Ten years ago, people began to discuss a pattern of unusual ecological disturbances, including includes droughts, forest fires and freak storms, that ranged from South America through sub-Saharan Africa, to Asia and even Australia. The phrase El Nino caught on; the most common explanation being that the strange weather has its roots in the changing temperature of the Pacific Ocean - El Nino means literally the Christ Child, referring to hot Christmas seas off Ecuador and Peru. People discuss the phenomenon as if it was something new that can, perhaps, be explained in terms of global warning. Yet the most spectacular El Nino events took place between 125 and 100 years ago.
In China, India, Brazil and across the Southern Hemisphere, the years between 1876 and 1902 witnessed a near-permanent cycle of droughts, bad harvests and subsequent famine. Davis' book is studded with reports sent home by missionaries, many describing disasters of biblical proportions. One cleric became so traumatised that he thought that he was living in the last days, as foretold in the book of Revelation. Between 1876 and 1878 alone, seven million people were killed as a result of droughts in India, and by 1896 to 1897, catastrophic harvests affected every tropical country in the world. In total, somewhere between thirty million and sixty million people died.
One message of Davis' book is the connectedness of things. It is no accident that these famines, probably the most terrible in recorded human history, took place at the end of the railway age, as the new industrial system spread across the world. Free trade and military adventures combined to bring the people of Africa and Asia to the brink of famine; between 1850 and 1900 the per capita income of the average Indian fell by 50 percent.
The victims in the South blamed demons or capricious gods. The sober economists of Victorian Britain blamed sunspots for the disasters. But the crisis of the third world was about both bad climate, and a bad economic system. Now that the real meterological origins of El Nino are known, can we be sure that the same disasters will not be allowed to happen again?
A fascinating, sobering historical investigation
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