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The game quantum minigolf is nearly the same as the game minigolf
- except that the ball obeys the laws of quantum mechanics.
Such a ball can be at several places at once. It can diffract around
obstacles and interfere with itself. Apart from that, the rules are
the same: You can play on various tracks involving various obstacles.
You hit the ball with a club and try to kick it into a hole on the
other side of the track.
WWW: http://quantumminigolf.sourceforge.net
|
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"pile_set_name": "Github"
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|
SCORCHED EARTH
Jason and the Scorchers
by Alan Crandall (July 1998)
If you happened to turn on Late Night With Conan O'Brien a few months ago, you might have
seen something very strange.
His musical guests: a long-haired, red-neck-trucker type swayed back and forth while hammering
away at the biggest bass guitar seen since John Entwistle's heyday; a little troll of a man made funny
faces while whomping away on his drum kit; the guitar player, who seemed to have wandered in
from some local heavy-metal bar, was blasting out power chords and fast licks like some kind of
roots-rock Eddie Van Halen, while periodically spinning himself around, the guitar held
perpendicular to his chest by centrifugal force; meanwhile, a skinny, gawky spaz in an outrageous
cowboy suit and hat whirled around the stage, performed awkward/graceful "dance" steps, flailed
his arms like a madman, fanned the guitar player with his jacket, blew a harmonica solo and, while
doing all of the above, howled out a song that could only be descirbed as "country," even if the
band could only be called rock`n'roll.
Even O'Brien seemed a little stunned. Who the fuck were these insane people? Ladies and gents,
Jason and the Scorchers.
In the 1960's, Gram Parson made the fateful re-discovery that country music was at the roots of
rock`n'roll, as surely as blues or r&b. Actually he wasn't the only one The Beatles had covered
Buck Owens, The Stones did Hank Snow (and later, via association with Parsons, would pen their
own rocking country songs). John Fogerty remembered, too - thus "a dinosaur Victoria/listening to
Buck Owens" in "Lookin' Out My Back Door," and later the whole Blue Ridge Rangers album, a
classic. Parsons also reminded The Byrds of their country roots, thus sparking the Sweetheart of
the Rodeo album. But by and large, and largely due to the growing rigidity of popular radio, which
relegated country, rock, black music, and everything else, to their own little air slots (and if you
want to know what killed good music after the '60's, there's one of the main culprits right there),
country music and rock`n'roll, by the late '60's, were becoming two separate entities.
Another reason for this is guilt by association - by the late '60's, rock music had become the sound
of the counterculture; it symbolized everything it's audience believed in: an end to the war in
Vietnam, free love, smoking dope, and all things countercultural. Country music had come to
symbolize everything establishment - a listen to Merle Haggard's infamous "Okie From Muskogee"
or "The Fightin' Side Of Me" is instructive. The fact that Haggard meant "Okie" as something from
a joke had no bearing on the fact that most listeners took him at face value, and loved, or hated
him, for it.
Today, it's even more true. Leaving aside record freaks and music-lovers like myself, the rock
audience is unremittingly hostile to country music - I once had an avowed Eagles and Grateful Dead
fan practically foaming at the mouth for mentioning that both of the aforementioned are heavily
influenced by country music a fact only the clueless or ignorant could possibly fail to perceive.
Try pointing out to a Stones fan that "Honky Tonk Woman" is, in fact, a country song go ahead,
try it!
By the '80's, this kind of thinking was pretty firmly entrenched. Meanwhile, country music was
undergoing a re-shaping, thanks to Urban Cowboy and other absurdities. The music, at least it's
most visible end, was continuing it's trend away from traditional sounds to a more pop-rock
orientation. What passed for country on the Billboard charts was mostly closer to The Eagles or
even Billy Joel; "lite" rock with a little bit of "twang" for flavoring. The old-timers, and those who
stuck to their guns, started to get the cold shoulder; by 1983, Johnny Cash found himself
unceremoniously dumped from Columbia, his label of the past thirty years.
Such was the state when a young band began to tear up Nashville's tiny punk/underground scene.
Jason Ringenberg, hog-farmer from Illinois, had his eclectic taste - a love for classic country
music in all it's forms, combined with a passion for rockabilly, classic 60's rock`n'roll, and the sheer
power and drive of punk rock, found some like-minded mental cases - with Warner Hodges on guitar,
Perry Baggs on drums, and Jeff Johnson on bass, he put it all together into something that was
genuinely new; a band that played pure country music, except they played it like The Ramones.
The term "country-rock" conjures up a mellow, pleasant, front-porch kind of sound The
Grateful Dead, The Eagles, Linda Rondstadt this is not how Jason and the Scorchers sounded.
Warner Hodges had grown up with country music (his parents were professional musicians, and
had even provided back-up for several big names, including Johnny Cash); but in his teens, he got
turned on by Jimi Hendrix, and AC/DC. So, while quite capable of picking out pure Luther Perkins
licks (which he did, when he wanted to), he cranked his guitar up all the way and let rip, cramming
the songs with power chords and pure white-noise/blues guitar licks ala Angus Young. There was
nothing fancy about the rhythm section: Baggs and Johnson just whomped the sucker as hard as
they could. As for Jason, he whooped, hollered, yelped and howled, using all the tricks he'd
learned off of rockabilly records to make the most of his limited but powerful voice, all delivered in
an unmistakable southern drawl`n'twang. They sounded like one of Dave Dudley's big-rigs
barrelling down the highway at 200 mph. There was nothing genteel or reverent about them this
was hard, fast, LOUD music. The music, and their wild stage show, were designed to whip an
audience into a frenzy. They did.
And, it was real country music. Not the watered-down adult contemporary of then (and
still)-current Nashville. Jason had an innate understanding of the tradition of country music
songwriting: cheating, drinking, love lost and found, commitment, sin and salvation, old-fashioned
values, a sense of history and sometimes, a sense of the macabre. Lines like "I tried to fight through
that emptiness/I feel every time you undress" ("Broken Whiskey Glass") come straight from George
Jones territory. "Shot Down Again" started off as almost a parody: Jason's girl just can't stop
cheating on him, and worse than that, he can't get any; "when I tried to kiss her/Jerry Falwell shot
tear gas in my eyes," but then takes a sudden dark turn into the Rubber Room ("Well I went to love
my little girl/She had a golden wedding band/I walked these midnight streets alone/Bloodstains on
my hands "). "If You've Got The Love (I've Got the Time)" was trash-county so accurate, most
thought it was a cover. Of course, they did play covers; country chestnuts by Hank Williams, Faron
Young, and Jimmie Rodgers, rockabilly from Carl Perkins, rock`n'roll from The Rolling Stones.
In the '90's, there's a host of bands who play a hard rock/country hybrid, in 1981, there was no
one. Jason and the Scorchers were something genuinely new and different (although the country
sound would take hold on the West Coast around the same time, thanks to The Blasters, X, Rank
and File, and later, The Beat Farmers and Long Ryders). In Nashville, The Scorchers were quickly
popular, and controversial. Nashville didn't take kindly to having their chestnuts smashed by this
bunch of lunatics, but, based on a plethora of Nashville news broadcasts that circulate on video, the
general reaction seems to have been one of bemusement.
They gained momentum fast. A week after their first gig (January 1982), they laid down Reckless
Country Soul in a three-hour session. The disc (long-impossible to find, but now reissued with
outtakes by Mammoth) captured their sound brilliantly. Within a year, they had a major-label deal
with EMI. They shared stages with R.E.M. (with Michael Stipe appearing on their next EP), The Replacements, and legends like Carl Perkins. The
Fervor EP followed in `84. If anything, they were even more overpowering, leaving behind the
spare, rootsy sound of Reckless Country Soul in favor of a full-throttle roar. "Help! There's A
Fire" from Reckless was here transformed from a country blues to a rockabilly romp with Buddy
Holly-esque vocals from Jason. "I Can't Help Myself," their latest country massacre, went from a
frantic buildup to a full firestorm, while "Pray For Me Mama (I'm A Gypsy Now)" (another remake
from Reckless), and "Harvest Moon" offered further proof of Jason's gift for country songwriting.
Best of all was "Both Sides of the Line," a Yardbirds-like rave-up filled with ominous apocalyptic
imagery ("But if the mountains fall down and the seas around/Could crumble in my midst/I'd trade it
all for a midnight call/And just one holy kiss"). A roaring cover of Dylan's "Absolutely Sweet
Marie" became a critic's fave.
Soon they were assured Next Big Thing status, and EMI started giving them The Push. Lost and
Found, their first full-length LP, wasn't quite the breakthrough for them it seemed a little low on
first-rate new material. Still the onstage fave "White Lies," the great hillbilly stomp called "Blanket
Of Sorrow," terrific covers of "Lost Highway" and "I Really Don't Want To Know" (done as a
mean blues-rocker), a definitive "Broken Whiskey Glass" (another remake from Reckless) and the
lovely "Far Behind" were nothing to be ashamed of.
I saw them that summer at the packed Keystone in Palo Alto, CA. Onstage, they were incendiary.
I have never seen a band so determined to put an audience on their knees. Loud, frantic, thrashing
about the stage like crazy men. Jason, who looked like Hector Heathcoat in a suit that would
embarrassed Nudie, leaned into a young woman's face, close enough to have kissed her instead
he let out with a mighty cowboy yell, then flung himself off the stage, into the audience, and
somehow ended up running across tables (those that weren't already occupied by dancing fans)
while blasting away on his harp. In good cowboy style, he never once lost his hat, either. To this
day, it remains one of the three or four most exciting live rock`n'roll shows I've ever seen.
If I may digress for a moment: If there's one thing the rock audience, and rock performers, have
forgotten, it's how to be crazy onstage. I remember a friend grimacing at the sight of Joe "King"
Carrasco on Saturday Night Live, prancing around in his underwear with a crown on his head
("That guy's an idiot!"). We all know Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd would never stoop to such
silliness.
In the beginning, rock`n'roll musicians were all crazy. Elvis shook and gyrated and generally
shocked (and excited) middle America. Little Richard pounded his piano, played with his feet,
howled like a madman and got away with being as fruity as you possibly could in the mid-50's;
Chuck Berry duck-walked and shook all over a stage, while Screamin' Jay Hawkins popped out of
a coffin; and Jerry Lee Lewis well he did all of these and more. In the 60's, there were still
some who remembered: James Brown, Mick Jagger, The Who, Hendrix, Iggy. But more and
more, we got the Eric Clapton syndrome - the rock musician as Serious Artist - back to the
audience, in commune with his instrument, pulling genius out of some deep inner part of himself. It's
remained a model ever since. End of digression.
For the next couple years, they toured hard and played the game while EMI publicity beat the
bushes. However, EMI wasn't getting the hit they wanted. Still Standing, their `86 followup,
solidified their strengths they were, if anything, better than ever. Great songs like the "Tumblin'
Dice" knockoff "Golden Ball and Chain" (The Stones are also done tribute here by a cover of "19th
Nervous Breakdown"), the furious blues rock of "Shotgun Blues," and the country boogie "My
Heart Still Stands With You" were the highlights. It was on that tour that I saw them for the second
(and so far, last) time. It was at a place called One Step Beyond, a cavernous club that actually
booked a surprisingly hip lineup of acts in the mid-'80's. That time, they played to perhaps 20
people, perhaps 12. I remember standing right up in front, turning around and noticing that the
crowd of us gathered around the stage constituted everyone in the club. The show was less frantic
than the first time, but they still came out full-throttle, taking requests ("Polk Salad Annie" - Tony
Joe White's swamp-rock hit, also one of their B-sides) and surprises: Bobby Womack's "It's All
Over Now," a final, gentle "Amazing Grace," and best of all, a murderous assault on "Country
Roads Take Me Home," taken at 11 on the volume and 90 mph - hilarious, and rockin'!
As the above may indicate, Still Standing didn't sell. EMI dumped them, and for a time they
seemed to vanish from the face of the earth.
They broke the silence in 1989, when Thunder and Fire suddenly appeared. Y'know what it's like
when you buy an album you can't wait to hear, get it home and feel disappointed, try and try to like
and then realize it's just not that hot? It started off good even though "When The Angels Cry" is
clearly aimed straight at AOR, pure MTV arena-rock, it's so impassioned that they get away with
it. Despite some highlights (a typically Scorcherized cover of Phil Ochs' "My Kingdom For A Car,"
"Bible And A Gun" co-written with Steve Earle, and Perry's blues-rock workout "Six Feet
Underground"), most of Thunder sounded generic and rather ordinary. Plain and simple, Jason and
company hadn't come up with enough interesting songs. In the meantime, the band had switched
labels (to A&M), lost Jeff Johnson and added a second guitar player.
And that was it. Except for a showcase gig in Los Angeles, there doesn't seem to have been much
of a tour. The band broke up, blaming lack of success and personal problems (read: drugs, booze,
not getting along).
Now if you'll excuse a little personal digression. As the years passed, I sort of filed Jason and the
Scorchers away. Occasionally I'd dig the albums out and groove on them again, and regret that
they hadn't stuck it out. Jason (now having dropped his last name) put out a solo album in 1992,
One Foot in the Honky Tonk. It flopped too. Not surprisingly, because it was very much a
schizophrenic thing, mixing Scorchers-esque rockers that would have come across a lot stronger
with a band that really knew how to play them ("Hard Luck Boy"), a handful of hard country gems
("One Foot in the Honky Tonk," "I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water") and a batch of pleasant
pop-country numbers that were brilliant compared to Garth Brooks or Alan Jackson, but pretty
thin compared to the glories of his past.
One night in 1995, I was driving a friend back from an evening's drinking, and had a Scorchers
tape in the car. So I put it on. He'd never heard of them, but liked them immediately. Then, just a
week or two later, he shows up with a copy of Rolling Stone: "Hey, check it out: Jason and the
Scorchers have a new album!" And there it was. Not a compilation, not a posthumous live
album . an actual brand-new Jason and the Scorchers album!
Jeff Johnson had apparently cajoled the band members back together for an anniversary show in
Nashville. During rehearsals and the fated gig, they'd realized they had something, and decided to
give it another whirl.
A Blazing Grace was a better album than one could have hoped for. Not perfect their cover of
George Jones' "Why Baby Why" rips, but there's a stiffness there that wasn't around in the early
days. But "Cry By Night Operator," "200 Proof Lovin'" and, finally preserved for all time, "Country
Roads Take Me Home" are prime Scorchers. The other tracks were all good if not brilliant.
Still, The Scorchers kept a low profile, touring only in their good towns; the South, Midwest, and
Europe (American roots music seems to always do well in Europe). Their next opus, Clear
Impetuous Morning, appeared without much fanfare a couple years later. It starts off great with
"Self-Sabotage," a major Scorchers classic, then gets weird with "Cappuccino Rosie," picks up for
a great take on Gram Parsons' "Drugstore Truck Drivin' Man" (about time, guys), moves into
country territory with "Going Nowhere" (good, not great), and then falls apart in a mishmash of "the
anonymous hard-rock/heavy-metal guitar sound that defined AOR radio in the '80s" (thanks,
All-Music Guide) which is not only uninteresting, but dated in the worst possible way.
Apparently, Jason and the Scorchers' idea of a mainstream rock song is about ten years out of date,
or more. They finally save face with "Jeremy's Glory," a Civil War epic, but it's a little late. In
interviews at the time, Jason went on about how they busted their nuts to make the best album they
could, but overall it's their least interesting release.
Which brings us to Midnight Roads and Stages Seen, a live album celebrating their history, and a
clear bid for Bigger Time. Live albums are rarely among an artist's finest work (to be sure, there are
exceptions). They're basically gifts to the fans (and as such, highly appreciated), a way to mark
time, and sometimes a way to close off a phase of one's career. One reason you don't hear many
raves from critics about live albums is, quite frankly, they're not very interesting to write or talk
about. Live remakes of old songs; generally a pretty safe selection, usually a surprise or two thrown
in for good measure and to help attract sales.
This one pretty much plays the game, too. The "hits" and crowd-pleasers are here, there's a new
song ("This Town Isn't Keeping You Down," good but not great), and a surprise Warner
Hodges' parents join them for a rockin' "Walkin' the Dog" (Warner's mom coulda been a
contender she's got a great rockabilly-type voice -- and in fact has an album of her own in the
hopper). Jason and the Scorchers are a great live band, but they need to be seen for full
appreciation. That being said, there are moments here that easily live up to their rep:
"Self-Sabotage" starts things off with a bang; "Absolutely Sweet Marie" improves on the
poor-sounding live B-side version from `85; "Golden Ball and Chain" and "Both Sides of the Line"
get estimable workouts, and "Harvest Moon" is an absolute motherfucker; the band swings into the
last verse as hard as they can. It's the kind of thing that's hard to put into words you know it
when you hear it.
Midnight Roads has led to their most aggressive attempt at winning over the public since Lost and
Found. They're touring extensively (though still not on the West Coast, where they haven't played
in close to ten years) and played their first New York gig in many years this past April. They've
made a major television appearance and are scheduled, as of this writing, to appear on The
Nashville Network in July. They seem to be grabbing for the brass ring again.
The question that seems to come up again and again, with Jason and the Scorchers and countless
others (The Replacements, Richard Thompson) is why haven't they made it? If they're so damn
good, how come they're not selling 50 million albums?
It's a stupid question, really. Especially in an e-zine that's focused on
underground/obscure/cult/otherwise left-of-center music and musicians; especially when it's
possible for artists with such limited commercial potential as Tom Waits or Frank Zappa to build up
large and hungry cult followings without ever having a Top 40 hit or going into heavy rotation on
MTV - hell, even the no-hit Paul Westerberg rapidly sells out every time he performs in my town;
and Elvis Costello (also missing any Top 40 winners) fills stadiums; especially when any time one of
these beloved cult artists does manage to break into the mainstream, they're immediately rejected
by a big chunk of their following for "selling out" (and witness the fate of poor Soul Asylum, who
lost their hip underground constituency by landing "Runaway Train" on the Hit Parade, then threw
off their new fans with a pair of half-hearted, desultory followup albums, leaving them now banished
to limbo wherever bands go when they're neither hip, respected, or popular).
But leaving aside all the facets of that discussion, in Jason and the Scorcher's case, it does matter.
Because "making it" has been their intent from Day One. And while countless followers --- The
Supersuckers, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, The Bottle Rockets, and, rarely mentioned but still true, Social
Distortion (contemporaries of The Scorchers, but don't tell me their rocked-up covers of "Ring Of
Fire" and "Makin' Believe" aren't pages from The Scorchers' songbook) have managed to carve a
nice niche for themselves, Jason and the Scorchers seem relegated forever to "oh yeah, them"
status. Jason and the Scorchers always meant to be the Next Big Thing.
Could be a lot of reasons, I suppose. In one sense, they're probably their own worst enemies: the
uninspired riff-rockers that fill up most of Clear Impetuous Morning aren't likely to sway many
alt.country fans. Their demented stage show gets them laughed at in this day of "serious" musicians
(Ha! See more on this above). One look at Jason's nutty cowpoke duds on The Essential Jason
and the Scorchers caused one of my alt.country-loving pals to write them off forever.
Still, I hope it works for them, mainly for purely selfish reasons. I love `em despite their recent
failings, they're still one of my favorite bands, and I want them to go on being Jason and the
Scorchers, and making music, and hopefully, one day, fulfilling the potential of their early releases. I
can't imagine them ever actually cracking the Top 40, but then again stranger things have happened.
If not, I hope they're determined enough to keep going. Keep rolling on, Scorchers and
dammit isn't it time you played the Bay Area again?
DISCOGRAPHY
Reckless Country Soul (Praxis, 1982) has been reissued on Mammoth and is essential. Fervor
and Lost and Found have been reissued by EMI as The Essential Jason and the Scorchers,
Vol. 1 and also as Both Sides Of the Line, though I've heard both of these are now out of print.
Still Standing was intended for The Essential Jason and the Scorchers Vol. 2, which never
appeared. Otherwise, it's out of print. So, to the best of my knowledge, is Thunder and Fire.
A Blazing Grace, Clear Impetuous Morning and Midnight Roads and Stages Seen are all
available from Mammoth. So is a live video for Midnight Roads that includes material not found on
the album.
There are a large number of rarities, including great versions of Neil Young's "Are You Ready For
the Country, " "Honky Tonk Blues, " "Polk Salad Annie," "Route 66" and an amazing take on the
old Kenny Rogers atrocity "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town." Hopefully they'll collect all of
these one day.
Jason's 1992 solo album, One Foot in the Honky Tonk is also out of print.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
|
/**
* @license
* Copyright (c) 2018 The Polymer Project Authors. All rights reserved.
* This code may only be used under the BSD style license found at
* http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt
* The complete set of authors may be found at
* http://polymer.github.io/AUTHORS.txt
* The complete set of contributors may be found at
* http://polymer.github.io/CONTRIBUTORS.txt
* Code distributed by Google as part of the polymer project is also
* subject to an additional IP rights grant found at
* http://polymer.github.io/PATENTS.txt
*/
import generate from 'babel-generator';
import * as babel from 'babel-types';
import {ResolvedUrl} from 'polymer-analyzer';
import {assertIsJsDocument, getAnalysisDocument} from './analyzer-utils';
import {AssignedBundle, BundleManifest} from './bundle-manifest';
import {Bundler} from './bundler';
import {BundledJsDocument} from './document-collection';
import {getModuleExportNames, getOrSetBundleModuleExportName} from './es6-module-utils';
import {Es6Rewriter} from './es6-rewriter';
import {ensureLeadingDot, stripUrlFileSearchAndHash} from './url-utils';
/**
* Produces an ES6 Module BundledDocument.
