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July 11, 2008
Current Reading
I'm beginning Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Somehow I managed to miss this meaty tome (I guess 'meaty tome' is skating right up to the edge of redundancy) when it made the rounds a few years ago. Only a few dozen pages in it would seem that the basic thesis is that a series of serious natural shocks in the last third of so of the 19th century were compounded tremendously by the erosion of indigenous political, social and economic structures by corrosive policies in then-colonial countries (with a dash of explicitly, deliberately exacerbating measures; "nothing pacifies like the enervation from a little hunger", said the fat man) to create lasting degradation of the financial, economic and (sneaking a peak at a discussion of few pages ahead regarding the desertification of tracts North China) environmental systems of the affected societies, with implications that have lingered long past their colonial era (indeed, into the present). But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
Posted by dag at July 11, 2008 8:58 AM