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

After the 1876 crisis in India, The British Raj instituted famine relief codes and established a Famine Relief and Insurance Fund, but the colonial authorities remained woefully underprepared to cope with subsequent drought-famines. The fertile years of the 1880s made them overconfident in their ability to deal with future disasters. As new rice surpluses flowed in from Burma, the colonial government built thousands of miles of new railroads. However, “these improvements were meaningless” (152). The new viceroy, Lord Elgin, perpetuated policies like Lytton’s practices by, for instance, resisting charity and forbidding municipalities from diverting revenue to fair price shops. The monsoon failed in early 1896, preventing farmers from planting across a wide swath of the subcontinent. Moreover, exportation to England in previous years left grain stores depleted, and railroad transport of relief was useless when famine victims could not afford the grain. Meanwhile, the British appropriated wealth from the famine relief fund to finance their war in Afghanistan and ignored “warnings from Indian nationalists as well as their own health officers about the ever-increasing population of poor people vulnerable to any sharp increase in food prices” (153).

When drought returned, it pushed the already-inflated food prices even higher, leading to widespread famine. Elgin, in response, established British-style poor houses for victims too malnourished to labor, whom he believed inherently lazy: “Confinement was especially unbearable to tribal peoples, like the Gonds and Baigas” who reportedly preferred death (156). Widespread grain riots occurred, and political unrest surged in Bombay, where the nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak assumed control of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabh party and encouraged Irish-style resistance to British imperialism. Bubonic plague accompanied famine in Bombay; the disease spread easily in the crowded city, where black rats were prevalent. The British attempted to stop the plague’s transmission by destroying shanties, but this act failed to curb the spread. Railroad transport of grain stores infested with rats and fleas only facilitated the spread of plague. British authorities confined suspected plague victims in camps:

The shocking contrast between the huge number of people detained, many of them apparently healthy, and the relatively few ever released alive from the plague camps played on Indians’ worst apprehensions about British rule (160).

The cost of living for most Indians rose. Wages did not keep up with rent increases. Indians grew enraged with the lavish preparations to celebrate Queen Victoria’s 16th year on the throne, leading to anti-colonial violence and to May 1897 assassination of British official W.C. Rand. The British responded by cracking down on any and all resistance. However, many Indians were too weakened by starvation to mount challenges to British imperialism. Children languished in poor camps, a sight that shocked and disturbed visitors, including the American journalist Julian Hawthorne, who reported these horrors in Cosmopolitan.

When the monsoon strengthened again in 1898, the British swiftly closed relief operations. Epidemics and famine continued, leading to 6.5 million additional dead. In total, approximately 11 million Indians perished during this crisis. Another drought-famine soon followed from 1899-1902. Even regions like Gujarat and Berar, which were often spared the calamity of drought, suffered. Water tables were so low that wells could not reach them, nor could peasants afford to deepen the wells. The peasants had not recovered from the costs of previous disasters, and tax collectors seized the surpluses they stored during the interlude of 1898. Surplus from Burma and Bengal could support the population in the drought-stricken central and western regions, but unemployment and low wages made food unaffordable even when it was available. Small landowners went bankrupt: “In a single year in the Maharashtran Deccan there was a mortgage or foreclosure for every seven rural inhabitants […]” (172).

Viceroy Curzon, like Lytton and Elgin before him, “represented a hardened imperial policy […]” that claimed the British Raj had done enough for its Indian subjects, suggested lack of relief encouraged self-sufficiency, and blamed drought exclusively for the crisis (172). He cut relief allocations, reinstituted the Temple wage, and established a fund to support the Boer War. The English public likewise diverted their charity to the effort in Southern Africa. One British journalist reported “open contempt” for victims in the relief camps, where many were too weak to perform the required labor and were thus punished with reduced rations. Cholera and dysentery spread throughout Bombay, filled with starving people, due to the low water table and contamination. The British responded to the influx of famine refugees into India from surrounding areas by deporting them to the British dependencies from which they had fled, where they received no assistance. Grain traders profited from the suffering as they transported supplies from rural areas to urban centers. Starving famine victims crowded around railway stations, hoping for relief, while pigeons pecked at the grain supplies. Some fled into Gujarat, a region usually safe from drought, but they found no relief.

In Gujarat, the confluence of famine and cholera led to a 90% mortality rate. Starving people sold their children to Western missionaries, who were desperate for converts to Christianity. One British official referred to Gujaratis as “soft” and too lazy to labor under the hot sun (182). The imperial government imposed a 24% tax hike. Farmers who were unable or unwilling to pay had their lands taken. Here at least one-sixth of the total population perished, and the Lancet estimated the overall death toll in the subcontinent at nineteen million. The death and agricultural devastation shattered the growth of the 1880s, while India’s “demographic engine ground to a near halt” (185). A British report on the crisis acknowledged that mass famine relief could have prevented extensive death but argued that it was too costly. Another suggested that the British had distributed too much relief during the famine, although less than one-fifth of the casualties ever received such aid.

Northern China was ravaged by drought, famine, and foreign intervention for five years, beginning in 1897. The colonized saw these phenomena as interrelated, so that “drought-famine was the bellows that transformed local sparks of anti-foreignism into a vast popular conflagration across North China” (189). Many concluded that foreigners “disrupted the feng shui or geometric balance of nature, thus awakening the Earth Dragon and causing floods and drought” (189). Flooding quickly followed the drought of 1897. Nearly two thousand villages were impacted. Some villagers huddled on dikes above the waters for months while surviving on willow leaves and other foraged scraps. Thousands of displaced villagers died during the winter. Imperial powers in China dismissed pleas for aid that came from Western missionaries as well as their local officials.

