A review by ethanhedman
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis

challenging dark informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.75

I once heard it said "The English Empire was morally on par with the Third Reich" and I never really knew why that might be true. As an American, the Irish Potato Famine is unique in the way it is taught in that it is not understood as it is more broadly across the world - a genocide. What Mike Davis' brilliant book lays out, is that the forced and violent introduction of global, market-based economics on communities all over the world, combined with the ENSO cycle of El-Nino and La-Nina years of extreme drought and extreme flooding, brought destruction, social and economic upheaval, and death to nearly every corner of the world. Davis leaves no room for argument that the famines that the British Empire oversaw in India, China, and Brazil were holocausts, at the very least mitigable by the oversight regimes, and does put them morally on par with Nazi Germany. 
From the introduction, on the reasons why photographs of these genocides were included: 
"In her somberly measured reflections, Reading the Holocaust, Inga Glendinnen ventures this opinion about the slaughter of innocents: "If we grant that 'Holocaust,' the total consumption of offerings by fire, is sinisterly appropriator the murder of those millions who found their only graves in the air, it is equally appropriate for the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden." Without using her capitalization (which implies too complete an equation between the Shoah and other carnages), it is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies towards starving "subjects" were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped at 18,000 feet. The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations not illustrations."
So when people are seen not mourning the death of the queen, or even celebrating it, a proper reaction would perhaps not be to scold that person outright, but to ask "what could a person have done in their life to have people react this way to news of their demise?"