*/
export async function bundle(
bundler: Bundler, manifest: BundleManifest, url: ResolvedUrl):
Promise<BundledJsDocument> {
const bundle = manifest.bundles.get(url);
if (!bundle) {
throw new Error(`No bundle found in manifest for url ${url}.`);
}
const assignedBundle = {url, bundle};
const generatedCode =
await prepareBundleModule(bundler, manifest, assignedBundle);
const es6Rewriter = new Es6Rewriter(bundler, manifest, assignedBundle);
const {code: rolledUpCode} = await es6Rewriter.rollup(url, generatedCode);
const document = assertIsJsDocument(
await bundler.analyzeContents(assignedBundle.url, rolledUpCode));
return {
language: 'js',
ast: document.parsedDocument.ast,
content: document.parsedDocument.contents,
files: [...assignedBundle.bundle.files]
};
}
/**
* Generate code containing import statements to all bundled modules and
* export statements to re-export their namespaces and exports.
*
* Example: a bundle containing files `module-a.js` and `module-b.js` would
* result in a prepareBundleModule result like:
*
* import * as $moduleA from './module-a.js';
* import * as $moduleB from './module-b.js';
* import $moduleBDefault from './module-b.js';
* export {thing1, thing2} from './module-a.js';
* export {thing3} from './module-b.js';
* export {$moduleA, $moduleB, $moduleBDefault};
*/
async function prepareBundleModule(
bundler: Bundler, manifest: BundleManifest, assignedBundle: AssignedBundle):
Promise<string> {
const bundleSource = babel.program([]);
const sourceAnalysis =
await bundler.analyzer.analyze([...assignedBundle.bundle.files]);
for (const resolvedSourceUrl of [...assignedBundle.bundle.files].sort()) {
const moduleDocument =
getAnalysisDocument(sourceAnalysis, resolvedSourceUrl);
const moduleExports = getModuleExportNames(moduleDocument);
const starExportName =
getOrSetBundleModuleExportName(assignedBundle, resolvedSourceUrl, '*');
bundleSource.body.push(babel.importDeclaration(
[babel.importNamespaceSpecifier(babel.identifier(starExportName))],
babel.stringLiteral(resolvedSourceUrl)));
if (moduleExports.size > 0) {
bundleSource.body.push(babel.exportNamedDeclaration(
undefined, [babel.exportSpecifier(
babel.identifier(starExportName),
babel.identifier(starExportName))]));
bundleSource.body.push(babel.exportNamedDeclaration(
undefined,
[...moduleExports].map(
(e) => babel.exportSpecifier(
babel.identifier(e),
babel.identifier(getOrSetBundleModuleExportName(
assignedBundle, resolvedSourceUrl, e)))),
babel.stringLiteral(resolvedSourceUrl)));
}
}
const {code} = generate(bundleSource);
return code;
}
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Github"
}
|
Q:
Fody, propertychanged and setting same value?
Is there any way to configure fody to not check the value which is set to property - I have situations when value is the same and I want property to be set because I have additional logic in property setter that is not invoked.
A:
This is clearly literally years after the original question but for future reference:
This is indeed possible by modifying the options in the FodyWeavers.xml file.
As is shown on the PropertyChanged.Fody wiki, one of the options is called CheckForEquality and can be set to false (it defaults to true). This will prevent Fody from injecting equality checking code. The FodyWeavers.xml file could now look as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Weavers>
<PropertyChanged CheckForEquality='false'/>
</Weavers>
As noted in the comments there is also the possibility to do this per property via the DoNotCheckEquality attribute e.g.
[ImplementPropertyChanged]
public class Person
{
[DoNotCheckEquality]
public string Name { get; set; }
}
See wiki/Attributes
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
Traumatic lesions of the salivary glands.
Injuries to the region of the major salivary glands, especially the parotid, may have important sequelae and require insight and persistence to manage. This is an area in which microsurgery comes into its own, especially for repair of the duct or nerve. In cases of severe injury or complications, the removal of the involved gland is always an option.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
}
|
Do you believe in magic? The impact of "Magic" Johnson on adolescents' AIDS knowledge and attitudes.
A group of young people ages 10 to 18, interviewed after basketball star Earvin "Magic" Johnson announced that he had tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), were asked for their reactions to the news. Their knowledge of and attitudes regarding AIDS were also compared to those of similar young people interviewed before the announcement. Reactions to the announcement were varied and were accompanied by only isolated changes in knowledge and attitudes, suggesting that news of this celebrity's HIV infection served primarily to reinforce or make temporarily more salient knowledge and attitudes that predated the announcement.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
}
|
Cyrtodactylus caovansungi
Cyrtodactylus caovansungi is a species of gecko that is endemic to southern Vietnam.
References
Category:Cyrtodactylus
Category:Reptiles of Vietnam
Category:Reptiles described in 2007
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Wikipedia (en)"
}
|
5 Advantages of Blockchain to Enterprises Past Digital currency
Caught wind of Bitcoins and cryptographic money of late? You most likely have, on account of all the buzz encompassing Bitcoinβs record-breaking misuses.
Itβs relatively strange to surmise that, in 2011, Bitcoins exchanged for $1 each. As of late one Bitcoin was justified regardless of an incredible $16,000. As a business visionary, you may not be keen on obtaining Bitcoins or some other cryptographic money as a type of venture. Yet, you need to value the fundamental innovation that makes Bitcoin conceivable β the blockchain.
In laymanβs terms, the blockchain is a virtual, open record that records everything in a safe and straightforward way. Not at all like banks that encourage exchanges with customary monetary standards, the blockchain permits the free cryptocurreny exchange through a decentralized situation. Every one of the information is then held in an interlinked system of PCs, claimed and keep running by none other than the clients themselves.
Certainly, the interest for Bitcoin is huge right now. The advantages of blockchain, be that as it may, are more than sufficiently enormous to support its significance for ages to come. Right away, here are the most vital advantages of blockchain that may turn out to be helpful to organizations in various businesses:
Store Network Administration (Supply Chain Management)
For store network administration, the blockchain innovation offers the advantages of traceability and cost-adequacy. Put just, a blockchain can be utilized to track the development of products, their starting point, amount et cetera. This achieves another level of straightforwardness to B2B biological systems β disentangling procedures, for example, proprietorship exchange, creation process confirmation and installments.
Quality Affirmation
On the off chance that an abnormality is identified some place along the production network, a blockchain framework can lead all of you the path to its purpose of source. This makes it less demanding for organizations to complete examinations and execute the vital activities.
An utilization case for this is in the nourishment area, where following the start, group data and other vital points of interest is critical for quality confirmation and wellbeing.
Bookkeeping
Recording exchanges through blockchain for all intents and purposes takes out human mistake and shields the information from conceivable altering. Remember that records are checked each and every time they are passed on starting with one blockchain hub then onto the next. Notwithstanding the ensured precision of your records, such a procedure will likewise leave a very traceable review trail.
Obviously, the whole bookkeeping process additionally turns out to be more proficient on a foundational level. As opposed to keeping up partitioned records, organizations can just keep a solitary, joint enlist. The honesty of an organizationβs monetary data is additionally ensured.
Voting
Much the same as in production network administration, the guarantee of blockchains in the part of voting all comes down to trust. As of now, openings that relate to government races are being sought after. One case is the activity of the legislature of Moscow to test the viability of blockchains in neighborhood races. Doing as such will fundamentally lessen the probability of constituent misrepresentation, which is an enormous issue in spite of the predominance of electronic voting frameworks.
Stock Trade
The thought of utilizing blockchain innovation for securities and wares exchanging has been around for some time. Given the open-yet-solid nature of blockchain frameworks, it isnβt shocking to hear that stock trades now consider it as the following enormous jump forward.
Truth be told, Australiaβs stock trade is as of now never going to budge on changing to a blockchain-fueled framework for their tasks, which is planned by the blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings. In an official statement distributed in December 2017, Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset, stated, βafter so much buildup encompassing conveyed record innovation, the present declaration conveys the primary important evidence that the innovation can satisfy its potential.β
Startups generally celebrate every small reason, But if the reason is about a milestone achievement then it makes a big difference. This victorious path is not an easier one and we have faced and surpassed many challenges in the last few months to meet our target of half a million visitors. While our ambition is a much bigger number, the target we achieved was planned towards the end of the financial year and our team made it possible 4 months in advance.
Indeed a great effort by Shishir Kumar and the entire team and a special thanks to the avid readers of IndianCEO for following us. IndianCEO is indeed my first bet in to media business and believe me this is just the beginning. Early next year we have some great product announcements and our next milestone is not far away.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
|
---
abstract: 'We present an exactly solvable spin-orbital model based on the Gamma-matrix generalization of a Kitaev-type Hamiltonian. In the presence of small magnetic fields, the model exhibits a critical phase with a spectrum characterized by topologically protected Fermi points. Upon increasing the magnetic field, Fermi points carrying opposite topological charges move toward each other and annihilate at a critical field, signaling a phase transition into a gapped phase with trivial topology in three dimensions. On the other hand, by subjecting the system to a staggered magnetic field, an effective time-reversal symmetry essential to the existence of three-dimensional topological insulators is restored in the auxiliary free fermion problem. The nontrivial topology of the gapped ground state is characterized by an integer winding number and manifests itself through the appearance of gapless Majorana fermions confined to the two-dimensional surface of a finite system.'
author:
- 'Gia-Wei Chern'
title: 'Three-dimensional topological phases in a layered honeycomb spin-orbital model'
---
Introduction
============
Topological phases of matter are one of the most remarkable discoveries in modern condensed-matter physics. [@tknn; @avron83; @kohmoto85; @wen90; @volovik] Instead of a local order parameter describing broken symmetries of the system, this novel state of matter is characterized by a topological invariant which is insensitive to small adiabatic deformations of the Hamiltonian. A classic example is the integer quantum Hall (IQH) effect, where the quantized Hall conductance corresponds to a topological invariant called the first Chern number or the TKNN integer. [@tknn] Another distinctive property of IQH states is the appearance of zero-energy modes at the sample edge, despite the fact that all bulk excitations are fully gapped. Due to their topological nature, these conducting edge modes persist even in the presence of disorders. Recently, theoretical investigations have shown that similar topological insulators can be generalized to time-reversal invariant systems (quantum spin-Hall effect) [@kane05; @bernevig06; @moore07; @roy09a] and to three dimensions. [@fu07a; @fu07b; @roy09b] Signatures of topological insulators such as quantized conductance and protected surface Dirac cone have been reported experimentally in semiconducting alloys and quantum wells. [@konig07; @hsieh08; @xia09; @roushan09; @chen09] Following these developments, systematic classifications of topological insulators have also been proposed. [@schnyder08; @kitaev09; @qi08]
Although most discussions of topological insulators are in the context of tight-binding fermionic models or mean-field superconductors, it has been shown that topological insulators can also emerge from strongly correlated electronic systems. [@jackeli09; @shitade09; @raghu08; @sun09; @zhang09] An exactly solvable example is Kitaevβs anisotropic spin-1/2 model on the two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. [@kitaev06] As shown in his seminal paper, the spin model can be reduced to a problem of free Majorana fermions coupled to a static $Z_2$ gauge field. The ground state of the Kitaev model has two distinct phases. The gapped Abelian phase is equivalent to the toric code model [@kitaev03] whose excitations are Abelian anyons. Relevant to our discussion is the non-Abelian B phase in the presence of a magnetic field. This phase is characterized by an integer winding number $\nu = \pm 1$. Similar to IQH insulators, the non-Abelian phase also supports gapless chiral edge modes (whose chirality depends on the sign of magnetic fields) except that the edge modes here are real Majorana fermions, as contrasted to complex fermions in the case of IQH states.
There has been much effort to generalize Kitaev model to other trivalent lattices [@yang07; @yao07] and to three-dimensions. [@si07; @si08; @mandal09] Probably the most notable example is the discovery of a chiral spin liquid as the ground state of Kitaev model on a decorated-honeycomb lattice. [@yao07] On the other hand, despite being exactly solvable, we find that most gapped phases of 3D Kitaev model is topologically trivial. [@chern09] The fact that the model can only be defined on lattices with coordination number 3 significantly constrains the possible Majorana hopping Hamiltonian. Recently, noting that the exact solvability of Kitaev model relies on the fact that the three spin-1/2 Pauli matrices realize the simplest (dimension-2) Clifford algebra, the so-called $\Gamma$-matrix generalization of the Kitaev model offers richer possibilities of engineering exactly solvable models with unusual phases in both 2D and 3D. [@levin03; @hamma05; @yao09; @wu09; @ryu09; @nussinov09] Physically, models based on, e.g. dimension-4 $\Gamma$ matrices can be interpreted as spin-$\frac{3}{2}$ models, spin-$\frac{1}{2}\frac{1}{2}$ models, or spin-orbital models.
Based on the above $\Gamma$-matrix generalization of Kitaev model, emergent topological insulators have been demonstrated on a 3D diamond lattice with coordination number 4. [@wu09; @ryu09] To construct a Kitaev-type model on such a lattice, one needs four mutually anticommuting operators for the four nearest-neighbor links. This can be easily realized using the dimension-4 $\Gamma$-matrix representation of the Clifford algebra. By exploiting the redundancy of representing two such sets of bosonic operators in terms of 6 Majorana fermions, the diamond-lattice model enjoys an effective time-reversal symmetry (TRS) which is essential to the existence of topological insulators in 3D. [@schnyder08] With only nearest-neighbor interactions, the diamond-lattice model reduces to a problem of two identical copies of free Majorana fermions sharing the same $Z_2$ gauge field. The permutation symmetry between the two fermion species thus manifests as a TRS. In the weak-pairing regime of the model, hybridization of the two Majorana species results in a gapped ground state with nontrivial topology.
A natural question to ask is whether it is possible to realize the required TRS in a Kitaev-type model via generic physical mechanisms. In this paper, we provide such an example through a natural generalization of the honeycomb Kitaev model. Using a similar $\Gamma$-matrix formalism, we study a Kugel-Khomskii-type [@kk] spin-orbital Hamiltonian on a layered honeycomb lattice whose coordination number is 5. We further consider perturbations due to a weak magnetic field and single-ion spin-orbit interaction. In the weak-pairing regime of our model, the ground state remains gapless up to a critical field strength. The Fermi points of this critical phase are characterized by a nonzero topological invariant, hence are stable against weak perturbations. As the field strength is increased, Fermi points with opposite winding numbers eventually annihilate with each other and the spectrum acquires a gap above a critical field. Since the TRS is explicitly broken in the presence of a uniform magnetic field, the gapped phase represents a multilayer generalization of the 2D Kitaev model, and is topologically trivial in three dimensions.
On the other hand, when the sign of magnetic field alternates between successive honeycomb planes, an effective TRS is restored in the auxiliary fermionic model, and the corresponding ground state in the weak-pairing phase is equivalent to a topological superconductor belonging to symmetry class DIII in Altland-Zirnbauerβs classification. [@az] We also show that the quantum ground state is characterized by an integer winding number, consistent with the general classification of 3D topological insulators.[@schnyder08] A physical consequence of the nontrivial ground-state topology is the appearance of surface Majorana fermions which remain gapless against perturbations respecting the discrete symmetries of the Hamiltonian. The specific multilayer geometry of our model also allows us to analytically demonstrate the existence of surface Majorana fermions obeying a Dirac-like Hamiltonian by relating the surface modes to the chiral edge modes of 2D Kitaev model.
The spin-orbital model
======================
\[t\] ![\[fig:honeycomb\] A layered honeycomb lattice. The five distinct nearest-neighbor links are indicated by the corresponding exchange constant. The open and filled circles denote sites belonging to the two inequivalent sites of a unit cell. The primitive vectors of the underlying Bravais lattice are $\mathbf a_1
= (1,0,0)$, $\mathbf a_2 = (\frac{1}{2},\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2},0)$, and $\mathbf a_3 = (0,0,1)$. An arrow from site $j$ to site $k$ means the corresponding link variable $u_{jk} = +1$.](honeycomb "fig:"){width="0.8\columnwidth"}
We study a Kugel-Khomskii-type[@kk] spin-orbital model defined on a layered honeycomb lattice shown in Fig.Β \[fig:honeycomb\]. In addition to a spin-1/2 degree of freedom, each lattice site has an extra doublet orbital degeneracy. The spin and orbital (pseudospin) operators are denoted by Pauli matrices $\sigma^\alpha$ and $\tau^\alpha$ ($\alpha = x, y, z$), respectively. As in the original honeycomb Kitaev model, nearest-neighbor links lying on a honeycomb plane are divided into three types: $x$, $y$, and $z$, depending on their orientations. The model Hamiltonian is defined as follows: $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:h}
\mathcal{H}_0 &=& -\sum_{j}\!^{\,'} \, J_{\parallel}
\bigl(\tau^x_{j}\tau^x_{j + z} +
\tau^y_{j}\tau^y_{j - z}\bigr) \nonumber \\
& & -\frac{1}{2} \sum_{j}\sum_{\alpha=x,y,z} J_\alpha\,
\tau^z_{j}\tau^z_{j+ \bm\delta_\alpha}
\,\sigma^\alpha_{j}\sigma^\alpha_{j + \bm\delta_\alpha}.\end{aligned}$$ Here $j$ runs over the lattice sites, $j\pm z$ denote nearest neighbors along the two vertical links, and $j + \bm\delta_\alpha$ denotes in-plane nearest neighbor along the link of type $\alpha$. The prime in the first term indicates that the summation runs over sites on every second honeycomb layer. The exchange constant is $J_{\parallel}$ on vertical links, and is $J_\alpha$ on $\alpha$-links lying on a honeycomb plane (see Fig.Β \[fig:honeycomb\]). The spin-orbital interaction within each honeycomb layer resembles the original 2D Kitaev model with spin-1/2 operator $\sigma^\alpha$ replaced by the spin-orbital operator $\tau^z\sigma^\alpha$. The inter-layer interaction in our model, on the other hand, involves only orbital operators; the orbital interaction alternates between the $\tau^x$ and $\tau^y$ types along successive vertical links. In addition to discrete lattice symmetries, the Hamiltonian is invariant under a $\pi$ rotation about $\tau^z$ axis followed by lattice translations along the $z$ direction by one layer.
Since the five spin-orbital operators $\tau^x$, $\tau^y$, and $\tau^z\sigma^\alpha$ anticommute with each other, they generate a $4\times 4$ matrix representation of the Clifford algebra. With an enlarged Hilbert space, one may introduce 6 Majorana fermions $c$ and $b^\mu$ ($\mu = 1,\cdots,5$) such that: $$\begin{aligned}
& &\tau^z\sigma^x = i b^1 c, \quad
\tau^z\sigma^y = i b^2 c, \quad
\tau^z\sigma^z = i b^3 c, \nonumber \\
& & \quad\quad\quad\quad
\tau^x = i b^4 c, \quad
\tau^y = i b^5 c.\end{aligned}$$ By denoting these operators as $\Gamma^\mu = i b^\mu c$, HamiltonianΒ (\[eq:h\]) can be recast into a Kitaev-type interaction $$\begin{aligned}
\mathcal{H}_0 = -\sum_{\mu=1}^5 J_{\mu} \sum_{\mu-\mbox{\scriptsize
links}} \Gamma^\mu_j \Gamma^\mu_k,\end{aligned}$$ with $J_1 = J_x$, $J_2 = J_y$, and $J_3 = J_z$ for links lying on a honeycomb plane, and $J_4 = J_5 = J_{\parallel}$ along the vertical links. The six Majorana fermions form an 8-dimensional Hilbert space which is twice as large as the local physical Hilbert space. This redundancy can be remedied by demanding the allowed physical states be eigenstate of gauge operator $D \equiv i c \,\prod_{\mu=1}^5
b^\mu$ with eigenvalue +1. This is also consistent with the identity $\tau^x\tau^y\tau^z\sigma^x\sigma^y\sigma^z = -1$. We note that the same $\Gamma$-matrix extension of the Kitaev model on a 2D decorated square lattice (Shastry-Sutherland lattice) has been studied in Ref. .
Following Kitaev, [@kitaev06] we introduce the link operator $u_{jk} \equiv i b^\mu_j\,b^\mu_k$, where $\mu=\mu_{jk}$ implicitly depends on the type of link connecting sites $j$ and $k$. The Hamiltonian then becomes $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:H-cc}
\mathcal{H}_0 = \frac{i}{2} \sum_{jk} J_{\mu}u_{jk}\, c_j c_k.\end{aligned}$$ A remarkable feature of the fermionic Hamiltonian first noted by Kiatev is that the link operators $u_{jk}$ commute with each other and with the Hamiltonian. We may thus replace them by their eigenvalues $u_{jk} = \pm 1$, which act as an emergent $Z_2$ gauge field. Consequently, for a given choice of $\{u_{jk}\}$, Hamiltonian (\[eq:H-cc\]) reduces to a problem of free Majorana fermions with nearest-neighbor hopping $t_{jk} = J_{\mu} u_{jk}$. However, since $u_{jk}$ does not commute with operator $D_j$, the spectrum of the free fermion Hamiltonian depends only on gauge invariant quantities which are given by the product of link operators around the boundary of elementary plaquette: $w_p = \prod_{(jk)\in
\partial p} u_{jk}$. As $w_p^2 = 1$, the flux associated with a given plaquette is also given by a $Z_2$ variable $w_p = \pm 1$.
