New Issue of Global Nineteenth-Century Studies Reflects on Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts

In addition to an essay by Caroline Anjali Ritchie on the Dutt Family Album, a review forum on Jarod Hore's Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped

Settler Colonialism, and reviews of recent publications, issue 4.1 of Global Nineteenth-Century Studies features "Of Deaths, Disease, and Empire: A Forum on Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts." The forum includes an introduction by Sandeep Banerjee (McGill University) as well as an essay by him, "Politics and Aesthetics in the Realm of Hunger," as well as essays by Suvendu Ghatak (University of Florida), "The Political Ecology of Epidemics in the Third World"; Prachi Deshpande (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata), "At the Conjuncture of Nature, Culture, and Politics: Lessons in Political Ecology"; and Subho Basu (McGill University),"On the Birth of the Third World: Notes Towards an Intellectual History."

Why Late Victorian Holocausts and why now? The forum was convened to mark the passing of Davis in 2022 and the 25th anniversary of the book's publication in 2025. As Banerjee writes in his introduction, "this forum extends the insights of Late Victorian Holocausts into the domains of aesthetics, politics, and the environment to showcase it as a generative piece of scholarship as one that remains remarkably relevant in, and for understanding, our contemporary moment."

Banerjee's contribution to the forum, "Politics and Aesthetics in the Realm of Hunger," "considers Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts as a meditation on imperial biopolitics in addition to treating the study as a provocation for thinking about the relationship between colonial history – specifically the history of famines – and the domain of aesthetics. In the first section, the essay reads Davis’s study as a historical supplement to Michel Foucault’s abstract speculations on the relationship of race and racism to imperialism. In so doing, it not only grounds Foucault’s insights into the concrete field of history but also highlights the significance of colonial famines and attendant deaths in the process of imperial subjects. The second section of the essay takes up the category of the ‘aesthetics of hunger’ framed by the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha to examine Bengali ghost stories. It argues for thinking about these stories, replete with agential ghosts, as both a literary registration and a determinate negation, of the experience of hunger and death in colonial Bengal."

Suvendu Ghatak's essay, "The Political Ecology of Epidemics in the Third World,"argues that Late Victorian Holocaust is as important a contribution to medical history as environmental history. It relates Davis’s entanglement of the environmental and epidemiological aftermath of colonialism to transatlantic medical histories, and posits his work as a pioneering study of the disease ecologies of the Indian Ocean region in the wake of its colonization. The essay also distinguishes Davis’s scholarship from what it calls the ‘epidemiological model’ of writing medical histories, an imperial model of understanding diseases that often persists in current scholarship. It notes his theoretical deftness in moving beyond the binaries of nature and history for analyzing colonial epidemics."

In "At the Conjuncture of Nature, Culture, and Politics: Lessons in Political Ecology," Prachi Deshpande "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."

Finally, Subho Basu's "On the Birth of the Third World: Notes Towards an Intellectual History" "revisits Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts to discuss the making of the Third World in relation to famines of late colonial India and the imperial political economy. The essay also discusses issues concerning stadial theories, the project of imperial modernization, and its implications on the colonial as well as the postcolonial worlds of Asia and Latin America to explore the continuing relevance of Mike Davis’s thesis."

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