At the Conjuncture of Nature, Culture, and Politics: Lessons in Political Ecology

This essay revisits the insights of Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts (2002) in light of recent, somewhat binary debates about colonialism or climate being the singular causes of colonial-era famine crises. It highlights Davis’s powerful braiding of these two factors in demonstrating how colonial policy and inaction significantly exacerbated climate-caused subsistence crises into famines and loss of life. It also draws on recent scholarship on the early modern era, particularly state responses to dearth and famine, to complicate the sharp pre-colonial and colonial binary in Davis’s own work. The essay argues that Davis’s magisterial work holds tremendous lessons for us amidst the deepening climate crisis and its impact on food production and security.