![\[fig:flux\] Configuration of $Z_2$ gauge fields $\{u_{jk}\}$ and $\{u'_{jk}\}$ on (a) square and (b) hexagonal plaquettes; $u_{jk} = 1$ if there is an arrow pointing from site $j$ to site $k$. The numbers 1 and 2 label the two inequivalent sites within a unit cell.](flux){width="0.95\columnwidth"}
The question remains of what choices of $u_{jk}$, or equivalently the $Z_2$ fluxes $w_p$, give the lowest ground-state energy of the free fermion problem. Numerically, we find that such a state is attained when all hexagons are vortex free while all squares contain a $\pi$ flux: $$\begin{aligned}
w_{\varhexagon} = 1, \quad\quad w_{\Square} = -1,\end{aligned}$$ consistent with Liebβs theorem. [@lieb] A gauge choice which gives the desired plaquette fluxes without enlarging the unit cell is shown in Fig.Β \[fig:flux\]. With this specific choice of $Z_2$ gauge field, the fermion spectrum can be obtained analytically using Fourier transformation.
In the weak-pairing regime to be discussed below, model (\[eq:h\]) exhibits a gapless phase similar to the B phase of 2D Kitaev model. In order to explore possible topological insulators emerging from this critical phase, we consider the following single-ion perturbations: $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:h1}
\mathcal{H}_1 = -\sum_{j} \mathbf h_j\cdot\bm \sigma_j
+ \lambda\sum_{j} \tau^z_{j} \hat\mathbf n\cdot\bm\sigma_j.\end{aligned}$$ The first term is the Zeeman coupling to an external magnetic field $\mathbf h_j = \eta_j \mathbf h$, where the phase factor $\eta_j =
\pm 1$ depends only on the $z$ coordinate of spin $j$, i.e. the field is constant within a given honeycomb plane. As mentioned previously, we shall consider two special cases in this paper: uniform field with $\eta_j = 1$ and staggered field with $\eta_j =
(-1)^{z_j}$. Since spins transform as $T \sigma^\alpha T^{-1} =
-\sigma^\alpha$ under time-reversal $T$, the first term above explicitly breaks TRS.
The second term in Eq.Β (\[eq:h1\]) represents a spin-orbit-like interaction where $\lambda$ is an effective coupling constant, and $\hat\mathbf n$ is a unit vector specifying the local anisotropy axis. Such a coupling arises when the orbital basis $|\tau^z = \pm
1\rangle$ carries a nonzero orbital angular momentum $\mathbf L \sim
\tau^z\hat\mathbf n$ which is parallel or antiparallel to the local anisotropy axis depending on $\tau^z = +1$ or $-1$, respectively. An explicit example is given by two degenerate orbitals with $t_{2g}$ symmetry, e.g. $|yz\rangle$ and $|zx\rangle$ in a tetragonal crystal field. By identifying $|\tau^z = \pm 1 \rangle$ as $|yz\rangle \pm i
|zx \rangle$, respectively, the orbital basis has a nonzero angular momentum pointing along the symmetry axis of the tetragonal field.
The effects of $\mathcal{H}_1$ can be studied following the perturbation treatments discussed in Ref.Β . Essentially, one constructs an effective Hamiltonian acting on the subspace which is free of vortex-type excitations. The first-order correction vanishes identically as both single-ion perturbations create $\pi$ fluxes on hexagons, [@baskaran07] whereas the second-order terms simply modify the nearest-neighbor exchange constants $J_{\alpha}$. Nontrivial corrections to the fermion spectrum arise at the third-order perturbation which involves multiple spin-orbital interactions, e.g. $$(\tau^z_j \sigma^x_j)(\tau^z_k \sigma^y_k)
\,\sigma^z_l = i (\tau^z_j \sigma^x_j)(\tau^z_k \sigma^y_k)
(\tau^z_l \sigma^x_l) (\tau^z_l \sigma^y_l).$$ Such terms introduce an effective second nearest-neighbor hopping for Majorana fermions $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:H-cc2}
\mathcal{H}_1 = \frac{i \kappa}{2} \sum_{jk} \eta \, u'_{jk} c_j c_k,\end{aligned}$$ where $\kappa \sim \lambda^2 h/J^2$ and $\eta = \pm 1$ is a constant within the plane containing sites $j$ and $k$. The additional second-neighbor $Z_2$ field $u'_{jk} = -u'_{kj}$ is shown by the dashed line in Fig.Β \[fig:flux\]. Depending on the direction of $\hat\mathbf n$ and $\mathbf h$, the hopping amplitude $\kappa$ could take different values along inequivalent second-neighbor links. As the main purpose of this term is to introduce a spectral gap, to avoid unnecessary complications, we shall assume the symmetric case in the following discussion.
Uniform magnetic field {#sec:uniform-h}
======================
We first discuss the ground state in the presence of a uniform magnetic field, i.e. $\eta_j = +1$ for all layers. As will be discussed below, the gapped phase at large fields is characterized by a $\pi_2$ Chern number corresponding to a multi-layer generalization of the 2D Kitaev model, and is topologically trivial in 3D (which generally is characterized by $\pi_3$ homotopy groups). This is mainly because the TRS essential to the existence of 3D topological insulators is explicitly broken by the uniform field. However, the critical phase in the case of small fields is interesting in itself and is similar to the gapless A-phase of $^3$He discussed in Ref.Β ; the gaplessness of both phases are topologically protected.
Since the original unit cell of the lattice is preserved by the $Z_2$ fields $u_{jk}$ and $u'_{jk}$ shown in Fig.Β \[fig:flux\], we express the site index as $j = (\mathbf r, s)$, where $\mathbf r$ denotes the position of the unit cell, and $s=1,2$ indicates the two inequivalent sites in a unit cell. With Fourier transformation $a_{\mathbf k,s} = \sum_{\bf r} c_{\mathbf r, s}\, e^{-i\mathbf
k\cdot(\mathbf r + \mathbf d_s)}/\sqrt{2N}$, where $\mathbf d_s$ is a basis vector and $N$ is the number of unit cells, the Hamiltonian becomes $\mathcal{H} = \mathcal{H}_0 + \mathcal{H}_1 =\frac{1}{2}
\sum_{\mathbf k}\,\Psi^\dagger_{\mathbf k}\,H(\mathbf
k)\,\Psi_{\mathbf k} $, with $\Psi_{\mathbf k} = (a_{\mathbf k,1},
\, a_{\mathbf k, 2})^T$ and $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:Hu}
H(\mathbf k) &=& \left(\begin{array}{cc}
g(k_z)+\Delta(\mathbf k_\perp) & -i f(\mathbf k_\perp) \\
i f(\mathbf k_\perp)^* & -g(k_z)-\Delta(\mathbf k_\perp)
\end{array}\right), \\
& = & {\rm Im} f(\mathbf k_\perp)\,\tau^x + {\rm Re} f(\mathbf k_\perp)\,\tau^y +
\bigl[g(k_z)\!+\!\Delta(\mathbf k_\perp)\bigr]\,\tau^z. \nonumber\end{aligned}$$ For convenience, we have defined the following functions: $$\begin{aligned}
g(k_z) = 4 J_\parallel \sin k_z, \quad
f(\mathbf k_\perp) = 2 \sum_{\alpha=1}^3 J_\alpha\,e^{i\mathbf
k_{\perp}\cdot \bm \delta_\alpha}, \\ \nonumber
\Delta(\mathbf k_\perp) =
8\kappa\,\sin\frac{k_x}{2}\,\Bigl(\cos\frac{\sqrt{3}k_y}{2}-\cos\frac{k_x}{2}\Bigr).
\quad\end{aligned}$$ The three vectors $\bm \delta_{1,2} = (\frac{\pm
1}{2},\frac{-1}{2\sqrt{3}})$, and $\bm \delta_{3} =
(0,\frac{1}{\sqrt{3}})$ connect nearest-neighbor sites in a honeycomb layer. In the following we shall focus on the emergent free fermion problem. The Pauli matrices $\tau^\mu$ appearing in the single-particle Hamiltonian now act on the sublattice index $s$ (not to be confused with orbital pseudospins).
The hermitian matrix $H(\mathbf k)$ in Eq.Β (\[eq:Hu\]) also satisfies $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:symD}
H^T(-\mathbf k) = - H(\mathbf k),\end{aligned}$$ which is the defining property of symmetry classΒ D in Altland-Zirnbauerβs classification. [@az] As 3D insulators in this class is topologically trivial, [@schnyder08] the gapped phase of Eq.Β (\[eq:Hu\]) represents a trivial multilayer generalization of the 2D Kitaev model. Nonetheless, for small magnetic fields such that the second-neighbor hopping $\kappa \sim
\lambda^2 h$ is below a critical value $\kappa_c$, the fermion spectrum remains gapless in the weak-paring regime of the model. The corresponding critical phase is characterized by topologically protected Fermi points as we shall discuss below.
Diagonalizing Hamiltonian (\[eq:Hu\]) yields a spectrum: $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:e1}
\epsilon_{\pm}(\mathbf k) = \pm \sqrt{\bigl[g(k_z) + \Delta(\mathbf
k_\perp)\bigr]^2 + |f(\mathbf k_\perp)|^2}.\end{aligned}$$ When one of the in-plane coupling is much larger than the other two, e.g. $J_z \gg J_x, J_y$, there is no solution to equation $f(\mathbf
k_\perp) = 0$, and the spectrum is always gapped irrespective of the applied magnetic field. This phase corresponds to the A phase of the 2D Kitaev model, [@kitaev06] and is referred to in the following as the strong-pairing phase based on analogy with the $p$-wave topological superconductors. [@read00] On the other hand, in the weak-pairing regime of the model where the three in-plane couplings satisfy the triangle inequalities, [@kitaev06] the model displays a possible gapless phase as two solutions $\mathbf k^*_\perp$ exist for the equation $f(\mathbf k_\perp) = 0$. To be specific, we now concentrate on the symmetric case $J_x = J_y =
J_z \equiv J$, where zeros of $f(\mathbf k_\perp)$ are at the corners of the 2D hexagonal Brillouin zone $\mathbf k^*_{\perp} =
(\pm \frac{4\pi}{3}, 0)$.
In contrast to the 2D Kitaev model where applying a magnetic field immediately opens an energy gap, [@kitaev06] spectrum (\[eq:e1\]) of the 3D model remains gapless when $\kappa$ is less than a critical strength $|\kappa| \leq \kappa_c.$ For symmetric in-plane couplings, we find $\kappa_c \equiv 2J_\parallel/3\sqrt{3}$ and the nodes of the spectrum $\epsilon_{\pm}(\mathbf k)$ are located at $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:fermipts}
\begin{array}{llcl}
\quad & \mathbf k^*_{1,+} = \bigl(\frac{4\pi}{3}, 0, -\pi+\xi\bigr),
& &
\mathbf k^*_{1,-} = \bigl(\frac{4\pi}{3}, 0, -\xi\bigr),
\\
\quad & \mathbf k^*_{2,+} = \bigl(-\frac{4\pi}{3}, 0, \xi\bigr),
& &
\mathbf k^*_{2,-} = \bigl(-\frac{4\pi}{3}, 0, \pi-\xi\bigr),
\end{array} \quad\end{aligned}$$ where $\xi = \arcsin(\kappa/\kappa_c)$. These Fermi points are topologically protected and are robust against weak perturbations. To see this, we first rewrite Hamiltonian (\[eq:Hu\]) as $H(\mathbf k) = \varepsilon_+(\mathbf k)\,\hat{\mathbf m}(\mathbf
k)\!\cdot\!\bm\tau$, where $\hat\mathbf m(\mathbf k)$ is a unit vector. A topological invariant characterizing the singularities of the spectrum is given by the winding number of mappings from a sphere $S^2$ enclosing the Fermi point $\mathbf k^*$ to the 2-sphere of the unit vector $\hat{\mathbf m}$: [@volovik] $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:nu1}
\nu = \int_{S^2} \frac{d^2 A_\rho}{8\pi} \epsilon^{\mu\nu\rho}\,
\hat{\mathbf m}\cdot\bigl(\partial_\mu\hat{\mathbf m}\times\partial_\nu\hat{\mathbf m}\bigr).\end{aligned}$$ The above definition corresponds to the second homotopy group $\pi_2(S^2) = Z$, which characterizes point defects in an $O(3)$ spin field.[@mermin79]
Examples of topologically nontrivial Fermi points are given by the spectra of Weyl Hamiltonian describing a massless spin-1/2 particle: $H_{\rm Weyl} = \pm ic\tau^\mu\partial_\mu$, where $c$ is the speed of light. [@volovik] The plus and minus signs refer to left and right-handed particles, respectively. Using Eq.Β (\[eq:nu1\]) the winding number of Weyl spinors can be readily computed, resulting $\nu = \pm 1$ for right and left-handed particles, respectively. Take left-handed Weyl spinor for example, the expectation value of its spin is parallel to its momentum: $\langle \bm \tau \rangle
\parallel \mathbf p$. In the ground state with filled negative-energy states, Fermi point with $\nu = 1$ thus looks like a magnetic monopole (a hedgehog) in momentum space. These singular points are robust in the sense that it is impossible to continuously deform a hedgehog into a uniform spin configuration (corresponding to the trivial case of $\nu = 0$).
![\[fig:k-top\] (Color online) (a) Projection of ground-state pseudospin $\langle \bm\tau\rangle = -\hat{\mathbf
m}(\mathbf k)$ on a face of the Brillouin zone. The two vertical edges of the face correspond to $K = (\frac{4\pi}{3},0, k_z)$ and $K'=(\frac{2\pi}{3},\frac{2\pi}{\sqrt{3}},k_z) \equiv
(-\frac{4\pi}{3},0,k_z)$. The location of the four topologically non-trivial Fermi points are indicated by black arrows. (b) Dispersion along the $K'$ edge of Brillouin zone for various $\kappa
\sim \lambda^2 h$. Upon increasing magnetic field $h$, the two Fermi points carrying opposite winding numbers move in opposite directions along the $K'$ edge. At a critical field ($\kappa = \kappa_c$), the two singularities merge to form a new Fermi point with trivial winding number $\nu = 0$ at $(-\frac{4\pi}{3}, 0, \frac{\pi}{2})$. The spectrum becomes gapped above $\kappa_c$.](mk){width="0.8\columnwidth"}
To compute the winding number of Fermi points in our 3D model, we expand Hamiltonian (\[eq:Hu\]) around the singular points, e.g. $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:hw}
H(\mathbf k^*_{1,\pm}+\mathbf p) = - v_\perp p_y\tau^x - v_\perp
p_x\tau^y \mp v_\parallel p_z \tau^z,\end{aligned}$$ where the Fermi velocities are $v_\perp = \sqrt{3}J$ and $v_\parallel\!=\! 2 (4 J_\parallel^2 - 27 \kappa^2 )^{1/2}$. The dispersion around these points has a conic singularity:Β $\varepsilon_\pm\!\approx\! \pm \sqrt{(v_\perp \mathbf
p_\perp)^2 + (v_\parallel p_z)^2}$. After rotation and mirror-inversion, Eq.Β (\[eq:hw\]) is essentially equivalent to the momentum-space Weyl Hamiltonian discussed above. The four Fermi points (\[eq:fermipts\]) form two pairs (labeled by $r = 1,2$) of singularities with opposite winding numbers $\nu = \pm 1$. The ground-state configuration of pseudospin $\langle \bm\tau\rangle =
-\hat{\mathbf m}(\mathbf k)$ projected onto a face of the Brillouin zone is shown in Fig.Β \[fig:k-top\](a). The two pairs of singularities are located at the two inequivalent edges $K$ and $K'$ of the 3D Brillouin zone. Instead of a monopole-like configuration, vector field $\hat\mathbf m(\mathbf k)$ in the vicinity of these Fermi points has a saddle-point-like singularity.
Although these Fermi points are topologically protected due to their nonzero winding numbers, a spectral gap can still be induced through mutual annihilation of Fermi points carrying opposite topological charges. This process is illustrated in Fig.Β \[fig:k-top\]. Take for example the two Fermi points on the $K'$-edge of the Brillouin zone. Upon increasing magnetic field $h$, the two singularities characterized by winding numbers $\nu = \pm 1$ move toward each other along the $K'$ edge, and eventually merge to form a new Fermi point when $\kappa$ reaches the critical $\kappa_c$. Because of the conservation of topological charge, the new Fermi point has a winding number $\nu = 0$, hence is topologically trivial. Above the critical field, the spectrum is fully gapped.
It is also interesting to understand the critical B phase of Kitaevβs original 2D model from the perspective of topological winding number. As discussed in Ref.Β , the gaplessness of B phase is protected by TRS on the bipartite honeycomb lattice. This discrete symmetry essentially forces the unit vector $\hat\mathbf m(\mathbf k_\perp)$ to lie in the $xy$ plane as $\tau^z$ terms in Eq.Β (\[eq:Hu\]) is not allowed by TRS. For a planar unit vector $\hat\mathbf m$ whose tip lies on a circle $S^1$, the singularities are characterized by an integer topological invariant, also known as the vortex winding number, corresponding to $\pi_1(S^1) = Z$. [@mermin79] The two Fermi poins in the B phase of Kitaevβs model can be viewed as vortices carrying opposite winding numbers $\nu = \pm 1$, respectively. In the presence of perturbations breaking the TRS, the vector $\hat\mathbf m$ now lives on a 2-sphere. Since $\pi_1(S^2) = 0$, singularities of the spectrum are then topologically trivial ($\pi_2$ characterization of 2D singularities is not well defined).
The gapped phase above the critical $\kappa_c$ represents a trivial generalization of the 2D Kitaev model in much the same way as the multilayer generalization of the IQH state. The topological properties of such systems are characterized by three spectral Chern numbers. [@kohmoto92] In our case, the nonzero topological invariant is given by the winding number of vector field $\hat{\mathbf m}(\mathbf k_\perp; k_z)$ which maps the in-plane hexagonal Brillouin zone (a 2-torus) to a unit 2-sphere: $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:nu1b}
\nu = \frac{1}{4\pi}\int dk_x dk_y\,\hat{\mathbf
m}\cdot\bigl(\partial_x \hat{\mathbf
m}\times\partial_y\hat{\mathbf m}\bigr)
= \frac{\kappa}{|\kappa|}.\end{aligned}$$ By treating $k_z$ as a parameter, Hamiltonian (\[eq:Hu\]) has exactly the same form as that of the 2D Kitaev model. The first Chern number (\[eq:nu1b\]) of the corresponding β2Dβ Hamiltonian $H_{k_z}(\mathbf k_\perp)$ is given by $\nu = {\rm
sgn}\,\Delta_{k_z}$, [@kitaev06] where $\Delta_{k_z} =
6\sqrt{3}(\kappa + \kappa_c\,\sin k_z)$ is the effective gap parameter at corner $K$ of the hexagonal Brillouin zone. Therefore, as long as $|\kappa| > \kappa_c$, hence the system remains gapped, the winding number $\nu = {\rm sgn}\kappa = \pm 1$ is independent of $k_z$, and the whole Brillouin zone is characterized by the same chirality.