The British and Germans reached an agreement in 1898 that “acknowledged British hegemony in the lower Yangzi Valley in return for recognition of a German sphere of influence in the North China Plain” (191). The presence of foreign missionaries grew so much that locals viewed them as an invading force. Simultaneously, imported Indian cotton yarn ruined the craft industry in China’s northern provinces. Thus arose the Spirit Boxers, a popular anti-Christian and anti-Western movement grounded in martial arts and comprised of peasants and laborers. It swept through western Shandong province, where flooding had wrecked agriculture. The movement “combined the attributes of predatory social banditry with the defensive role of traditional village militias […]” (193). When drought arose again in 1899, conditions deteriorated and resistance to Western influence grew. The Qing government was incapable of implementing effective relief, while elites hoarded wealth and resources. Since the Spirit Boxers seized food stores, joining the group was often the only way for impoverished and hungry commoners to get relief. Boxers encouraged violence against foreigners, while Buddhist monks claimed the drought would not abate while Christians “openly defined Chinese traditions” (196). The Boxer Rebellion resulted in the slaughter of missionaries, but the group could not withstand foreign retaliation. German forces, for example, massacred hundreds of people, including children, but they paved the way for future revolutionary efforts.

Millenarian resistance arose in Brazil, where drought returned at the 19th-century’s end. It served as a coping mechanism for those subject to environmental crises in the sertão. The priest Cícero, for example, helped drought victims take refuge in the Araripe Mountains, where there was virgin, fertile soil, supposedly discovered through an Afro-Brazilian woman’s divine vision. Cícero’s actions generated a schism between Afro-Brazilian folk Catholicism and the church hierarchy.

Drought coincided with the bursting of the coffee bubble, leading to dire economic conditions while the state failed to provide relief: “Under the new federalism virtually all relief and public works were concentrated in the south, leaving the sertanejos at the mercy of corrupt and bankrupt state oligarchs” (200). Meanwhile, demographic pressures forced more people into the sertáo, while landed elites controlled and restricted water access. These factors encouraged drought and famine victims to seek refuge with Cícero and in a settlement at Canudos, created by the prophet Antonio Canselheiro. Canselheiro’s movement encouraged social justice and “nonviolent civic and religious disobedience” (201), outraging the authorities and prompting the Bahian police to attempt to assassinate him in 1893. In reaction to the state’s failure to provide aid, Canselheiro established Canudos on an abandoned fazendo (ranch) in the sertáo where there was fertile soil. Thirty-five thousand people soon occupied this second Jerusalem, led by “previously outcast groups” (202). The people of Canudos did not rebel against the Brazilian authorities but sought “peaceful withdrawal into millenarian autonomy” (202). To the authorities, however, the settlement was a threat: It diverted a labor force from elite hands and represented resistance. Bahian forces thus attacked Canudos and, despite strong resistance from its residents, destroyed it by October 1897. Continued drought caused population decline in the sertão.

Millenarianism, anti-colonialism, and environmental crises combined in Korea, the Philippines, and Java as well. In the Philippines, for example, Spanish influence meant that sugar and rice displaced traditional, subsistence agriculture. These export crops caused deforestation and eventual desiccation. Rinderpest ravaged cattle, and when US and Spanish troops arrived at the end of the 1800s, they brought a host of illnesses, including smallpox, which infected the population. The United States weaponized disease and famine to support their imperialist efforts in 1899, closing ports and hindering the movements of desperate climate refugees: “Then, as drought began to turn into famine in 1900, they authorized the systematic destruction of rice stores and livestock in areas that continued to support guerilla resistance” (209). Plantations could no longer afford to feed their workers and had to lay them off. Newly unemployed, these workers could not afford to feed themselves either. A popular uprising appeared, centered on Indigenous shamanism and anti-colonialism. This movement “merged the grievances of unemployed sugar workers and marginalized peasants with those of aboriginal people displaced from the forests by land-hungry haciendas” (210). The revolt lasted for years.

Southern and eastern Africa again suffered drought beginning in 1896, while Europe’s “Scramble for Africa” generated new resistance in response to imperial policies that worsened the environmental disaster. For instance, the Portuguese imposed taxation on drought-stricken peasants in Mozambique, leading to anti-colonial uprisings in which peasants set fire to European estates while “spirit mediums roused the Tawara (Shona), who, in alliance with the Massangano and Barue on the upper Zambesi, seized most of Tet and the northeastern frontier” (216). Rebellion persisted for several years as resistance movements called for the expulsion of colonialists to ease the joint crises of drought, starvation, and disease. The Portuguese and British eventually overcame the Shona rebels as malnutrition and epidemic weakened the movement.

This phase of drought-famine led to long-term economic devastation in Africa and dependance on Western-dominated global trade, effectively turning the continent into the “third world.” Likewise, India was left underdeveloped by these disasters, while caste distinctions solidified, and once British imperialists “commodified property rights […] famine became a powerful opportunity for the accumulation of land and servile labor” (217). Financiers’ success was no longer linked to the maintenance of autonomous peasant labor, as it was prior to British imperialism. These 19th-century catastrophes may have created a “semi-proletariat” in China as rural peoples could no longer support themselves by agriculture exclusively and turned to wage-labor to generate additional income. Communist revolutionaries later responded to these new circumstances.