Since the French invasion of 1853 the indigenous Melanesians of the Pacific island of New Caledonia had been driven off the fertile land on the west coast into reserves in the mountainous interior. He maintains that the droughts that struck across Asia, Africa, South America and the Pacific at the end of the nineteenth century were at best exacerbated by the colonial powers and at worst turned into vehicles of extermination by European governments blinded by the yoked ideologies of neo-Darwinism and free-market capitalism.

When they sent the head of Atai, I wondered who the real headhunters were as Henri Rochefort had once written to me, 'the Versailles government could give the natives lessons in cannibalism'.'Ītai's simple but dramatic demonstration before the French governor and Michel's more conventional colonial narrative both express the central argument of Mike Davis's book.

In her memoirs Michel wrote movingly of the failed rebellion: 'The strength and longing of human hearts was shown once again, but the whites shot down the rebels as we were mowed down in front of Bastion 37 and on the plains of Satory. But Louise Michel, The Red Virgin of Paris, took the Kanak side and even gave half her famous red scarf to two rebel friends. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.It is a grim irony that many of those who fought in the war of extermination against the Kanaks were themselves exiles from the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China and Northeastern Brazil. Examining a series of El Nino-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.

Victorian holocausts