Staggered magnetic field {#sec:stagger-h}
========================
The gapped phase discussed in the previous section is topologically trivial due to the absence of TRS. As discussed in Ref.Β , TRS is a prerequisite for the existence of 3D topological insulators. In this section, we show that one can introduce a gap to the fermion spectrum, while at the same time preserving an effective TRS, by subjecting the system to a staggered magnetic field, i.e. $\eta_j = (-1)^{z_j}$. Because the sign of the field alternates between successive honeycomb layers, a discrete symmetry emerges in our model system as HamiltonianΒ (\[eq:h1\]) is invariant under time-reversal $T$ followed by a lattice translation along $z$ axis. This additional symmetry manifests itself as a TRS in the auxiliary Majorana hopping problem. The mechanism proposed here is similar to Haldaneβs model of realizing 2D quantum Hall effect without a net magnetic flux through the unit cells. [@haldane88]
Due to the staggered field, the sign of second nearest-neighbor hopping $u'_{jk}$ also alternates between successive honeycomb planes. This results in a staggered gap function $ \pm
\Delta(\mathbf k_{\perp})$, and a doubled unit cell along $z$ direction. We denote the fermion annihilation operators on the even and odd layers as $a_{\mathbf r, s}$ and $b_{\mathbf r, s}$, respectively, where subscript $s = 1, 2$ refers to the two inequivalent sites within a honeycomb plane. The Fourier-transformed Hamiltonian then reads $\mathcal{H} = \frac{1}{2}\sum_{\mathbf k}
\Psi^\dagger_{\mathbf k} H(\mathbf k) \Psi_{\mathbf k}$, with $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:Hs}
& &H(\mathbf k) = \left(\begin{array}{cccc}
\Delta(\mathbf k_{\perp}) & g(k_z) & -i f(\mathbf k_{\perp}) & 0
\\
g(k_z) & -\Delta(\mathbf k_{\perp}) & 0 &
-i f(\mathbf k_{\perp}) \\
i f(\mathbf k_{\perp})^* & 0 & -\Delta(\mathbf k_{\perp}) & -g(k_z) \\
0 & i f(\mathbf k_{\perp})^* & -g(k_z) & \Delta(\mathbf k_\perp)
\end{array}\right) \quad\,\,\,\, \\ \nonumber
\\
& & \,\, = \Delta(\mathbf k_{\perp}) \tau^z \sigma^z\!+\! g(k_z)
\tau^z\sigma^x\! +\! {\rm Im}f(\mathbf k_{\perp})\tau^x \! +\! {\rm Re}
f(\mathbf k_{\perp})\tau^y, \nonumber\end{aligned}$$ and $\Psi_{\mathbf k} = \bigl(a_{\mathbf k,1}, b_{\mathbf k_,1},
a_{\mathbf k,2}, b_{\mathbf k, 2}\bigr)^T$. The two sets of Pauli matrices $\tau^\mu$ and $\sigma^\mu$ now act on the sublattice $(1,2)$ and even-odd $(a,b)$ indices, respectively.
In addition to symmetry relation (\[eq:symD\]) shared by Hamiltonians describing free Majorana fermions, the hermitian matrix (\[eq:Hs\]) also satisfies $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:trs}
\tau^z (i\sigma^y)\, H^T(\mathbf k)\, (-i\sigma^y)\, \tau^z =
H(-\mathbf k),\end{aligned}$$ stemming from the generalized TRS. The extra $\tau^z$ factor can be gauged away by a $\pi/2$ rotation about the $\tau^z$ axis. Eq.Β (\[eq:trs\]) defines the symmetry property of DIII Hamiltonians in Altland-Zirnbauerβs classification. [@az] As discussed in Ref.Β , a topological invariant can be defined for Hamiltonians in this symmetry class based on the block off-diagonal representation of the Hamiltonian, or more precisely, of the spectral projection operator. In fact, the same definition can be applied to classes of Hamiltonians which possess some form of chiral symmetry arising from either the sublattice symmetry or a combination of particle-hole and time-reversal symmetries. [@schnyder08]
To compute the topological winding number of our model, we first bring Hamiltonian (\[eq:Hs\]) into a block off-diagonal form through a series of unitary transformations. First, noting that the layered honeycomb lattice is bipartite in which nearest neighbors of one sublattice belong to the other one, we regroup fermions of the same sublattice into a block, e.g. $a_{\mathbf k,1}$ and $b_{\mathbf k, 2}$. Mathematically this is achieved by interchanging the 2nd and 4th entries of $\Psi_{\mathbf k}$, the transformed Hamiltonian becomes $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:Hd1}
H(\mathbf k) \to \alpha^x {\rm Im} f(\mathbf k_{\perp})
+ \alpha^y {\rm Re} f(\mathbf k_{\perp})
+ \alpha^z g(k_z)
+ \beta \Delta(\mathbf k_{\perp}),\quad\,\end{aligned}$$ where $\alpha^\mu$ and $\beta$ given by $$\begin{aligned}
\alpha^\mu = \gamma^\mu = \tau^x \sigma^\mu, \quad
\beta = \gamma^0 = \tau^z,\end{aligned}$$ are the standard Dirac matrices. The second part of the unitary transformation is a $\pi/2$ rotation about the new $\tau^x$ axis, which transforms $\tau^z \to \tau^y$, hence $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:HDIII}
H(\mathbf k) \to \left(\begin{array}{cc}
0 & D(\mathbf k) \\
D^\dagger(\mathbf k) & 0 \end{array}\right),\end{aligned}$$ where the upper right block is $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:D1}
D(\mathbf k) = \left(\begin{array}{cc}
g(k_z) - i\Delta(\mathbf k_{\perp}) & -if(\mathbf k_{\perp}) \\
if(\mathbf k_{\perp})^* & -g(k_z) - i \Delta(\mathbf k_{\perp})
\end{array}\right).\end{aligned}$$ Noting that $f(-\mathbf k_{\perp}) = f(\mathbf k_{\perp})^*$, and $\Delta(\mathbf k_{\perp})$, $g(k_z)$ are odd functions of $\mathbf
k$, matrix (\[eq:D1\]) satisfies a symmetry $D^T(\mathbf k) =
-D(-\mathbf k)$. The block off-diagonal form of the Hamiltonian implies that $\epsilon(\mathbf k)^2 = D^\dagger(\mathbf k) D(\mathbf
k)$, which gives rise to a fermion spectrum $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:ek2}
\epsilon_{\pm}(\mathbf k) = \pm \sqrt{\Delta(\mathbf
k_{\perp})^2 + g(k_z)^2 + \bigl|f(\mathbf k_{\perp})\bigr|^2}.\end{aligned}$$ Due to the effective TRS (\[eq:trs\]), the spectrum is double degenerate at each wavevector $\mathbf k$, except at possible Fermi points. It is worth noting that, contrary to the uniform field case, the staggered field immediately opens an energy gap to the spectrum in the weak-pairing phase of the model.
The topological properties of the quantum ground state (occupied Bloch states) in the gapped phase is captured by the following $Q$ matrix: [@schnyder08] $$\begin{aligned}
Q(\mathbf k) = \left(\begin{array}{cc}
0 & q(\mathbf k) \\
q^\dagger(\mathbf k) & 0 \end{array}\right),
\quad
q(\mathbf k) = \frac{D(\mathbf k)}{\epsilon_+(\mathbf k)}.\end{aligned}$$ In fact $Q(\mathbf k)$ represents a βsimplifiedβ Hamiltonian obtained by assigning an energy $\epsilon = - 1$ to all occupied states and $\epsilon = +1$ to all empty bands of Hamiltonian $H(\mathbf k)$. [@schnyder08; @qi09] As long as the system is in the same gapped phase, one can continuously deform the model such that $H(\mathbf k)$ gradually transforms to the simplified form $Q(\mathbf k)$. Not surprisingly, the $Q$ matrix is related to the spectral operator via $Q(\mathbf k) = 1- 2 P(\mathbf k)$. [@schnyder08]
It is easy to see that the block matrix $q$ satisfies $$\begin{aligned}
q^\dagger(\mathbf k)\, q(\mathbf k) = 1,
\quad q^T(\mathbf k) = - q(-\mathbf k),\end{aligned}$$ as expected for a DIII class Hamiltonian. The topological invariant characterizing the ground state is defined as the integer winding number of mapping $q: T^3 \to U(2)$, [@schnyder08; @volovik] $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:nu2}
\nu = \int \frac{d^3 k}{24\pi^2} \epsilon^{\mu\nu\rho} {\rm
tr}\bigl[(q^{-1} \partial_{\mu} q)(q^{-1} \partial_{\nu} q)
(q^{-1} \partial_{\rho} q)\bigr],\end{aligned}$$ where the integral is over the three-dimensional Brillouin zone, which is essentially a 3-torus $T^3$. For DIII class Hamiltonians, the winding number $\nu$ can take on an arbitrary integer, each labels a unique topological class of the quantum ground state.
\[t\] ![\[fig:phase\] (Color online) (a) Phase diagram in the plane of $J_x + J_y + J_z = $ const. The shaded triangle corresponds to the region where the in-plane couplings satisfy the triangle inequalities. In the absence of staggered field $\kappa = 0$, the shaded area represents a critical phase with zero energy gap. We define a parameter $\delta = 2 J_x - J_z$ along the $J_x = J_y$ line specifying the distance from the phase boundary. (b) Phase diagram as a function of distance $\delta$ and field strength $\kappa$. Panels (c) and (d) Numerical evaluation of the winding number $\nu$ as a function of $\delta$ and $\kappa$, respectively. The field strength $\kappa = \pm 0.02 J_z$ in the calculation of panel (c), whereas we set $J_x = J_y = J_z \equiv J$ and $\kappa$ is measured in units of $J$ in (d).](phase "fig:"){width="0.9\columnwidth"}
The value of the topological winding number $\nu$ can only change in the presence of a quantum phase transition, which is usually accompanied by a vanishing bulk gap. In our case, noting that $g(0)
= 0$, a prerequisite for spectrum (\[eq:ek2\]) to be gapless is that the in-plane couplings satisfy the triangle inequalities $|J_z|
\le |J_x|+|J_y|$, and so on \[see Fig.Β \[fig:phase\](a)\], such that solutions exist for $f(\mathbf k_{\perp}) = 0$ (the weak-paring regime of the model). In the absence of magnetic field $\kappa = h =
0$, the triangle inequalities thus define a critical phase with gapless fermionic excitations. For convenience, we use $\delta$ to denote the βdistanceβ from the boundary of the critical phase. For example $\delta \equiv 2 J_x - J_z$ along the $J_x = J_y$ line shown in Fig.Β \[fig:phase\](a). We numerically compute the winding number $\nu$ using definition (\[eq:nu2\]) for various gapped phases of the model Hamiltonian; the resulting phase diagram as a function of $\delta$ and $\kappa$ is summarized in Fig.Β \[fig:phase\](b).
At the phase boundary defined by $\kappa = 0$ and $\delta = 0$, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition of a topological nature. Fig.Β \[fig:phase\](c) shows numerical evaluation of the winding number $\nu$ as a function of $\delta = 2 J_x - J_z$ in the presence of a staggered field such that $|\kappa| = 0.02 J_z$. Depending on the sign of $\kappa$, the winding number jumps from $\nu = 0$ to $\nu = \pm 1$ when $\delta$ crosses the phase boundary from the topologically trivial phase (corresponding to the A phase in 2D Kitaev model). On the other hand, for systems inside the critical phase ($\delta < 0$), the winding number jumps from $\nu = -1$ to $\nu = +1$ as $\kappa$ changes sign.
The nontrivial winding number of the quantum ground state can also be understood from the topological properties of the singular (Dirac) points in the fermion spectrum. To simplify the discussion, we focus on the symmetric case $J_x = J_y = J_z \equiv J$, where zeros of spectrum (\[eq:ek2\]) in the $\kappa \to 0$ limit are at $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:dirac-pts}
\begin{array}{lcl}
\mathbf k^*_1 = (\frac{4\pi}{3},0,0), & &
\mathbf k^*_2 = (-\frac{4\pi}{3}, 0, 0).
\end{array}\end{aligned}$$ In the vicinity of these two points, the fermions obey a Dirac-like Hamiltonian \[c.f. Eq. (\[eq:Hd1\])\] $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:Hc1}
H(\mathbf k^* + \mathbf p) = \alpha^\mu \tilde p_\mu + m \beta,\end{aligned}$$ where the scaled momentum and mass term are $$\begin{aligned}
\begin{array}{c}
\tilde \mathbf p_{\perp} = \sqrt{3}J (p_y, \mp
p_x), \quad \tilde p_z = 4J_{\perp} p_z, \\ \\
m=\Delta(\mathbf k^*_s) = \pm 6\sqrt{3}\kappa.
\end{array}\end{aligned}$$ The plus and minus signs in the expression of $m$ correspond to $\mathbf k^*_1$ and $\mathbf k^*_2$, respectively. The spectrum of (\[eq:Hc1\]) given by $\epsilon_{\pm} = \pm \sqrt{\tilde p^2 +
m^2}$ is two-fold degenerate at each $\mathbf p$. As discussed above, a $\pi/2$ rotation about $\tau^x$ brings the Dirac mass into a chiral mass term, i.e. $\beta \to i\gamma^5\beta$. The transformed Hamiltonian $H = \alpha_\mu \tilde p_\mu - i \beta \gamma^5 m$ is in a block off-diagonal form with $D = \tilde\mathbf p\cdot\bm\sigma -
i m$. The $q$ matrix of the spectral projector is then given by $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:qc1}
q(\mathbf k^* + \mathbf p) = \frac{\tilde\mathbf p\cdot
\bm\sigma - i m}{\sqrt{\tilde p^2 + m^2}}.\end{aligned}$$ Eqs. (\[eq:Hc1\]) and (\[eq:qc1\]) can be viewed as a continuum approximation to the low-energy physics of the model system. A direct evaluation using Eq. (\[eq:nu2\]) yields a winding number $$\begin{aligned}
\nu = \pm\frac{1}{2}\frac{m}{|m|},\end{aligned}$$ with $\pm$ sign refering to $\mathbf k^*_1$ and $\mathbf k^*_2$ points, respectively. Note that when evaluating $\nu$ using the continuum description, we have extended the domain of integration to a 3-sphere in Eq.Β (\[eq:nu2\]). The appearance of a half-integer $\nu$ is an artifact of the continuum description; the winding number is modified once contributions from high-energy Bloch states (away from the Dirac point in the Brillouin zone) are properly included. Since the mass term has opposite sign at the two Dirac points, $m(\mathbf k^*_1) = - m(\mathbf k^*_2)$, we obtain $\nu_1 =
\nu_2 = \frac{1}{2} {\rm sgn}\,\kappa$. Interestingly, the sum of these two winding numbers $\nu = \nu_1 + \nu_2$ reproduces the topological invariant of the lattice model.
As recently pointed out in Ref.Β , stable Fermi lines generally appears in 3D topological superconductors described by Hamiltonians belonging to classes CI or DIII. An extended phase diagram of a lattice CI model [@schnyder09b] indeed shows regions of gapless phase with topologically stable Fermi lines. [@beri09] Here we show that such Fermi lines are also possible in our DIII Hamiltonian (\[eq:Hs\]).
To this end, we consider perturbations which break the sublattice symmetry by introducing different second-neighbor hoppings $\kappa$ on the two inequivalent sites of the lattice: $\kappa_{1,2} = \kappa
\pm \delta\kappa$. In the vicinity of the Dirac points (\[eq:dirac-pts\]), the asymmetric coupling results in an additional term of the off-diagonal block matrix $$\begin{aligned}
D =\tilde\mathbf p\cdot\bm\sigma - i m - i \mu \sigma^z,
\quad\quad \mu = 6\sqrt{3}\,\delta\kappa.\end{aligned}$$ The corresponding spectrum $\epsilon^2 = \tilde p_z^2 + \bigl(\mu -
\sqrt{m^2 + \tilde p_{\perp}^2}\bigr)^2$ has a Fermi line specified by $$\begin{aligned}
\tilde p_{\perp} = \sqrt{\mu^2 - m^2},
\quad\quad \tilde p_z = 0,\end{aligned}$$ when $\mu > m$. Finally, we point out that introducing a similar asymmetric hopping $\delta\kappa$ in the case of uniform field results in a Fermi surface in the weak-pairing regime.
Gapless Surface Majorana fermions
=================================
Analogous to the gapless chiral edge modes in the non-Abelian phase of 2D Kitaev model, [@kitaev06] the nontrivial topology of the $\nu = \pm 1$ quantum ground state in our 3D model manifests itself through the appearance of gapless Majorana fermions at the sample surface. To study the properties of these surface modes, we solve the Majorana hopping problem (\[eq:H-cc\]) and (\[eq:H-cc2\]) in a finite geometry with periodic boundary conditions along $x$ and $z$ directions and open boundary condition along $y$ direction. We assume that the $x$-axis is parallel to the zigzag direction of the honeycomb lattice. As Fig.Β \[fig:surface\] shows, in addition to gapped states in the bulk, the spectrum of a finite system contains additional surface modes crossing the bulk gap.
The properties of these surface states can be understood analytically using the edge modes of 2D Kitaev model, whose existence has been demonstrated in Ref.Β . These boundary modes are confined to the edge of the honeycomb lattice and possess a definite chirality depending on the sign of magnetic field $h$. Without loss of generality, we assume $\kappa\sim \lambda^2 h >
0$, hence $\epsilon_{\perp}(k_x) > 0$ for positive $k_x$ in the 1D Brillouin zone. The Hamiltonian describing the edge states is given by $$\begin{aligned}
\label{eq:H-edge}
\mathcal{H}_{\rm edge} = \frac{1}{2}\sum_{k_x} \epsilon_{\perp}(k_x)
\,\chi(-k_x)\, \chi(k_x),\end{aligned}$$ where $\chi(k_x)$ and $\chi(-k_x) = \chi^\dagger(k_x)$ for $k_x>0$ are annihilation and creation operators, respectively, of the Majorana edge modes. The spectrum of the edge states has the form $\epsilon_{\perp}(k_x) \approx 12\kappa \sin k_x$ in the vicinity of the 1D Fermi point $k^*_x = \pi$, and gradually merges with the bulk spectrum as $k_x$ moves away from $k^*_x$. [@kitaev06]
![\[fig:surface\] (Color online) Spectrum of a finite system with $L = 10$ layers along $y$ direction. We consider the symmetric case with $J_x = J_y = J_z \equiv J$. Coupling constant along vertical links is set to $J_{\parallel} = 0.35 J$, and the strength of the uniform field is $\kappa = 0.05 J$. Panels (a) and (b) show dispersion along $k_x$ and $k_z$ directions, respectively, of the 2D surface Brillouin zone.](edge "fig:"){width="0.492\columnwidth"} ![\[fig:surface\] (Color online) Spectrum of a finite system with $L = 10$ layers along $y$ direction. We consider the symmetric case with $J_x = J_y = J_z \equiv J$. Coupling constant along vertical links is set to $J_{\parallel} = 0.35 J$, and the strength of the uniform field is $\kappa = 0.05 J$. Panels (a) and (b) show dispersion along $k_x$ and $k_z$ directions, respectively, of the 2D surface Brillouin zone.](edge2 "fig:"){width="0.492\columnwidth"}
It is interesting to note that the $J_{\parallel} = 0$ limit of the 3D model (\[eq:h\]) can be viewed as a collection of decoupled honeycomb layers. Due to the staggered magnetic field, the edge states on even and odd numbered layers have opposite chirality $\nu
=\pm {\rm sgn}\,\kappa$; the corresponding quasiparticle operators are denoted as $\chi_+(k_x,2n)$ and $\chi_-(k_x,2n+1)$, respectively. The ensemble of the edge modes is described by Hamiltonian: $$\begin{aligned}
\mathcal{H}_{\perp} = \frac{1}{2}\sum_n \sum_{k_x}
\epsilon_{\perp}(k_x) \bigl[\chi_+(-k_x,2n)\chi_+(k_x,2n) \nonumber \\
-\chi_-(-k_x,2n+1)\chi_-(k_x,2n+1)\bigr].\end{aligned}$$ For odd-numbered layers, the quasiparticle annihilation operator is given by $\chi_-(k_x, 2n+1)$ with negative $k_x$. A nonzero $J_{\parallel}$ introduces coupling between adjacent layers: $$\begin{aligned}
\mathcal{H}_{\parallel} = iJ_{\parallel}\sum_{n}\sum_{k_x}
\bigl[\chi_-(-k_x,2n+1)\chi_+(k_x,2n) \nonumber \\
+ \chi_+(-k_x,2n)\chi_-(k_x,2n-1)\bigr].\end{aligned}$$ After Fourier transformation with respect to $z$ coordinate, we obtain the Hamiltonian for surface modes $$\begin{aligned}
\mathcal{H}_{\rm surf} = \frac{1}{2}\sum_{k_x,k_z} \psi^\dagger_{k_x,
k_z} \bigl[\epsilon_{\perp}(k_x)\sigma^z +
\epsilon_{\parallel}(k_z) \sigma^x\bigr] \psi_{k_x,k_z},\end{aligned}$$ where $\psi_{k_x,k_z} = \bigl(\chi_+(k_x,k_z),
\chi_-(k_x,k_z)\bigr)^T$, and the off-diagonal coupling $\epsilon_{\parallel}(k_z) = 2J_{\parallel} \sin k_z$. The spectrum can be easily obtained $\epsilon_{\rm surf} =
\bigl(\epsilon_{\parallel}^2 + \epsilon_{\perp}^2\bigr)^{1/2}$. Consistent with the numerical calculation shown in Fig.Β \[fig:surface\], the surface spectrum has a conic singularity at the 2D Fermi point $(k^*_x, k^*_z) = (\pi,0)$.
In the continuum approximation, the low-energy surface modes close to the 2D Fermi point obeys a gapless Dirac-like Hamiltonian $H_{\rm
Dirac} = -i( u_{\perp} \sigma^z \partial_x + u_{\parallel} \sigma^x
\partial_z)$. The existence of gapless surface Majorana modes is a direct consequence of the nontrivial ground-state topology when the 3D bulk sample is terminated by a 2D boundary. [@callan85; @fradkin86] Due to its topological nature, the surface Dirac cone is stable against perturbations respecting the effective TRS.
