![]() The Third World thus resulted from a conjuncture of natural, political, and socioeconomic processes. The Holocaust took place during WWII, when Hitler and the Nazis were in power and had control over majority of Europe, and lasted until WWII ended in 1945 (Compton’s by Britannica). Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. The famines in turn provided imperialists with an opportunity for further territorial aggrandizement. The term Holocaust refers to the period of time where millions of Jews and others deemed unfit were brutally killed. ![]() Davis teases out the causal linkages among them, painting a new picture of the elements that went into “the making of the Third World.” His thesis is that the late-nineteenth-century globe-spanning droughts in India, China, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia were precipitated by El Niño, but they became massive famines-killing 30 to 50 million people-because of a London-centered international capitalism. Mike Davis examines the relationships among (a) late-nineteenth-century famines in much of what we now call the “Third World,” (b) the climatic effect known as ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation), (c) Western imperialism, and (d) the twentieth-century gap between the wealthiest and poorest countries in the world. ![]() ![]() The dust-jacket blurbs use “stunning,” “eloquent,” “wholly original,” and “first-rate” to describe the author and this work, and the praise is apt. ![]()
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