The Origins of the Third World: Markets, States and Climate

by Mike Davis

Corner House Briefing 27
first published December 2002

Three waves of drought, famine and disease devastated agriculture throughout the tropics and northern China at the end of the nineteenth century. Fifty million people died. Researchers have since attributed these catastrophic climate disasters and crop failures to El Niño. But nature alone is rarely so deadly.

Millions of peasants and farmers in India and China had recently turned to cash-crop cultivation and been incorporated into webs of world trade, making them dramatically more vulnerable to natural disasters such as extreme climate events. Many contemporary policy makers ascribed nineteenth-century famines not just to bad weather but also to Malthusian pressures -- too many people, too little land, too little food -- an explanation which survives today. But absolute scarcity of food was never the issue, and Malthusian explanations in fact contributed to the deaths.

This briefing examines imperial policies at the time and explores the ways in which Europe and North America created India and China as “peripheries” in the world economy. It considers how the decline of irrigation and the enclosure of common resources interacted with household poverty and state policies to create a “Third World” that was so much more vulnerable to monsoon failure.

A revised understanding of these famines illuminates how many of the current challenges of so-called “development” came about, and calls into question the wisdom of development policies still pursued today and the justifications for them.

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