Discussion
==========
To summarize, we have constructed an interacting bosonic model on a three-dimensional layered honeycomb lattice which displays topologically nontrivial ground states. Our approach is based on the $\Gamma$-matrix generalization of Kitaevβs original spin-1/2 model. [@levin03; @hamma05; @yao09; @wu09; @ryu09; @nussinov09] We show that the ground state in the weak-pairing phase remains gapless in the presence of a small magnetic field. The fermion spectrum of this critical phase is characterized by four topologically protected Fermi points. Upon increasing the field strength, Fermi points with opposite winding numbers move toward each other and eventually annihilate at a critical field, signaling the transition into a topologically trivial phase with a gapped spectrum.
On the other hand, with the sign of magnetic field staggered along successive layers, the bulk spectrum of the weak-pairing phase immediately acquires a gap. An effective TRS is restored thanks to the staggering of the magnetic field. The corresponding quantum ground state is characterized by an integer winding invariant and possesses nontrivial topological properties, a manifestation of which is the appearance of protected gapless surface Majorana modes when the sample is terminated by a two-dimensional surface.
It is worth noting that our model provides an alternative example in which a 3D topological insulator emerges from an interacting bosonic Hamiltonian. More importantly, the TRS essential to the existence of 3D topological insulators is realized in our model through a generic physical mechanism, instead of relying on special symmetries of the $\Gamma$-matrix representation in the recently proposed diamond-lattice model. [@ryu09; @wu09] We also remark that despite the experimental difficulty of realizing the Kitaev model and its variants, the study of these exactly solvable models has enriched our understanding of the physics of topological phases. Finally, we would like to point out that it remains unclear whether an emergent topological insulator can be realized in a spin-1/2 Kitaev model on a 3D trivalent lattice.\
The author acknowledges B. BΓ©ri, R. Moessner, N. Perkins, Tieyan Si, Hong Yao, Sungkit Yip for helpful discussions and comments, and also the visitors program at Max-Planck-Institut fΓΌr Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden, Germany. In particular, I would like to thank Benjamin BΓ©ri for pointing out the possibility of topologically stable Fermi lines in the DIII Hamiltonian studied in this paper.
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|
{
"pile_set_name": "ArXiv"
}
|
Q:
add all user ids for one product
For adding to cart customer has to logg in,in cart table I have a column for user_id but in user_id column all of user_id in database add!for example for product1 all user1,user2,user3 ides add not just the one logged in
cart table:
Schema::create('cart', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->increments('id');
$table->integer('product_id');
$table->char('user_id');
$table->string('session_id');
$table->string('product_name');
$table->string('user_email');
$table->integer('qty');
$table->integer('product_price');
$table->timestamps();
});
addToCart method in controller:
public function addtocart(Request $request){
$data = $request->all();
if (empty($data['user_email'])){
$data['user_email'] = ' ';
}
$user_id = User::get('id');
if (empty($user_id)){
$user_id = Auth::user()->id;
}
$session_id = Session::get('session_id');
if (empty($session_id)){
$session_id = Str::random(40);
Session::put('session_id' , $session_id);
}
DB::table('cart')->insert(['product_id' => $data['product_id'] , 'product_name' => $data['product_name'], 'user_id'=>$user_id,
'product_price' => $data['product_price'], 'qty' => $data['qty'], 'user_email' => $data['user_email'] , 'session_id' => $session_id ]);
return redirect('cart');
}
what is the problem?
A:
You are currently requesting all the user ids by doing $user_id = User::get('id'); so if you want to set user_id as your authenticated user id you need to replace:
$user_id = User::get('id');
if (empty($user_id)){
$user_id = Auth::user()->id;
}
by:
$user_id = Auth::user()->id;
or shorter version:
$user_id = Auth::id();
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-only
/*
* Copyright Β© 2009 Intel Corporation
*/
#include <linux/delay.h>
#include <linux/i2c.h>
#include <linux/pm_runtime.h>
#include <drm/drm_fourcc.h>
#include "framebuffer.h"
#include "gma_display.h"
#include "power.h"
#include "psb_drv.h"
#include "psb_intel_drv.h"
#include "psb_intel_reg.h"
#define MRST_LIMIT_LVDS_100L 0
#define MRST_LIMIT_LVDS_83 1
#define MRST_LIMIT_LVDS_100 2
#define MRST_LIMIT_SDVO 3
#define MRST_DOT_MIN 19750
#define MRST_DOT_MAX 120000
#define MRST_M_MIN_100L 20
#define MRST_M_MIN_100 10
#define MRST_M_MIN_83 12
#define MRST_M_MAX_100L 34
#define MRST_M_MAX_100 17
#define MRST_M_MAX_83 20
#define MRST_P1_MIN 2
#define MRST_P1_MAX_0 7
#define MRST_P1_MAX_1 8
static bool mrst_lvds_find_best_pll(const struct gma_limit_t *limit,
struct drm_crtc *crtc, int target,
int refclk, struct gma_clock_t *best_clock);
static bool mrst_sdvo_find_best_pll(const struct gma_limit_t *limit,
struct drm_crtc *crtc, int target,
int refclk, struct gma_clock_t *best_clock);
static const struct gma_limit_t mrst_limits[] = {
{ /* MRST_LIMIT_LVDS_100L */
.dot = {.min = MRST_DOT_MIN, .max = MRST_DOT_MAX},
.m = {.min = MRST_M_MIN_100L, .max = MRST_M_MAX_100L},
.p1 = {.min = MRST_P1_MIN, .max = MRST_P1_MAX_1},
.find_pll = mrst_lvds_find_best_pll,
},
{ /* MRST_LIMIT_LVDS_83L */
.dot = {.min = MRST_DOT_MIN, .max = MRST_DOT_MAX},
.m = {.min = MRST_M_MIN_83, .max = MRST_M_MAX_83},
.p1 = {.min = MRST_P1_MIN, .max = MRST_P1_MAX_0},
.find_pll = mrst_lvds_find_best_pll,
},
{ /* MRST_LIMIT_LVDS_100 */
.dot = {.min = MRST_DOT_MIN, .max = MRST_DOT_MAX},
.m = {.min = MRST_M_MIN_100, .max = MRST_M_MAX_100},
.p1 = {.min = MRST_P1_MIN, .max = MRST_P1_MAX_1},
.find_pll = mrst_lvds_find_best_pll,
},
{ /* MRST_LIMIT_SDVO */
.vco = {.min = 1400000, .max = 2800000},
.n = {.min = 3, .max = 7},
.m = {.min = 80, .max = 137},
.p1 = {.min = 1, .max = 2},
.p2 = {.dot_limit = 200000, .p2_slow = 10, .p2_fast = 10},
.find_pll = mrst_sdvo_find_best_pll,
},
};
#define MRST_M_MIN 10
static const u32 oaktrail_m_converts[] = {
0x2B, 0x15, 0x2A, 0x35, 0x1A, 0x0D, 0x26, 0x33, 0x19, 0x2C,
0x36, 0x3B, 0x1D, 0x2E, 0x37, 0x1B, 0x2D, 0x16, 0x0B, 0x25,
0x12, 0x09, 0x24, 0x32, 0x39, 0x1c,
};
static const struct gma_limit_t *mrst_limit(struct drm_crtc *crtc,
int refclk)
{
const struct gma_limit_t *limit = NULL;
struct drm_device *dev = crtc->dev;
struct drm_psb_private *dev_priv = dev->dev_private;
if (gma_pipe_has_type(crtc, INTEL_OUTPUT_LVDS)
|| gma_pipe_has_type(crtc, INTEL_OUTPUT_MIPI)) {
switch (dev_priv->core_freq) {
case 100:
limit = &mrst_limits[MRST_LIMIT_LVDS_100L];
break;
case 166:
limit = &mrst_limits[MRST_LIMIT_LVDS_83];
break;
case 200:
limit = &mrst_limits[MRST_LIMIT_LVDS_100];
break;
}
} else if (gma_pipe_has_type(crtc, INTEL_OUTPUT_SDVO)) {
limit = &mrst_limits[MRST_LIMIT_SDVO];
} else {
limit = NULL;
dev_err(dev->dev, "mrst_limit Wrong display type.\n");
}
return limit;
}
/** Derive the pixel clock for the given refclk and divisors for 8xx chips. */
static void mrst_lvds_clock(int refclk, struct gma_clock_t *clock)
{
clock->dot = (refclk * clock->m) / (14 * clock->p1);
}
static void mrst_print_pll(struct gma_clock_t *clock)
{
DRM_DEBUG_DRIVER("dotclock=%d, m=%d, m1=%d, m2=%d, n=%d, p1=%d, p2=%d\n",
clock->dot, clock->m, clock->m1, clock->m2, clock->n,
clock->p1, clock->p2);
}
static bool mrst_sdvo_find_best_pll(const struct gma_limit_t *limit,
struct drm_crtc *crtc, int target,
int refclk, struct gma_clock_t *best_clock)
{
struct gma_clock_t clock;
u32 target_vco, actual_freq;
s32 freq_error, min_error = 100000;
memset(best_clock, 0, sizeof(*best_clock));
memset(&clock, 0, sizeof(clock));
for (clock.m = limit->m.min; clock.m <= limit->m.max; clock.m++) {
for (clock.n = limit->n.min; clock.n <= limit->n.max;
clock.n++) {
for (clock.p1 = limit->p1.min;
clock.p1 <= limit->p1.max; clock.p1++) {
/* p2 value always stored in p2_slow on SDVO */
clock.p = clock.p1 * limit->p2.p2_slow;
target_vco = target * clock.p;
/* VCO will increase at this point so break */
if (target_vco > limit->vco.max)
break;
if (target_vco < limit->vco.min)
continue;
actual_freq = (refclk * clock.m) /
(clock.n * clock.p);
freq_error = 10000 -
((target * 10000) / actual_freq);
if (freq_error < -min_error) {
/* freq_error will start to decrease at
this point so break */
break;
}
if (freq_error < 0)
freq_error = -freq_error;
if (freq_error < min_error) {
min_error = freq_error;
*best_clock = clock;
}
}
}
if (min_error == 0)
break;
}
return min_error == 0;
}
/**
* Returns a set of divisors for the desired target clock with the given refclk,
* or FALSE. Divisor values are the actual divisors for
*/
static bool mrst_lvds_find_best_pll(const struct gma_limit_t *limit,
struct drm_crtc *crtc, int target,
int refclk, struct gma_clock_t *best_clock)
{
struct gma_clock_t clock;
int err = target;
memset(best_clock, 0, sizeof(*best_clock));
memset(&clock, 0, sizeof(clock));
for (clock.m = limit->m.min; clock.m <= limit->m.max; clock.m++) {
for (clock.p1 = limit->p1.min; clock.p1 <= limit->p1.max;
clock.p1++) {
int this_err;
mrst_lvds_clock(refclk, &clock);
this_err = abs(clock.dot - target);
if (this_err < err) {
*best_clock = clock;
err = this_err;
}
}
}
return err != target;
}
/**
* Sets the power management mode of the pipe and plane.
*
* This code should probably grow support for turning the cursor off and back
* on appropriately at the same time as we're turning the pipe off/on.
*/
static void oaktrail_crtc_dpms(struct drm_crtc *crtc, int mode)
{
struct drm_device *dev = crtc->dev;
struct drm_psb_private *dev_priv = dev->dev_private;
struct gma_crtc *gma_crtc = to_gma_crtc(crtc);
int pipe = gma_crtc->pipe;
const struct psb_offset *map = &dev_priv->regmap[pipe];
u32 temp;
int i;
int need_aux = gma_pipe_has_type(crtc, INTEL_OUTPUT_SDVO) ? 1 : 0;
if (gma_pipe_has_type(crtc, INTEL_OUTPUT_HDMI)) {
oaktrail_crtc_hdmi_dpms(crtc, mode);
return;
}
if (!gma_power_begin(dev, true))
return;
/* XXX: When our outputs are all unaware of DPMS modes other than off
* and on, we should map those modes to DRM_MODE_DPMS_OFF in the CRTC.
*/
switch (mode) {
case DRM_MODE_DPMS_ON:
case DRM_MODE_DPMS_STANDBY:
case DRM_MODE_DPMS_SUSPEND:
for (i = 0; i <= need_aux; i++) {
/* Enable the DPLL */
temp = REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, i);
if ((temp & DPLL_VCO_ENABLE) == 0) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, temp, i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, i);
/* Wait for the clocks to stabilize. */
udelay(150);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->dpll,
temp | DPLL_VCO_ENABLE, i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, i);
/* Wait for the clocks to stabilize. */
udelay(150);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->dpll,
temp | DPLL_VCO_ENABLE, i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, i);
/* Wait for the clocks to stabilize. */
udelay(150);
}
/* Enable the pipe */
temp = REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->conf, i);
if ((temp & PIPEACONF_ENABLE) == 0) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->conf,
temp | PIPEACONF_ENABLE, i);
}
/* Enable the plane */
temp = REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->cntr, i);
if ((temp & DISPLAY_PLANE_ENABLE) == 0) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->cntr,
temp | DISPLAY_PLANE_ENABLE,
i);
/* Flush the plane changes */
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->base,
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->base, i), i);
}
}
gma_crtc_load_lut(crtc);
/* Give the overlay scaler a chance to enable
if it's on this pipe */
/* psb_intel_crtc_dpms_video(crtc, true); TODO */
break;
case DRM_MODE_DPMS_OFF:
/* Give the overlay scaler a chance to disable
* if it's on this pipe */
/* psb_intel_crtc_dpms_video(crtc, FALSE); TODO */
for (i = 0; i <= need_aux; i++) {
/* Disable the VGA plane that we never use */
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(VGACNTRL, VGA_DISP_DISABLE, i);
/* Disable display plane */
temp = REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->cntr, i);
if ((temp & DISPLAY_PLANE_ENABLE) != 0) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->cntr,
temp & ~DISPLAY_PLANE_ENABLE, i);
/* Flush the plane changes */
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->base,
REG_READ(map->base), i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->base, i);
}
/* Next, disable display pipes */
temp = REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->conf, i);
if ((temp & PIPEACONF_ENABLE) != 0) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->conf,
temp & ~PIPEACONF_ENABLE, i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->conf, i);
}
/* Wait for for the pipe disable to take effect. */
gma_wait_for_vblank(dev);
temp = REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, i);
if ((temp & DPLL_VCO_ENABLE) != 0) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->dpll,
temp & ~DPLL_VCO_ENABLE, i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, i);
}
/* Wait for the clocks to turn off. */
udelay(150);
}
break;
}
/* Set FIFO Watermarks (values taken from EMGD) */
REG_WRITE(DSPARB, 0x3f80);
REG_WRITE(DSPFW1, 0x3f8f0404);
REG_WRITE(DSPFW2, 0x04040f04);
REG_WRITE(DSPFW3, 0x0);
REG_WRITE(DSPFW4, 0x04040404);
REG_WRITE(DSPFW5, 0x04040404);
REG_WRITE(DSPFW6, 0x78);
REG_WRITE(DSPCHICKENBIT, REG_READ(DSPCHICKENBIT) | 0xc040);
gma_power_end(dev);
}
/**
* Return the pipe currently connected to the panel fitter,
* or -1 if the panel fitter is not present or not in use
*/
static int oaktrail_panel_fitter_pipe(struct drm_device *dev)
{
u32 pfit_control;
pfit_control = REG_READ(PFIT_CONTROL);
/* See if the panel fitter is in use */
if ((pfit_control & PFIT_ENABLE) == 0)
return -1;
return (pfit_control >> 29) & 3;
}
static int oaktrail_crtc_mode_set(struct drm_crtc *crtc,
struct drm_display_mode *mode,
struct drm_display_mode *adjusted_mode,
int x, int y,
struct drm_framebuffer *old_fb)
{
struct drm_device *dev = crtc->dev;
struct gma_crtc *gma_crtc = to_gma_crtc(crtc);
struct drm_psb_private *dev_priv = dev->dev_private;
int pipe = gma_crtc->pipe;
const struct psb_offset *map = &dev_priv->regmap[pipe];
int refclk = 0;
struct gma_clock_t clock;
const struct gma_limit_t *limit;
u32 dpll = 0, fp = 0, dspcntr, pipeconf;
bool ok, is_sdvo = false;
bool is_lvds = false;
bool is_mipi = false;
struct drm_mode_config *mode_config = &dev->mode_config;
struct gma_encoder *gma_encoder = NULL;
uint64_t scalingType = DRM_MODE_SCALE_FULLSCREEN;
struct drm_connector *connector;
int i;
int need_aux = gma_pipe_has_type(crtc, INTEL_OUTPUT_SDVO) ? 1 : 0;
if (gma_pipe_has_type(crtc, INTEL_OUTPUT_HDMI))
return oaktrail_crtc_hdmi_mode_set(crtc, mode, adjusted_mode, x, y, old_fb);
if (!gma_power_begin(dev, true))
return 0;
memcpy(&gma_crtc->saved_mode,
mode,
sizeof(struct drm_display_mode));
memcpy(&gma_crtc->saved_adjusted_mode,
adjusted_mode,
sizeof(struct drm_display_mode));
list_for_each_entry(connector, &mode_config->connector_list, head) {
if (!connector->encoder || connector->encoder->crtc != crtc)
continue;
gma_encoder = gma_attached_encoder(connector);
switch (gma_encoder->type) {
case INTEL_OUTPUT_LVDS:
is_lvds = true;
break;
case INTEL_OUTPUT_SDVO:
is_sdvo = true;
break;
case INTEL_OUTPUT_MIPI:
is_mipi = true;
break;
}
}
/* Disable the VGA plane that we never use */
for (i = 0; i <= need_aux; i++)
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(VGACNTRL, VGA_DISP_DISABLE, i);
/* Disable the panel fitter if it was on our pipe */
if (oaktrail_panel_fitter_pipe(dev) == pipe)
REG_WRITE(PFIT_CONTROL, 0);
for (i = 0; i <= need_aux; i++) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->src, ((mode->crtc_hdisplay - 1) << 16) |
(mode->crtc_vdisplay - 1), i);
}
if (gma_encoder)
drm_object_property_get_value(&connector->base,
dev->mode_config.scaling_mode_property, &scalingType);
if (scalingType == DRM_MODE_SCALE_NO_SCALE) {
/* Moorestown doesn't have register support for centering so
* we need to mess with the h/vblank and h/vsync start and
* ends to get centering */
int offsetX = 0, offsetY = 0;
offsetX = (adjusted_mode->crtc_hdisplay -
mode->crtc_hdisplay) / 2;
offsetY = (adjusted_mode->crtc_vdisplay -
mode->crtc_vdisplay) / 2;
for (i = 0; i <= need_aux; i++) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->htotal, (mode->crtc_hdisplay - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_htotal - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->vtotal, (mode->crtc_vdisplay - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_vtotal - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->hblank,
(adjusted_mode->crtc_hblank_start - offsetX - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_hblank_end - offsetX - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->hsync,
(adjusted_mode->crtc_hsync_start - offsetX - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_hsync_end - offsetX - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->vblank,
(adjusted_mode->crtc_vblank_start - offsetY - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_vblank_end - offsetY - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->vsync,
(adjusted_mode->crtc_vsync_start - offsetY - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_vsync_end - offsetY - 1) << 16), i);
}
} else {
for (i = 0; i <= need_aux; i++) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->htotal, (adjusted_mode->crtc_hdisplay - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_htotal - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->vtotal, (adjusted_mode->crtc_vdisplay - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_vtotal - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->hblank, (adjusted_mode->crtc_hblank_start - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_hblank_end - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->hsync, (adjusted_mode->crtc_hsync_start - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_hsync_end - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->vblank, (adjusted_mode->crtc_vblank_start - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_vblank_end - 1) << 16), i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->vsync, (adjusted_mode->crtc_vsync_start - 1) |
((adjusted_mode->crtc_vsync_end - 1) << 16), i);
}
}
/* Flush the plane changes */
{
const struct drm_crtc_helper_funcs *crtc_funcs =
crtc->helper_private;
crtc_funcs->mode_set_base(crtc, x, y, old_fb);
}
/* setup pipeconf */
pipeconf = REG_READ(map->conf);
/* Set up the display plane register */
dspcntr = REG_READ(map->cntr);
dspcntr |= DISPPLANE_GAMMA_ENABLE;
if (pipe == 0)
dspcntr |= DISPPLANE_SEL_PIPE_A;
else
dspcntr |= DISPPLANE_SEL_PIPE_B;
if (is_mipi)
goto oaktrail_crtc_mode_set_exit;
dpll = 0; /*BIT16 = 0 for 100MHz reference */
refclk = is_sdvo ? 96000 : dev_priv->core_freq * 1000;
limit = mrst_limit(crtc, refclk);
ok = limit->find_pll(limit, crtc, adjusted_mode->clock,
refclk, &clock);
if (is_sdvo) {
/* Convert calculated values to register values */
clock.p1 = (1L << (clock.p1 - 1));
clock.m -= 2;
clock.n = (1L << (clock.n - 1));
}
if (!ok)
DRM_ERROR("Failed to find proper PLL settings");
mrst_print_pll(&clock);
if (is_sdvo)
fp = clock.n << 16 | clock.m;
else
fp = oaktrail_m_converts[(clock.m - MRST_M_MIN)] << 8;
dpll |= DPLL_VGA_MODE_DIS;
dpll |= DPLL_VCO_ENABLE;
if (is_lvds)
dpll |= DPLLA_MODE_LVDS;
else
dpll |= DPLLB_MODE_DAC_SERIAL;
if (is_sdvo) {
int sdvo_pixel_multiply =
adjusted_mode->clock / mode->clock;
dpll |= DPLL_DVO_HIGH_SPEED;
dpll |=
(sdvo_pixel_multiply -
1) << SDVO_MULTIPLIER_SHIFT_HIRES;
}
/* compute bitmask from p1 value */
if (is_sdvo)
dpll |= clock.p1 << 16; // dpll |= (1 << (clock.p1 - 1)) << 16;
else
dpll |= (1 << (clock.p1 - 2)) << 17;
dpll |= DPLL_VCO_ENABLE;
if (dpll & DPLL_VCO_ENABLE) {
for (i = 0; i <= need_aux; i++) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->fp0, fp, i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, dpll & ~DPLL_VCO_ENABLE, i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, i);
/* Check the DPLLA lock bit PIPEACONF[29] */
udelay(150);
}
}
for (i = 0; i <= need_aux; i++) {
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->fp0, fp, i);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, dpll, i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, i);
/* Wait for the clocks to stabilize. */
udelay(150);
/* write it again -- the BIOS does, after all */
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, dpll, i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->dpll, i);
/* Wait for the clocks to stabilize. */
udelay(150);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->conf, pipeconf, i);
REG_READ_WITH_AUX(map->conf, i);
gma_wait_for_vblank(dev);
REG_WRITE_WITH_AUX(map->cntr, dspcntr, i);
gma_wait_for_vblank(dev);
}
oaktrail_crtc_mode_set_exit:
gma_power_end(dev);
return 0;
}
static int oaktrail_pipe_set_base(struct drm_crtc *crtc,
int x, int y, struct drm_framebuffer *old_fb)
{
struct drm_device *dev = crtc->dev;
struct drm_psb_private *dev_priv = dev->dev_private;
struct gma_crtc *gma_crtc = to_gma_crtc(crtc);
struct drm_framebuffer *fb = crtc->primary->fb;
int pipe = gma_crtc->pipe;
const struct psb_offset *map = &dev_priv->regmap[pipe];
unsigned long start, offset;
u32 dspcntr;
int ret = 0;
/* no fb bound */
if (!fb) {
dev_dbg(dev->dev, "No FB bound\n");
return 0;
}
if (!gma_power_begin(dev, true))
return 0;
start = to_gtt_range(fb->obj[0])->offset;
offset = y * fb->pitches[0] + x * fb->format->cpp[0];
REG_WRITE(map->stride, fb->pitches[0]);
dspcntr = REG_READ(map->cntr);
dspcntr &= ~DISPPLANE_PIXFORMAT_MASK;
switch (fb->format->cpp[0] * 8) {
case 8:
dspcntr |= DISPPLANE_8BPP;
break;
case 16:
if (fb->format->depth == 15)
dspcntr |= DISPPLANE_15_16BPP;
else
dspcntr |= DISPPLANE_16BPP;
break;
case 24:
case 32:
dspcntr |= DISPPLANE_32BPP_NO_ALPHA;
break;
default:
dev_err(dev->dev, "Unknown color depth\n");
ret = -EINVAL;
goto pipe_set_base_exit;
}
REG_WRITE(map->cntr, dspcntr);
REG_WRITE(map->base, offset);
REG_READ(map->base);
REG_WRITE(map->surf, start);
REG_READ(map->surf);
pipe_set_base_exit:
gma_power_end(dev);
return ret;
}
const struct drm_crtc_helper_funcs oaktrail_helper_funcs = {
.dpms = oaktrail_crtc_dpms,
.mode_set = oaktrail_crtc_mode_set,
.mode_set_base = oaktrail_pipe_set_base,
.prepare = gma_crtc_prepare,
.commit = gma_crtc_commit,
};
/* Not used yet */
const struct gma_clock_funcs mrst_clock_funcs = {
.clock = mrst_lvds_clock,
.limit = mrst_limit,
.pll_is_valid = gma_pll_is_valid,
};
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Github"
}
|
Prevalence of overweight and hypertension in Tanzania: special emphasis on resting energy expenditure and leptin.
