intensified competition and the plummeting of agricultural incomes” (69). Widespread social discontent set in.

China’s Yellow River basin experienced a drought-famine so severe that it eclipsed the tragedy in India, but news of the crisis took months to get to the Qing rulers. Grain relief did not reach famine victims for a year, a circumstance the West viewed as evidence of “a stagnant civilization” (70). However, the true reason was breakdown in a previously effective system of famine relief. As winter set in, the peasantry resorted to burning their homes to keep warm. Many then fled southward, where sources describe them huddling together in large pits and where the state sometimes used force to repel the influx of famine refugees. To protest their circumstances, peasant women arranged “highly theatrical demonstrations […] against greedy gentry and dishonest magistrates” (74). Ongoing famine, however, weakened resistance, and social ties fractured. Provincial administrators focused on prosecuting desperate, starving thieves instead of alleviating the suffering. Relief efforts impacted no more than 40% of the population, and perhaps less, across five famine-stricken provinces. The Qing state diverted resources to military matters instead of aid. Millenarian movements attracted followers because they “offered Chinese peasants a cultural matrix for organizing and legitimating agrarian insurrection” (76). These movements, common across much of the world at the turn of the 19th century, shared a utopian belief that the new century would bring about a radical transformation of society.

In Shanxi province, where the provincial granaries were depleted, some were forced to resort to cannibalism: “Entire social strata had been wiped out from the bottom up” (78). The Grand Canal’s poor condition slowed the Qing’s meager relief efforts, causing a series of “transport bottlenecks” (80). Meanwhile, Western missionaries viewed the crises as an opportunity to spread Christianity. Anti-Asian, racist sentiment in the United States prevented Congress from passing an aid bill. As famine refugees continued to flock to China’s urban centers, they unknowingly spread disease throughout their camps. The monsoon returned to normal in 1878, but by then Shanxi’s population was so depleted by death and migration that recovery was slow and difficult.

In northeastern Brazil, “Rainfall is dramatically orchestrated by El Niño and few landscapes change their aspect so radically between seasons or wet or dry years” (86). The drought here followed on the heels of the disaster in India, setting in six months after the Indian monsoon’s collapse. The region was dependent on cotton production, so the global failure of the cotton market compounded Brazilian farmers’ suffering. Famine victims resorted to foraging for cacti, and some unknowingly consumed toxic plants out of desperation. Grain imports were essential to survival: “The commercial grain trade was as hopelessly unequal to this task as in India or China” (89). Provincial officials responsible for relief were ill equipped and had little knowledge of the impacted backlands. Meanwhile, Social Darwinism led them to view the famine’s victims as responsible for their own suffering. Aid reached the backlands and only after hundreds of malnourished migrants flooded into the coastal city of Fortaleza—months after the crisis began. Even then, there was not enough water for the pack horses who would transport grain inland. The sertão—the typically semi-arid northeastern backcountry—had grown desolate.

Elite planters and merchants feared an “insurrectionary threat” should the drought migrants unite with the city’s poor and enslaved residents. The state thus shipped many to the rainforest as laborers. Starving mobs rioted in Fortaleza, causing the President to flee. Despite the political change that followed, conditions for famine victims failed to improve: “[…] the Liberals extolled the example of the Lytton administration in India and proposed to restore order in Ceará with strictly ‘scientific British methods’” (94). Deportations to the Amazon increased, and like the British Raj, the state tied relief to labor obligations. The Brazilian labor camps were plagued by unhygienic conditions, like their Indian counterparts, and a smallpox epidemic erupted. Rain returned in 1880, but much of the arid backland failed to return to its previous state. Moreover, exploiting drought refugees for labor and profiting from their deportations established a “‘drought industry’” (96) while also sounding the death knell for Brazilian slavery.

Drought and famine impacted other areas of Asia in 1876, allowing creditors to “tighten control over local rural economies through debt or outright expropriation” (99). Likewise, colonialism spread further, generating resistance to imperial authority and social inequality in the form of indigenous millenarian movements: “El Niño was thus followed by gunboats and messiahs as well as by famine and disease” (99).

In Vietnam, for instance, a Buddhist millenarian movement known as the Dan Lanh called for the expulsion of the French. In the Spanish Philippine province of Negros, where drought and inflation caused acute famine, peasants retreated to mountain millenarian communities and raised arms against the Spanish. One Spanish source confirms:

[…] the supernatural impotence of the Spanish priests in the face of drought, together with the inability of officials to contain the cholera epidemic that followed in its wake “inspired the shamans to mount direct challenges to a disintegrating colonial state […] (105).

New Imperialists—Davis’s term for practitioners of the industrialized, resource-extracting colonialisms of the late 18th and 19th centuries—used drought in southern Africa to their advantage. Global trade pressures worsened the famine in Angola, where cash crops like coffee overtook subsistence agriculture. Disease followed on famine’s heels. The British military was therefore able to suppress the weakened population, and colonial plantations expanded while the population rose, creating the potential for further crises. Yet European colonists did not escape downward mobility: As wool process fell and cattle died due to drought, some were compelled to seek employment in service industries. The British took advantage of Dutch colonial and Indigenous weakness, suppressing African resistance movements. For instance, they destroyed the Zulu kingdom when their once-allies rose in revolt.

In northern Africa, Egypt also suffered drought as the Nile’s level fell in 1878: “The drought struck a peasantry already reeling from collapsing export prices, high indebtedness, a rinderpest epidemic and overtaxation” (112). The Egyptian viceroy to the Turks “was forced to default in 1876, surrendering control over revenues to a Franco-British Dual Control Commission” (112). Tax collection continued unabated as the drought-famine devastated the peasantry, many of whom lost their lands to foreclosure and were thus reduced to laboring on elite estates. Banditry became a pervasive problem across the north. French Algeria and Morocco suffered similar ruin. Famine refugees depopulated the countryside and spread diseases like cholera and smallpox in unhygienic camps. Some, however, benefited from the crisis. Morocco became reliant on European loans, for example. Export houses began importing goods in Moroccan port cities, and colonials amassed “massive landholdings under fictive Moroccan ownership” (117). The crisis ushered in “formal colonialism” (117). 

Meanwhile, El Niño brought record productivity to California’s wheat harvest while crops in Ireland and Britian failed. These losses destroyed England’s yeoman class and encouraged mass migration to the US. Elsewhere, millions died. In India, for instance, upwards of seven million perished. Most victims never received any aid from the British Raj, despite the extensive railroads constructed under New Imperialism. Recovery from this disaster was difficult because so many men and boys perished under the Temple wage, thus disrupting family compositions and subsequent labor: “Few of the famine survivors […] were in any position to take advantage of the temporary recovery of agricultural prices” (122). As many as 20 million may have perished in northern China. In some provinces nearly the entire population starved to death. Shanxi province’s population did not recover to pre-famine levels of 1875 until the 1950s. Morocco and Brazil similarly faced population decline due to famine and the diseases that followed. The number of lives lost globally is astronomical.