1. In the present study we investigated the difference in the distribution of selected cardiovascular disease risk factors among three middle-aged Tanzanian populations with different lifestyles. 2. The prevalence of hypertension and overweight was higher in urban areas than in rural areas. Plasma leptin concentration was also highest in urban areas. Based on these results, we speculated that overweight in the urban population may be partly due to adiposity. 3. Resting energy expenditure was lower in urban areas than in other areas for both genders. These findings suggest that the high prevalence of overweight in the urban population may be partly due to low physical activity levels.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
}
|
family relationships
"In the Waiting Room," then, properly tells or narrates the "growth of a poet's mind." The poet originates in the recognition of her separation from, and identity with, her world, at once finding and losing her "self." Her birth or awakening comes with a scream from inside the dentist's office that is also the voice of the child in the waiting room, since "inside" says "either." When the child produces her explanation, she is a poet:
HowβI didn't know any
word for itβhow "unlikely" . . .
To explain an identity in nature, she finds the word "unlikely"; the perception of sameness is unlikely, because it is more than a likeness or likely. If all accounts of phenomena are likely stories only, the breach that gives birth to the poet is an origin that both is and is unlikely. This is also the breach of metaphorβunlikely identities. The scream, which is not "like" the child's voice but is hers all the same, signals a birth into natural identity and an unlikely language. For one's identity, one's sameness with and difference from others and objects, comes to be adequately revealed in the unlikely likenesses of metaphoric language. If there is an "inside" or a primal source that is glimpsed in the child's vertiginous insight, it is covered up or "framed" by the conspiracy of common sense, "objective" facts, and grammarβof nature and poetry: "You are an I, / you are anElizabeth, / You are one of them." And the source disclosed in the grammatical cleavage of "you are an I" is not a luminous star but nothingness itself, "cold, blue-black space," split by a cryβ"an oh! of pain"βthat might have been ours.
Smart Search
The Modern American Poetry Site is a comprehensive learning environment and scholarly forum for the study of modern and contemporary American poetry. MAPS welcomes submissions of original essays and teaching materials related to MAPS poets and the Anthology of Modern American Poetry. We are also happy to take questions and suggestions for future materials.
Read More
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
|
Seth Rosenblatt/CNET
If Twitter's trending topics is any indication, your news feed is going to be a quieter place come Friday.
One of the top trending hashtags on Twitter on Thursday night was #WomenBoycottTwitter, which represents an effort to organize a daylong protest to highlight harassment and abuse directed toward women on the site.
The idea for the boycott was suggested in a tweet by engineer Kelly Ellis as a way to show solidarity for actress Rose McGowan and "all the victims of hate and harassment Twitter fails to support." McGowan's Twitter account was briefly suspended Thursday after she spent a few days tweeting about the sexual harassment allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Twitter later restored the account, explaining that McGowan had been locked out because one of her tweets included a private phone number, which violated the company's terms of service. Several Twitter users bristled at that explanation, noting that Twitter rules appear to be enforced unevenly, especially if the tweets are issued by President Donald Trump.
"The sheer number of trolls and right-wing ne'er-do-wells infesting Twitter are driving women away," Daily Dot writer Ana Valens told Gizmodo. "The boycott shows Twitter that they can't ignore this problem any longer."
Sexual harassment and bullying behavior have been a public blight on the social network for years. Some particularly ugly episodes occurred last year, including a hate mob attacking Leslie Jones, a star of last summer's "Ghostbusters" movie.
Robin Williams' death in 2015 led some Twitter users to send vicious messages to his daughter, prompting her to delete the app from her phone. That same month, Anita Sarkeesian, an academic highlighting how women are portrayed in video games, was so disturbed by the tweets she received that she fled her home, fearing for her safety.
The campaign appears to have wide support on Twitter, among men and women alike:
Ladies. Let's do this. #WomenBoycottTwitter. Not because of hate but because I love this platform and know it can be better. β christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) October 13, 2017
Tomorrow (Friday the 13th) will be the first day in over 10 years that I wonβt tweet. Join me. #WomenBoycottTwitter pic.twitter.com/xoEt5Bwj5s β Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) October 13, 2017
I will be boycotting tomorrow. But not for white women first and foremost. But for women of color and gender minorities #WomenBoycottTwitter β Dr. ChandaQuark π§π§ (@IBJIYONGI) October 13, 2017
Not everyone was on board with the idea, though:
Let me get this straight. I'm supposed to silence myself to show that I'm against being silenced? π―
Silly liberals ππ#WomenBoycottTwitter β Colleen β¨ββ¨ (@We_R_TheMedia) October 13, 2017
Twitter didn't respond to a request for comment.
Tech Culture: From film and television to social media and games, here's your place for the lighter side of tech.
Batteries Not Included: The CNET team shares experiences that remind us why tech stuff is cool.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
}
|
Midregional pro-atrial natriuretic peptide: a novel marker of myocardial fibrosis in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
We aimed to determine the diagnostic performance of biomarkers in predicting myocardial fibrosis assessed by late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). LGE CMR was performed in 40 consecutive patients with HCM. Left and right ventricular parameters, as well as the extent of LGE were determined and correlated to the plasma levels of midregional pro-atrial natriuretic peptide (MR-proANP), midregional pro-adrenomedullin (MR-proADM), carboxy-terminal pro-endothelin-1 (CT-proET-1), carboxy-terminal pro-vasopressin (CT-proAVP), matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9), tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-1 (TIMP-1) and interleukin-8 (IL-8). Myocardial fibrosis was assumed positive, if CMR indicated LGE. LGE was present in 26 of 40 patients with HCM (65%) with variable extent (mean: 14%, range: 1.3-42%). The extent of LGE was positively associated with MR-proANP (r = 0.4; P = 0.01). No correlations were found between LGE and MR-proADM (r = 0.1; P = 0.5), CT-proET-1 (r = 0.07; P = 0.66), CT-proAVP (r = 0.16; P = 0.3), MMP-9 (r = 0.01; P = 0.9), TIMP-1 (r = 0.02; P = 0.85), and IL-8 (r = 0.02; P = 0.89). After adjustment for confounding factors, MR-proANP was the only independent predictor associated with the presence of LGE (P = 0.007) in multivariate analysis. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) indicated good predictive performance (AUC = 0.882) of MR-proANP with respect to LGE. The odds ratio was 1.268 (95% confidence interval 1.066-1.508). The sensitivity of MR-proANP at a cut-off value of 207 pmol/L was 69%, the specificity 94%, the positive predictive value 90% and the negative predictive value 80%. The results imply that MR-proANP serves as a novel marker of myocardial fibrosis assessed by LGE CMR in patients with HCM.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
}
|
Tuesday night, U.S. Senator Rand Paul issued the following statement after President Donald Trump delivered the State of the Union address to Congress:
βDuring President Trumpβs first year, we lowered Americansβ taxes, eliminated unnecessary regulations, appointed constitutional conservatives to all levels of the judiciary, including seating Justice Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, and achieved conservative reforms in health care, foreign aid, energy, and more. Our economy is growing, businesses are boosting workersβ pay and reinvesting in America, and policies are being crafted with a focus on putting America first. There is still much to be done, but I am excited about the gains we made in the past year, and I look forward to continuing to work with the President to help ensure this is only the beginning.β
|
{
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
}
|
"R:" "What am I doing with my life?" "I'm so pale." "I should get out more." "I should eat better." "My posture is terrible." "I should stand up straighter." "People would respect me more if I stood up straighter." "What's wrong with me?" "I just want to connect." "Why can't I connect with people?" "Oh, right." "It's because I'm dead." "I shouldn't be so hard on myself." "I mean, we're all dead." "This girl is dead." "That guy's dead." "That guy in the corner is definitely dead." " Jesus, these guys look awful." " (ZOMBIES MOANING)" "I wish I could introduce myself, but I don't remember my name anymore." "I mean, I think it started with an "R," but that's all I have left." "I can't remember my name, or my parents, or my job." "Although my hoodie would suggest I was unemployed." "(SCANNER BEEPS)" "Sometimes I look at the others and try to imagine what they were." "You were a janitor." "You were the rich son of a corporate CEO." "You were a personal trainer." " (SCREAMING) - (BALL BOUNCING)" "And now you're a Corpse." "I have a hard time piecing together how this whole apocalypse thing happened." "Could have been chemical warfare or an airborne virus, or a radioactive outbreak monkey." "But it doesn't really matter." "This is what we are now." "This is a typical day for me." "I shuffle around, occasionally bumping into people, unable to apologize or say much of anything." "It must have been so much better before, when everyone could express themselves, and communicate their feelings and just enjoy each other's company." "A lot of us have made our home here at this airport." "I don't know why." "People wait at airports, I guess, but I'm not sure what we're all waiting for." "(BONEYS GROWLING)" "Oh, man." "They call these guys Boneys." "They don't bother us much." "But they'll eat anything with a heartbeat." "I mean, I will too, but at least I'm conflicted about it." "We all become them some day." "At some point you just give up, I guess." "You lose all hope." "After that, there's no turning back." "Oh, man, gross." "Stop." "Stop, don't pick at it!" "You're making it worse!" "Oh, this is what I have to look forward to." "It's kind of a bummer." "I don't want to be this way." "I'm lonely." "I'm lost." "I mean, I'm literally lost." "I've never been in this part of the airport before." "Wonder if these guys are lost, too." "Wandering around, but never getting anywhere." "Do they feel trapped?" "Do they want more than this?" "Am I the only one?" "(SONG PLAYING)" "R:" "This is my best friend." "(M GROANING)" "By best friend, I mean we occasionally grunt and stare awkwardly at each other." "(BOTH GRUNT)" "We even have almost-conversations sometimes." "(BOTH GRUNTING RHYTHMICALLY)" "Days pass this way." "But sometimes we even find actual words." "Words like..." "Hungry." "And..." "City." "Uh." "Even though we can't communicate, we do share a similar taste in food." "Traveling in packs just kind of makes sense, especially when everyone and their grandmother is trying to shoot you in the head all the time." "God, we move slow." "(SIGHS) This could take a while." "(INDISTINCT TALKING)" "Hello, and thank you for your service today." "In the eight years since this plague destroyed our world..." "You think we're getting this stuff for the cure?" "...since we erected this wall..." "No one believes in a cure anymore, Jules." "...we have counted on young volunteers like you to gather resources from beyond the wall." "But first, a word of caution." "Corpses look human, they are not." "They do not think." "They do not bleed." "Whether they were your mother or your best friend, they are beyond your help." "They are uncaring, unfeeling, incapable of remorse." "Sound like anyone you know, Dad?" "Just picture them as this." "(GROWLING)" "As sons and daughters of possibly the sole remaining human settlement on Earth, you are a critical part of what stands between us and extinction." "Therefore you have an obligation to return to us safely." "And if you remember your training, you will." "Good luck, Godspeed, and God bless America." "USA!" "USA!" "PERRY:" "Let's go." "(ALARM RINGING)" "Sweet." "(SOFT MUSIC PLAYING)" "(INHALES DEEPLY)" "(GUN FIRING)" "Hey, Berg, you gonna help us out or what?" " No dice." "Almost at level five." " (LOW SHRIEKING IN DISTANCE)" "(HEAVY THUD IN DISTANCE)" "Did you hear that?" "I did." "We should bail." "Oh, hey, we can't just bail." "We have orders." "Do you have any idea how much medicine the City goes through a month?" "We need pharma salvage to survive." " We can't just abandon our..." " You sound just like my dad." " Thank you." " Yeah, it wasn't a compliment." "Oh, here, guys." "Take some Prozac." "Maybe that will cheer you up." "(METAL CLANKS)" "I told you I heard something." "(COCKING GUN)" "Per, let's bail." "Perry?" "We have orders, Jules." "It was nothing anyway." " You're being paranoid, okay?" " Perry!" "(GROWLING)" "(GUNS FIRING)" "Aim for their heads!" "(GRUNTING)" "(GROWLS)" "Smile, mother... (SCREAMS)" "(GRUNTING)" " R:" "Nice watch." " (SCREAMING)" "Now, I'm not proud of this." "In fact, I'd appreciate it if you might look away for a moment here." "I don't like hurting people, but this is the world now." "The new hunger is a very powerful thing." "(GROANS)" "If I don't eat all of him, if I spare his brain, he'll rise up and become a Corpse like me." "But if I do, I get his memories, his thoughts, his feelings." "I'm sorry, I just can't help it." "The brain's the best part." "The part that makes me feel human again." "(IMITATES EXPLOSION)" "You like it, Perry?" "R:" "I don't want to hurt you." "I just want to feel what you felt." "To feel a little better." "A little less dead." "Perry..." "I think I love you." "Say something." "Don't just say nothing." "No, I, um..." "I think I love you too, Julie." "I miss airplanes." "My mom used to say that it looked like an Etch A Sketch up there." "I like that you remember that kind of stuff." "If we don't, then it will just all be gone." "You know?" "Yeah." "The world is so messed up." "Not all of it." "Cheeseball." "(BOTH CHUCKLE)" "Perry?" "(ZOMBIES GROWLING)" " Perry!" " (MACHINE GUN FIRING)" "Perry, where are you?" "Answer me!" "(GROWLS)" "(CLATTERING)" "(R GROWLS)" "(STAMMERING) Julie..." "J-Julie..." "(SNIFFING)" "Safe." "Come..." "What?" "R:" "I don't know what I'm doing." "What's wrong with me?" "These other guys would never bring a living person home." "You know why?" "Because that's crazy!" "Right now, they think she's just another one of us." "A new addition to the family." "But they would think I was insane." "If they could think." "Why do I have to be so weird?" "What am I doing?" "(SCANNER BEEPS)" "(WIND WHISTLING)" "(DOOR CLOSES)" "(SOBBING)" "Home..." "(SOBS)" "(STAMMERING) Not eat." "(SOBS)" "Keep you safe." "(GASPS)" "(DOOR CLOSES)" "All right." "Maybe I could have thought this through a little more." "But I can tell when a girl needs her space." "There's a lot of ways to get to know a person." "Eating her dead boyfriend's brains is one of the more unorthodox methods, but..." "(CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYING)" "GRIGIO:" "It's a special occasion." "A special occasion, sir?" "It's Mom's birthday." " To Diane." " To Mom." "Yeah." " It's Mom's birthday." " GRIGIO:" "So, Perry," "Julie tells me you've been working in Agriculture." "But tell me you would never consider going to work construction with your father." "You know, on the wall we need good people." "Um..." "Don't mind him, Per." "Dad's idea of saving humanity is to build a really big concrete box, put everyone in it, and then wait at the door with guns until we grow old and die." "Well, Julie, without the wall, we would be eating brains now" " instead of rice." " Dad..." "JULLE:" "This is the only way past the wall." "Otherwise we get stopped." "Okay..." "Come on." "It's not that bad." "Come on." "I haven't heard from him in two days, Jules." "He's on construction detail, Perry." "He's working." "My dad goes weeks without checking in." "Okay." "This way." "Hey." "It's gonna be okay." "(COMMENTARY PLAYING FAINTLY)" "(HITTING BALL)" "(CROWD CHEERING)" "Dad." "Per." "(GROWLS)" "Whoa, whoa, hey, hey, hey!" "Perry!" "Come on!" "R:" "No wonder she's so afraid of me." "I need a different approach." "Okay, here we go." "Don't be creepy." "Don't be creepy." "Don't be creepy." "(SHIVERING)" "What are you doing?" "Please leave me alone." "Why me?" "Why did you save me?" "Don't" "c-cry." "(SOFT MUSIC PLAYING)" "Safe." "Keep you safe." "What are you?" "(SIGHS)" "I'm hungry." "Just let me go!" "(STAMMERING) Not safe." "Not safe?" "Uh-huh." "Not safe." "(JULIE SIGHS)" "Well, then you're just gonna have to go and get me some food." "Because I'm starved." "Please?" "I'd be very grateful for some food." "O-okay." "(DOOR CLOSES)" "(ZOMBIE GROANS)" "God!" "(ZOMBIES SNIFFING)" "Shit." "(GASPS)" "Don't r-run." "(SNIFFING)" "Come." "S-safe." "Thank you." "(ZOMBIES GROANING)" "Be dead." "(GROANING)" "Okay?" "(GRUNTING)" "That's too m-much." "Told you not s-safe." "Yeah, I get that." "I really am hungry, though." "JULIE:" "Yes!" "Mmm." "My God." "Oh, no." "Stop staring." "You're acting weird again." "(RATTLING)" "Thank you." "Oh, my God." "Mmm!" "Oh, man." "I can't remember the last time I had a beer." "I guess you can't be all that bad, Mr. Zombie." "(STAMMERING) My name..." "You have a name?" "What is your name?" "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr..." "Rrrr?" "R:" "This date is not going well." "I want to die all over again." "Rrrrrrr..." "Does your name start with "R"?" "Um..." "Robert?" "Richard?" "Randy?" "Raphael?" "Ricardo?" "Why don't I just call you "R"?" "I mean, that's a start, right?" "R..." "I want to go home, R." "Mmm-mmm." "It's n-not safe." "I get that." "And look..." "I know that you saved my life." "And I'm grateful for that." "But you walked me into this place." "So I know that you can walk me out again." "Oh, no." "She can't leave." "She just got here." "Tell her she has to wait." "Tell her they'll notice." "H-h-have to wait." "They..." "They'll notice." "Huh." "Not bad." "How long?" "F-f-few d-days." "Th-they'll f-forget." "Y-y-you'll be o-kay." "Are there others like you?" "I mean, I've..." "I've never ever heard a Corpse talk before." "I mean, apart from the groaning." "Okay." "A few days, huh?" "What am I supposed to do for a few days around here anyway?" "This is awesome!" "You wanna try?" "Oh, God!" "Oh!" "You're a leadfoot." "Okay." "Okay." "Pick a foot." "You're using two feet." "Pick one foot..." "There you go." "Okay... (LAUGHS)" "There you go." "All right." "Two hands on the wheel, buddy." "(JULIE GRUNTS)" "Jesus, R!" "This was a beautiful car!" "AUTOMATED VOICE:" "Recalculating." "(SCOFFS)" "(BREATHES DEEPLY)" "What's with all the vinyl?" "Couldn't figure out how to work an iPod?" "Better s-sound." "Oh, you're a purist, huh?" "More alive." "Yeah." "That's true." "Lot more trouble, though." "There you go again." "Shrugging." "Stop shrugging, shrugger." "It's a very non-committal gesture." "Really?" "These are really cool records." "How did you get all these?" "I collect things." "Yeah, I can see that." "You, my friend, are a hoarder." "Man, there's this awesome record store on Main and Ivy." "You would love it." "It's so cool." "Was so cool." "Alrighty." "(SONG PLAYING)" "Much better." "R?" "Can I ask you something?" "My boyfriend, he died back there." "Will he come back?" "As one of you?" "(SIGHS)" "That's good, I guess." "Something happened to him." "A lot of things happened to him." "But I guess there just came a point where he couldn't absorb any more." "It's just, in my world, people die all the time." "So..." "You know, it's not like" "I'm not sad that he's gone." "Because I am." "But I think I've been preparing for it for a really long time." "(SONG PLAYING)" "What are you?" "R:" "Man, it must be nice to sleep." "I wish I could." "I wish I could dream." "But that's not really an option for me." "The dead don't dream." "This is as close as we get." "You sure about this, son?" "Welcome, then." "Sorry for your loss." "Me, too." "Give him one and show him how to use it." "Hey, Berg, you gonna help us out or what?" "I'm almost at level five." "(HEAVY THUD IN DISTANCE)" "Did you hear that?" "I did." "We should bail." "PERRY:" "We can't just bail." "We have orders." "You sound just like my dad." " Thank you." " Yeah, it wasn't a compliment." "I told you I heard something." "JULIE:" "Perry!" "Aim for their heads." "(SPITTING)" "(BREATHING HEAVILY)" "(JULIE SCREAMING)" "(WEED WHACKER WHIRRING)" "(GROWLS)" "(GRUNTING)" "(SNIFFING)" "(JULIE SCREAMS)" "You said a few days." "It's been a few days, R." "I have to go home." "S-stay t-together." "Safe." "(M GROWLING)" "What?" "J-Julie." "Living." "Eat!" "(LOW GROWLING)" "Oh, my God!" "We go." "Eat." "R. Look." "(ZOMBIES MOANING)" "(GROWLING)" "(ROARS)" "(BANGING ON DOOR)" "This way." "Come with me." "What?" "No!" "Want to help her." "Who the hell asked you?" "Like her." "It's okay." "I'm sure it is." " Over there, the garage." " Hold on." "(SIGHS) I'm so happy to see you right now." "You okay?" "Um..." "R?" "(ZOMBIES SNIFFING AND MOANING)" "You drive." "Good idea." "(ENGINE STARTS)" "(BONEY SHRIEKS)" "(TIRES SCREECHING)" "(ROARING)" "MALE VOICE ON PA:" "The white zone is for loading and unloading of passengers only." "(SONG PLAYING)" "Jesus, I'm freezing." "I have to pull over." "This is one of the last neighborhoods my dad evacuated." "Maybe these houses have food." "Okay, come on." " (RATTLING DOOR)" " Oh, man." "It's locked." "(THUDS)" "Oh, God." "(JULIE SHIVERING)" "Oh, cool!" "Look what they have." "I haven't seen one of these in forever." "Cheese!" "(CHUCKLES)" "It's all right." "See?" "Yeah." "It's important to preserve memories, you know?" "Especially now that the world is on its way out." "Everything you see, you may be seeing for the last time." "Perry used to say that." "Here." "Take a picture." "(FOOTSTEPS)" "(JULIE SIGHS)" "I'm exhausted." "The bed actually isn't too rotten, so I'm gonna go to sleep." "Good night." "Um..." "R?" "Y-yeah?" "I was..." "I was thinking..." "You know, you could sleep in there if you want." "On the floor." "These houses creep me out, so..." "Okay." "(M BREATHING HEAVILY)" "(ZOMBIES MOANING)" "Do you feel it?" "(HEARTS BEATING)" "(NECK CRACKS)" "(BONEYS GROWLING)" "(SNIFFING)" "(ROARS)" "(SHUSHING)" "SOLDIER:" "Hey, look up this street." "Holy shit." "That's my dad." "Get back!" "He would have killed you." "If he saw you, he would have just shot you in the head, and you'd just be gone." "(EXHALES)" "These clothes are soaking still." "I'm gonna lay them out to dry." "Oh, relax." "R:" "Holy shit." "Don't look." "Okay." "Holy shit!" "Hey." "Do you have to eat people?" "Y-yeah." "Or you'll die?" " Yeah." " But you didn't eat me." "You rescued me." "Like, a bunch." "It must be hard being stuck in there." "You know, I can see you trying." "Maybe that's what people do." "You know, we try to be better." "Sometimes we kind of suck at it." "But I look at you and you try so much harder than any human in my city." "You're a good person, R." "Anyway." "It was me." "What was you?" "(TICKING)" "Oh." "I mean, I..." "I guess I kind of knew that." "Y-you did?" "Yeah, I..." "I guess I hoped that you didn't." "I'm sorry." "Julie..." "I'm so s-sorry." "Julie..." "R:" "The dead do not sleep." "(BIRDS TWITTERING)" "JULIE:" "If you guys could pick any job in the world..." "Pretend that everything was totally different, what would you want to do?" " Nursing." " Yeah?" "Yeah." "Healing people and saving lives and..." "I don't know, finding a cure." "I like that." "I think someday someone's gonna figure out this whole thing and exhume the whole world." "Exhume?" "And what does that mean?" "Um, exhume means to, like, revive." "It means to dig up." "As in digging up a corpse." "Whatever." "What the hell are you doing here?" "Are you actually dreaming right now?" "I'm not sure." "You can't dream, Corpse." "Dreaming is for humans." "Chill out, Per." "He can dream if he wants to." "What about you, R?" "What do you want to be?" "I don't know." "I don't even know what I am." "Well, you can be whatever you want." "Isn't that what they say?" "We can, right?" "You and me?" "Mmm-hmm." "It's not gonna happen, loverboy." "Not after you told her you ate her ex." "Shrug." "(SONG PLAYING)" "R:" "So much for dreaming." "You can't be whatever you want." "All I'll ever be is a slow, pale, hunched-over, dead-eyed zombie." "What did I think was gonna happen?" "That she'd actually want to stay with me?" "It's hopeless." "This is what I get for wanting more." "I should just be happy with what I had." "Things don't change." "I need to accept that." "It's easier not to feel." "Then I wouldn't have to feel like this." "βͺ I've been alone too many nights βͺ" "βͺ Too proud to tell you when you're right βͺ" "βͺ A little patience would have helped me then βͺ" "βͺ A lot like the break βͺ βͺ has been the common standard βͺ" "βͺ All the angels above the earth I prayed βͺ" "βͺ Send this message right into her head βͺ" "βͺ There's certain things in life I cannot take βͺ" "βͺ And I will wait βͺ" "βͺ I hope you know I care βͺ" "βͺ So cold I know you can't believe it βͺ" "βͺ Sometimes you gotta face the feeling βͺ" "βͺ When you don't care if you get up again βͺ" "βͺ There's a thousand things I will not understand βͺ" "βͺ I hope you know I care βͺ" "βͺ Now you're dealing with the hell βͺ βͺ I put you through βͺ" "βͺ If I had my way I would be βͺ βͺ right there next to you βͺ" "βͺ There's certain things in life you cannot change βͺ" "βͺ There's certain things βͺ" "Identify yourself!" "It's just me, Kevin." "It's okay." "I'm fine." "Just stop right there." "It's okay." "I'm not infected." "I said stop, Julie!" "Okay." "Fine." "Fine." "Let me check you out." "(DEVICE BEEPING)" " Is she okay?" " Clear, sir." "Hi, Dad." "I sent a half a dozen units out looking for you." "Nora said you were taken into..." "Yeah, I was." "But I escaped." "I was holed up in a house in the suburbs and then I found a car, so I came here." "Julie, are you sure nothing bit you?" "Do I look infected to you, Dad?" "We have to be safe." "Yeah, I know." "I know." "I'm fine, though." "I promise." "I thought I lost you." "Well, you didn't, Dad." "I'm here." "Welcome home." "Yeah." "Good to be back." "So I'm just gonna go home." "I'm gonna blend in." "I'm gonna stop thinking so much." "I'm gonna forget about her, just like I forgot about everything else." "I'm gonna..." "Oh, shit, am I cold?" "Is that what this is?" "Corpses don't get cold." "M:" "Yo!" "What are you doing here?" "Boneys." "They chased me out." "Came to find you." "Where is she?" "Went home." "You okay?" "No." "Bitches, man." "Boneys looking for you." "And her." "You started something." "I saw pictures last night." "Memories." "My mom..." "Summertime." "Cream of Wheat." "A girl." "A dream?" "A dream." "We are changing, I think." "We are." "I-I have to tell her." "W-will you help?" "H-help?" "Ex-hume?" "ZOMBIE:" "E-exhume." "(ZOMBIES GROANING IN AGREEMENT)" "They said" ""Fuck, yeah !"" "Wait here." "Be careful." "Okay?" "So I'll wait here." "It's not that bad." "Come on." "R:" "Julie and I were giving the others hope." "And it was spreading fast." "I guess the Boneys didn't like that." "That must be why they're looking for us." "I have to tell Julie." "I have to explain what's happening before it's too late." "I have to..." "Oh, no." "Oh, no." "Please, go!" "Go with your friends!" "Shoo!" "Leave me!" "That's it!" "Okay." "No, I'm serious, Nora." "I mean, "Corpse" is just..." "It's just a stupid name that we came up with for a state of being that we don't understand." "Yeah." "(SIGHS) Oh, my God!" "What is wrong with me?" "Okay." "I've got to tell you something." "This is kind of weird." " Please do not freak out." " No." "But I actually miss him." " You..." "You miss him?" " I know, it's so stupid." " Like you're attracted to him?" " No, I don't..." "Like he could be your boyfriend?" "Your zombie boyfriend?" "I mean, I know it's really hard to meet guys right now with the apocalypse and stuff, trust me." "And look, I know that you miss Perry." "Okay?" "But, Julie, this is weird." "Like, I wish the Internet was still working so I could just look up whatever it is that's wrong with you." "Shut up." "All right." "Okay." "I'm getting ready for bed." "Hey." "(JULIE SIGHS)" "I'm glad you're back." "Yeah." "(SING-SONG) Have sweet dreams about your zombie." "All right. (CHUCKLES)" "(SIGHS)" "Julie." "Julie!" "Oh, my God." "R!" "What are you doing here?" "Came to see you." "R..." "You can't just do that." "It's dangerous." "NORA:" "Grigio, shut up!" "I'm trying to sleep!" "Uh, sorry!" "Jesus, R, are you crazy?" "The people here, they're not like me." "If they see you, you'll get killed." "Do you understand that?" "Yes." "NORA:" "Are you talking to yourself?" " No!" " (DOOR OPENS)" "NORA:" "Okay, seriously, what is going on out here, Julie?" "Oh, my God !" "Is that him?" "Yeah." "'Sup?" "I'm sorry." "I know." "I'm sorry, too." "I actually missed you." "Me, too." "It's funny." "You feel warmer than I remember." "(SIREN WAILING)" "That's the patrol." "Come on, we better get you inside." "(JULIE SIGHS)" "Come on." "You're lucky my dad got pulled into some emergency thing." "You're safe here tonight, R." "After that, I don't know what we're gonna do." "How did you die?" "I don't remember." "How old are you?" "Because you could be twenty-something, but you could also be a teenager." " You have one of those faces." " Oh, my God." "And I can't even smell..." "You don't smell..." "He doesn't smell rotten." " I don't..." " Amazing." "Nora, he didn't come here for an interview." "Stop." "Why did you come here, R?" "To show everyone..." "Show them what?" "That we can change." "R, no one here is ever gonna buy that." "Not that we could get you even close enough to tell them." "As soon as they saw you, they would blow your head to bits." "Wait a minute." "Did you say "we"?" "Lots of us changing." "Dreaming." "That's kind of a big deal." "We have to move fast." "What do you mean?" "Boneys chasing me." "They're chasing us." "Okay, we have to go to my dad." "No, that is a very bad idea." "No, Nora, he was a reasonable guy once." "(CHUCKLES) Oh, no, I think you're confused." "It was your mom that was the reasonable one." "It was your dad that grounded you for a year for stealing Peach Schnapps." "Are you serious?" "It's your dad that likes to shoot Corpses in the head." "Well, what other choice do we have, Nora?" "(SIGHS) Still, we'd have to get him through the city." "Someone would definitely see you." "There isn't much time." "We could fix him up." "What?" "I have some makeup that I was saving for a special occasion that obviously isn't gonna happen." "Yeah." "Yeah, we could." "We could put on a little bit of foundation, maybe a little blush." "Probably a lot of blush." "No way." "Yeah, way." "(OH PRETTY WOMAN PLAYING)" "Would you change the song, please?" "What?" "It's funny." "No, it's not." "Fine." "(SONG PLAYING)" "There we go." "Oh, yeah." "Hold up..." "You look hot!" "(COCKING GUN)" "(GROWLING)" "(BONEYS ROARING)" "What?" "Nothing." "It's just, you look nice." "I don't know how my dad's gonna be." "He gets kind of crazy." "This might not work." "Hey." "No matter what, we stay together." "We're changing everything." "I know." "Stay together." "Promise." "I promise." "Come on." "Hey, it's game time." "All right, let's do this." "KEVIN:" "Excuse me." "Where are you guys headed?" "To see my dad, Kevin." "Miss Grigio, I can't let you guys in." "We're on high alert around here." " Why?" "What's going on?" " It's classified." "All right, well, we have our own classified business, so come on." "Hey." "R:" "Say something human." "Say something human." "How are you?" "Nailed it." "Over here." "He's fine." "Okay, you guys wait here." "What are you doing here?" "What is going on?" "What is all this?" "I'm not sure, but it's not good." "We've been getting reports there are sizable packs of skeletons and Corpses coming toward us." "We don't know why, but if they're here to attack, there's nothing we can do about it." "Too many of them, too few of us." "So I want you to get home, lock down the house." "I have the gun there, the Ruger SR..." "This?" "Yeah, okay." "I need to talk to you." " Julie, not now." " Dad, it's important." "This is gonna sound really crazy, but" "I think the dead are coming back to life." "That does sound crazy." "They're changing, Dad." "They're..." "I don't know." "They're somehow curing themselves." "You think they're curing themselves?" "How is that?" "I saw it." "It is really happening." "No." "You know what is happening, Julie?" "What's happening is every day there are more of them and less of us." "They are not curing themselves." "We're their food source." "They are not becoming vegan." "Okay?" "They don't eat broccoli." "They eat brains, your mother's and your boyfriend's included." "Okay?" "So I want you to wake up!" " I'll explain." " GRIGIO:" "Okay?" "What do you mean, "you'll explain"?" "Explain what?" "I got this." "Get yourself home." "Barricade yourself in the shelter." "There is enough stuff there that you can open up..." "Uh..." "Hi." "Who are you?" "This is R." "I didn't ask you." "I asked him." "Who are you?" "(STAMMERING)" "You're a Corpse?" "He saved my life." "He took care of me." "I triggered something in him and that must have sparked something in all of them..." " Now it's triggered something in me." " JULIE:" "No..." "Dad !" "No!" "Dad!" "We want to help." "Please, they don't want to attack us." "They want to help." "We're..." "We're getting better." "No." "Things don't get better." "Things get worse." "People get bit, then they get infected, then I shoot them in the head." " No, Dad..." " That's what happened to your mother, and that's what's gonna happen to him." "(GUN COCKING)" "I'm really sorry, Mr. Grigio." "Go." "Get out of here and be safe, no matter what." "Okay?" "Julie..." "I have to go." "You're not gonna shoot me." "Yes." "Yeah, I will." "Totally." "(PANTING)" "Okay." "That could have gone better." "I need to warn my friends." " Where?" " The stadium... (ALARM BLARING)" "Shit!" "Come on !" "Get on the subway!" "(GASPS)" "Whoa." "M:" "Excuse me." "Excuse me." "Sorry." "Coming through." "R." "Julie." "Hi." "Ready for a fight." "Yeah, I can see that." "R:" "S-soldiers coming." "Boneys closing in." "(BONEYS GROWLING)" "(THUDDING)" "(GLASS SHATTERING)" "They're here now." " Keep them out." " We will." "Run." "(ALL SHRIEKING)" "(SOLDIERS SHOUTING)" "JULIE:" "This way, come on!" "SOLDIER:" "Sir, your daughter is with the Corpse." "I've got eyes on them." "(ROARS)" "(GRUNTING)" "(ALL CLAMORING)" " (GROWLS) - (JULIE GASPS)" "(SCREAMS)" "Thank you." "Who the hell do we shoot?" "This asshole." "Hi." "Hey." "Hi." "Hi." "SOLDIER 1 :" "We see Corpses fighting skeletons, sir." "SOLDIER 2:" "Copy that." "We're seeing that over here, too." "Sorry, can you repeat that?" "Copy that." "We're seeing Corpses fighting skeletons, sir." "JULIE:" "Shit!" "(BONEY GROWLING)" "It's over." "No." "Keep you safe." "It will be okay." "R?" "R!" "R, please?" "You okay?" " Yeah." " Yeah?" "Whoa." "(GUN FIRES)" "(GASPS)" "Next one's the head." "Move away from him, Julie." "JULIE:" "No!" "Julie, move now." "Dad, you have to listen to me." "I know we lost everybody." "I know you lost Mom." "But you and me, we are still here." "We can fix all this." "We can start over." "They need our help." "Please, Dad !" "Look at him." "He's different." "He's..." "Bleeding." "He's bleeding, Dad." "Corpses don't bleed!" "Oh, God." "You're alive." "He's alive!" "(JULIE LAUGHS)" "You're alive." "Does it hurt?" "Yeah." "Yeah?" "Sir?" "This is Colonel Grigio." "The situation has changed." "Let's get you two the hell out of here." "Are you still bleeding?" " Yes." " Good." "Sorry." "R:" "On the one hand, getting shot in the chest hurt." "Like, a lot." "But on the other, it felt good to bleed, to feel pain." "To feel love." "I wish I could say we cured the Boneys with love, but really, we just straight up killed them all." "It sounds kind of messed up, but no one felt too bad about it." "They were too far gone to change." "It was actually a really good bonding experience for us and the humans." "Once we joined forces, they didn't stand a chance." "The ones we didn't kill just wasted away." "And the rest of us?" "Well, we kind of learned how to live again." "For a while, it seemed like a lot of us forgot what that meant." "The humans began to accept us, connect with us, teach us." "This was the key to the cure." "It was scary at first, but every great thing starts out a little scary, doesn't it?" "This is how it happened." "This is how the world was exhumed." "You need some help?" "Yeah." "I have, uh, zombie fingers." "Thank you." "Here." "Oh, it's okay." "I don't mind the rain." "I insist." "I'm..." "Mar-marcus." "Emily." "You're..." "You're very pretty." "Thank you, Marcus." "Now you're supposed to say I'm pretty, too." "R?" "Yeah?" "Do you remember your name yet?" "No." "Well, you know, you could just give yourself one." "Just pick one." "Whatever you want." "I like "R."" "Really?" "You don't want to know what it was?" "You don't want your old life back?" "No." "I want this one." "(SIGHS)" "Just "R," huh?" "Just "R.""
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This invention relates to air supply systems and in particular, to a new and improved air supply system incorporating a track along which a vehicle may move and pick up air from the track. The invention will be described herein as used with an air bearing transporter such as is shown by way of example in U.S. Pat. No. 3,796,279. However the air supply system of the present invention is not limited to use with air bearing transporters and may be utilized for supplying air under pressure to any type of vehicle or other load while moving or stationary.
An air bearing transporter has a plurality of air bearings which produce an air film between the transporter and the floor or other surface resulting in very low friction permitting the transporter and its load to be moved with a small force. The transporter requires a supply of air under pressure which may be provided by an onboard compressor or by a hose connection or by an air supply in the floor over which the transporter moves.
A prior air supply system with an air track is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,820,467. The air track comprises one or more ducts in the floor with openings along the upper surface of the duct for air flow into the vehicle positioned above the ducts. In this prior art system, the air passages in the upper wall of the ducts are open at all times, resulting in continuous air flow through all openings even though the vehicle is positioned over only a few of the openings. Such a system requires a relatively high rating for the compressed air source while wasting most of the compressed air.
In order to meet this disadvantage, various types of air supply systems have been developed utilizing control valves for the air flow. However the large number of valves required makes these systems expensive, and the valves are subject to damage and jamming and require continuous maintenance.
Another form of air track is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,722,424. In one embodiment, the spaced openings along the duct are closed by a sealing strip which is moved downward exposing the openings in the duct by the vehicle as it moves along the track. An alternative embodiment utilizes a pair of resilient tubes for closing a continuous opening in the duct, with a support structure carried by the vehicle and moving between the resilient tubes on rollers providing air flow from the duct to the vehicle. Another prior art system is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,190,460, utilizing a resilient duct with lips moved inward to an open position by a suction applied to the duct.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a new and improved air supply system which is simple to manufacture, install and maintain, relatively inexpensive and trouble free, and having substantially no air losses. A further object is to provide a new and improved air supply system utilizing an air track for the floor and a cooperating probe for the vehicle, with the probe being engageable with and disengageable from the air track as desired permitting control of movement of the vehicle along the track and permitting movement of the vehicle away from the track as desired. An additional object is to provide an air track and movable probe combination which can operate with the track in an overhead or side wall position. Other objects, advantages, features and results will more fully appear in the course of the following description.
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Alaska Deckhand Jobs β Whatβs Expected of You
If you land a job on a fishing boat you need to be prepared to work hard. Harvesting jobs can be highly lucrative but if you slack off you wonβt have as much of a chance to earn good money. What is expected of deckhands on a fishing boat? First of all, donβt complain. Youβve been lucky enough to land a coveted position on a fishing vessel. Donβt blow it by talking your way OUT of a job! Fishing boat owners want people who will work hard when they are asked to without complaining.
The manager mentioned above explained what the work load is like for longliner crew members:
βWe just expect everyone to pitch in and do their job. You canβt call in sick or expect not to work when you donβt feel like it, because itβs a real team effort. You donβt have to be an all-star; you just have to get the job done. Itβs very rare that someone ever quits or doesnβt work a shift, and thereβs no way to get off the boat, anyway. Everyone works on a straight percentage except for the engineer and the captain, who get a small daily allowance in addition to a percentage. Contracts are just trip to trip, and we usually donβt know how long the trip will be, though we canβt really stay out for more than forty days.β
Another vital part of doing well on a fishing boat is being on time. It is imperative that you know when you are expected to report for your shift and that you are there, working, on time.
Other important points to keep in mind when working on a fishing vessel include not going inside with rain gear on, and having the proper clothing and equipment. Rain gear with bib-style pants are the best way to go. Other suggestions for what to wear include long-sleeved t-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, rubber boots, wool socks, and long underwear. These items will make life on the job much more bearable.
In addition to being aware of what is expected of you, itβs equally important to make sure your own expectations are clear. Be sure you are told up front how much you will be paid and how much you are expected to pay for. Different captains have different policies involving paying for fuel, repairs, and groceries. Are you required to supply or pay for your own rain gear? Bedding? First aid kit? Donβt set yourself up for a rude awakening upon receiving your first paycheck.
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Freedom of religion has wrongly and unfairly been used to deny marriage rights to gay and lesbian Australians and must be strongly resisted, Labor frontbencher Penny Wong has said.
In a rallying call for the separation of church and state, the South Australian senator blasted religious fundamentalists for limiting the freedom of "those who do not 'conform' to their views".
"Religious freedom means being free to worship and to follow your faith without suffering persecution or discrimination for your beliefs. It does not mean imposing your beliefs on everyone else," Senator Wong told the NSW Labor Lawyers gathering on Tuesday night.
"And it most emphatically does not mean deploying the power of the state to enforce one set of religious beliefs. One's own views should not determine the rights of others."
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Q:
Datetime colum to float type conversion is getting issue in sql server
I'd like alter a column type from Datetime to float. Hence, I executed the below query but it was getting a issue
alter table dbo.purchasedate
alter column supp_dt float null
Error :: Implicit conversion from data type datetime to float is not allowed. Use the CONVERT function to run this query.
A:
Without knowing your desired output, you could just: Add Float column, populate, drop date column.
To my knowledge you cannot add a CONVERT to an ALTER statement, anyone know otherwise?
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"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
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DETROIT β A mother who was injured in a shooting and depends on a wheelchair can't believe someone would target her after all she's been through.
Brittany Bradley's wheelchair was stolen and damaged. She recovered the chair itself, but the tires are still missing. Bradley was injured in 2017 when she got caught in the crossfire on Detroit's west side when as arrived to her son's babysitters house; she was shot six times.
She spent months in a hospital, lost her leg and went through 36 surgeries. She did not lose her positivity.
"I'm frustrated because I'm already limited in the things I can do and then my chair gets stolen," Bradley said.
She said she had left the chair on her porch and went for a short ride with her friend to a store.
"Sometimes I get tired and I said, 'I won't take the chair since I'm not getting out of the car,'" she said.
Within the 30 minutes she was gone, someone took the chair and dumped it around the corner from her house with the back wheels missing.
"You really don't have no morals. That was heartless, you really wasn't thinking about me and my situation," she said.
Bradley survived the shooting and is raising her son. She lives independently and remains optimistic she'll get through this obstacle, too.
"Nothing can stop me because I got God on my side and end of the day, he will always protect me and keep me strong," she said.
If you would like to help Bradley, you can contact her via email at: bbradley357@gmail.com
A GoFundMe has been set up to help assist the family. You can donate here.
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The use of membrane vesicles to study the NaCl/KCl cotransporter involved in active transepithelial chloride transport.
Properties of the NaCl/KCl cotransport system were investigated in isolated membranes by flux measurements and binding studies. Chloride competes with "furosemide-like loop diuretics" for its two binding sites at the cotransporter as evidenced by the decrease in piretanide sensitivity of sodium flux and inhibition of high affinity N-methylfurosemide binding by chloride in rectal gland plasma membranes. In the rectal gland lithium inhibits sodium flux but is not translocated whereas in the renal thick ascending limb (TALH) it is also transported. Ammonium is a substrate for the sodium and potassium site in the rectal gland but only for the potassium site in the TALH. The latter finding raises the possibility that part of the ammonium reabsorption in the TALH is mediated by the cotransport system as NaCl/NH4Cl cotransport.
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"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
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Q:
SQL Stored Proc Executing Select before gettting values from other procs
Got a strange problem created a little stored proc which need to execute a couple of other stored procs to get some values before executing the main select statement see below,
set ANSI_NULLS ON
set QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_get_ApplicationUserServiceRoles]
@UserId int,
@ApplicationName varchar(50),
@ServiceName varchar(50)
AS
BEGIN
-----------------------------------------
SET NOCOUNT ON
-----------------------------------------
DECLARE @ApplicationId INT
exec @ApplicationId = dbo.usp_get_AppIdFromName @ApplicationName
DECLARE @ServiceId INT
exec @ServiceId = dbo.usp_get_ServiceIdFromName @ServiceName
SELECT
[RoleName]
FROM
[ServiceRoles] s
INNER JOIN
[ApplicationUserServiceRoles] r
ON
s.ServiceRoleId = r.ServiceRoleId
INNER JOIN
[ApplicationServices] p
ON
s.ServiceId = p.ServiceId
WHERE
r.UserId = @UserID
AND
r.ApplicationId = @ApplicationId
AND
s.ServiceId = @ServiceId
END
When I run this stored proc it returns me the two values from the two procs with this proc but not the actual select value. However when I run the select statement on its own with the values the secondary stored procs return it returns the correct data.
Any idea what's going on, is the select statement running before the two secondary stored procs so the select statement hasn't got the correct values?
Running in SQL 2005
A:
A stored procedure returns a number indicating the execution status of the stored procedure. In order to capture the select statement's output you'll have to use INSERT...EXECUTE (see here for details)
What happens in your case is that each sub-procedure executes but your main procedure fails. Check your output window, it should tell you the error.
A:
The only way to capture the result set of a stored procedure is INSERT ... EXEC:
declare @applicationId int;
declare @tableApplicationId table (ApplicationId ind);
insert into @tableApplicationId
exec dbo.usp_get_AppIdFromName @ApplicationName;
select @applicationId = ApplicationId from @tableApplicationId;
You may want to consider changing dbo.usp_get_AppIdFromName into a function instead, or a procedure that returns @applicationId as OUTPUT parameter.
INSERT ... EXEC has all sort of side effect problems, like nesting issues:
http://www.sommarskog.se/share_data.html#INSERTEXEC
The Hidden Costs of INSERT EXEC
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Q:
find a universe for variables x, y, and z for which this statement is true and another universe in which it is false
Im solving a practice quesitons on quantifiers and I'm stuck with this questions
im trying to solve this question for few hours now and I really don't have a clue what to do...
The question is
Find a universe for variables $x$, $y$, and $z$ for which the statement
$$\forall xβy((x\ne y) β βz((z = x) β¨ (z = y)))$$
is true and another universe in which it is false
Detailed explanation will be really much appreciated.
Thanks in advance guys!
A:
Hint: The logical negation of
$$ x\ne y\to (z=x\lor z=y)$$
is
$$x\ne y \land z\ne x\land z\ne y$$
or
$$x,y,z\text{ are three distinct objects}$$
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"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
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Common presentations of elder abuse in health care settings.
Health care professionals encounter elder abuse in the community and in medical offices, emergency rooms, hospitals, and long-term care facilities. Keen awareness of risk factors for elder abuse and the variety of presentations in different health settings helps promote detection, treatment, and prevention of elder abuse.
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Isolated left ventricular noncompaction (LVNC), also called spongiform cardiomyopathy is a rare cause of heart failure. Arrest of compaction process during normal heart development is thought to be the cause of LVNC \[[@B1][@B2]\]. Echocardiographic demonstration of the apical trabeculation of left ventricle and blood flow from ventricular cavity into the intertrabecular recesses are the main pathologic findings in the diagnosis of LVNC \[[@B3][@B4][@B5]\]. In patients with LVNC, mechanical dyssynchrony between non-compacted and compacted myocardium results in global left ventricular (LV) dysfunction \[[@B6]\] and leads to the clinical symptoms of heart failure. Other important clinical presentations of LVNC include thromboembolic events and arrhythmias due to microcirculatory dysfunction in the noncompacted myocardium and stasis of blood in the recesses \[[@B1]\]. In addition, left ventricular hypertrabeculation is observed in association with a variety of neuromuscular disease (NMD) \[[@B7]\]. Therefore, the anesthetic management of these patients requires special attention to the cardiac function and adverse reaction to general anesthesia. Perioperative echocardiography might be the method of choice to access cardiac function and thromboembolism during general anesthesia in such patients.
We reported our anesthetic experience with a LVNC patient who underwent laparoscopic ovarian cystectomy under general anesthesia with real time transesophageal echocardiography.
Case Report
===========
A 61-year-old woman with a left ovarian cyst was scheduled for laparoscopic ovarian cystectomy under general anesthesia. At age 49, she had difficulty going up 3 stairs and started a dry cough. She was referred to our institution for further evaluation and treatment. She had no other disease including NMD. A transthoracic echocardiogram (TTE) revealed decreased LV cavity size and mild to moderate LV systolic dysfunction with an ejection fraction (EF) of 40% by visual estimation. The patient\'s LV walls, especially apical and interventricular septum (IVS), were markedly thickened, and showed abnormal relaxation that was compatible with noncompaction of LV. She was started on digitalis, diuretics and anticoagulants. Recently, her symptoms were aggravated. She was able to perform basic activities of daily life, but frequently felt chest discomfort. On physical examination, she showed regular heart beats with grade II systolic murmur. Electrocardiogram (ECG) showed sinus bradycardia with 1st degree atrioventricular block, multiple ventricular premature contractions and left bundle branch block. TTE examination demonstrated normal LV cavity size, moderate to severe LV systolic dysfunction with EF of 30% by visual estimation and diastolic dysfunction with left atrial enlargement. Consistent with noncompaction, TTE showed prominent trabeculation with deep intertrabecular recesses and increased velocity at apical trabeculation (Vmax = 3.02 m/sec, Peak pressure gradient = 36.4 mmHg) ([Fig. 1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}).
We planned general anesthesia with real time TEE monitoring to access intraoperative cardiac function. We chose TEE, without placement of a pulmonary artery catheter (PAC), because we were concerned with the increased risk of life threatening complications associated with the use of PACs, such as dysrhythmias \[[@B8]\]. No premedication was administered to the patient. Continuous monitoring of blood pressure was initiated after placement of an arterial catheter at the right radial artery under local anesthesia. Anesthesia was induced with etomidate 0.25 mg/kg, midazolam 2 mg and continuous infusion of remifentanil under 100% O~2~ mask ventilation, followed by the muscle relaxant cisatracurium 0.15 mg/kg to facilitate tracheal intubation. Patient\'s lungs were ventilated at a rate of 10 breaths/min with an oxygen/air mixture using positive pressure ventilation. Anesthesia was maintained with continuous infusion of propofol and remifentanil, and standard monitoring of invasive arterial blood pressure, ECG, peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO~2~), bispectral index (BIS), train-of-four (TOF), and TEE.
Intraoperative TEE confirmed the preoperative TTE findings. TEE examination showed aneurysmal change of apex, trabeculation in anterior and anterolateral wall of LV, increased velocity at apical intertrabeculation and intertrabecular recesses ([Fig. 2](#F2){ref-type="fig"}).
Immediately after anesthetic induction, the patient\'s systolic blood pressure (SBP) abruptly decreased from 120 mmHg to 85 mmHg and heart rate (HR) was also decreased from 71 bpm to 45 bpm. The real time TEE examination demonstrated mild to moderate MR, global hypokinesia, visually estimated EF of 30%, and calculated cardiac output by TEE of 1.8 L/min/m^2^. Continuous infusion of the inotropic agent dobutamine was started at 3 Β΅g/kg/min to increase cardiac output. SBP and HR were maintained during the entire operation within the range of 90 to 140 mmHg and 51 to 70 bpm, respectively. There were no significant hemodynamic changes during insufflation and desufflation of carbon dioxide.
At the end of surgery, all the continuous anesthetic medications were tapered off. Soon after, TOF monitor reached 4/4 twitches, but BIS still ranged from 50 to 60 for about 50 minutes. Apnea, pinpoint pupils and lower range of BIS suggested opioid effects. Finally, naloxone, a Β΅-receptor antagonist that competitively inhibits opioids side effects, was administered intravenously at 120 Β΅g. Immediately after the injection, she opened her eyes on a verbal command and tidal volume recovered to 250β300 ml. The total operation time was 120 minutes but, the total anesthesia time was 214 minutes because of delayed awakening. Total infused amounts of crystalloid were 700 ml and estimated blood loss and urine output were 100 ml and 90 ml, respectively.
The patient was transferred to the intensive care unit. At postoperative day 1, she was transferred to the general ward uneventfully. The patient was discharged from the hospital on postoperative day 6 and she had regular follow up in the cardiology and obstetric departments.
Discussion
==========
LVNC is defined as thickened LV segments with a distinct 2-layer appearance and prominent trabecular meshwork of the apex and adjoining inferior and lateral walls \[[@B3][@B9]\]. Often the affected myocardial segments are hypocontractile and display a 2-layer appearance with a thicker, \'non-compacted\' or hypertrabeculated layer on the epicardial side \[[@B10]\]. LVNC is an uncommon condition; however, the estimated prevalence may be higher because asymptomatic individuals rarely undergo imaging studies and the condition likely remains undetected. Stanton et al. \[[@B11]\] detected isolated LVNC in 0.02% of 141,047 patients who were at least 16 years of age. However, increased awareness and improvements in imaging resolution may also contribute to an increase in the number of reported cases.
Diagnosis of LVNC is based on the echocardiographic findings of at least 4 prominent trabeculation, deep intertrabecular recesses and blood flow from the ventricular cavity into the intertrabecular recesses as visualized by color flow Doppler \[[@B9]\].
The clinical presentation of patients with LVNC is variable including congestive heart failure, arrhythmias and systemic thromboembolic events. The current recommendations for treatment according to the international guidelines of heart failure management include beta blocker, angiotensin - converting - enzyme inhibitor and diuretics \[[@B12]\]. Some clinicians prescribe anticoagulants for LVNC patients who develop atrial fibrillation to reduce the risk of thromboembolism \[[@B10]\]. Patients with LVNC may require insertion of ventricular assist devices or cardiac transplantation \[[@B10][@B13]\]. In a study on 34 patients, 12% required transplant and 35% died at 44 months follow up \[[@B4]\]. ECG reveals abnormalities in a majority of patients with LVNC. Most commonly, LV hypertrophy or ST-T wave changes are noted in the ECG. However, more severely, atrial fibrillation, Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome and other ventricular arrhythmias have also been described \[[@B2]\]. In a study by Fischer et al. \[[@B14]\], the patients were followed up for a mean of 30 months. During this period, 10 deaths were reported of which 60% occurred as a sudden event, whereas 34% of patients required hospitalization for symptoms of heart failure. Ventricular tachycardia was seen in 36% of patients and thromboembolic events in 9%. A familial occurrence was reported in 33% of patients.
Although classified by the American heart association as a primary cardiomyopathy, LVNC has been described in association with extracardiac conditions, most notably NMD \[[@B7]\]. The exact incidence is unknown, but in one study, 80% of patients with LVNC were diagnosed with an NMD \[[@B9]\]. A number of genes are thought to be associated with this condition.
The anesthetic management of these patients requires specific attention to heart failure, arrhythmia, thromboembolic events and NMDs \[[@B2][@B10]\]. TEE is a useful monitor to guide intraoperative anesthetic and fluid management in the presence of severely depressed LV and RV function \[[@B4]\]. Real time TEE might be the method of choice to access cardiac function and thromboembolism during general anesthesia in these patients. When the echocardiography is not suitable, non-invasive cardiac output monitoring devices might be helpful in the evaluation of cardiac function. Also patients with LVNC are susceptible to develop severe arrhythmia. Stressors that increase sympathetic tone and anesthetic drugs can provoke severe arrhythmia including fatal ventricular fibrillations. In addition, the dose of non-depolarizing neuromuscular blocking agents should be titrated under continuous monitoring of TOF \[[@B15]\].
In conclusion, echocardiography is the method of choice in the diagnosis of LVNC, a rare cardiomyopathy. Anesthesiologist should be specifically concerned with the presenting symptoms of LVNC, heart failure, thromboembolic events, arrhythmia and NMDs.
To the best of our knowledge, this is a rare case report of LVNC under general anesthesia reported by a Korean anesthesiologist. This case adds to the understanding of anesthetic management of LVNC patients using TEE. Further studies on the disease and its anesthetic management are required.
{#F1}
{#F2}
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Lupinus shockleyi
Lupinus shockleyi is a species of lupine known by the common name purple desert lupine. It is native to the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts, where it grows in open desert habitat. It is an annual herb growing up to 30 centimeters tall. Each palmate leaf is made up of 8 to 10 leaflets measuring 1 to 3 centimeters in length. The inflorescence is a small spiral of flowers. Each flower is about half a centimeter long and deep purple-blue in color with a yellowish patch on its banner. The fruit is an oval legume pod coated in thick, inflated hairs.
External links
Jepson Manual Treatment
Photo gallery
shockleyi
Category:Flora of the Southwestern United States
Category:Flora of the Sonoran Deserts
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{
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Chows are funny with dog interaction. They display, for a lack of better terms, an air of arrogance. This can put other dogs off and put them on the defensive.
If you have spent the past years socializing the Chows, then they should be fine. If they haven't spent much time around other dogs, I would be cautious.
Yorkie's can be a bit yippy, so it will really depend on that dog assuming the Chows are socialized.
I wouldn't worry so much about the size difference as much as the training. Chows can be very gentle when they are used to the situation. Properly trained, they don't tend to be overly aggressive/rough or dominant. They do however expect that boundaries be respected. So that would head on back to the Yorkie having similar social skills.
I have issues with my Chow and other dogs! Its never him - its always the other dog. Different breeds tend to take a dislike to them for their different smell and the way they look. However my Chow seems to get on better with smaller dogs rather than big ones. I encourage him to bond with friends dogs by taking them out for a walk together in a mutual environment and by the time we are home - they are the best of friends!
My adult male chow LOVES small dogs. He whimpers if I do not let him interact. When allowed time with small dogs, I place him in a sit or down and let the small dog sniff all over him before they mingle. He is very gentle, but extremely curious with the smaller dogs. Larger dogs he is more indifferent towards.
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$\begingroup$
This is a meaningless question. First, you count medieval "Arab" contribution as "non-western", while it is well-known that Arab mathematics comes from the Greek and Mesopotamian sources. Arabs did not invent mathematics themselves but developed Greek and Mesopotamian mathematics. Is Mesopotamian mathematics "western"?
Really, mathematics cannot be separated into "western" and "non-western" until 17 century. Greek mathematics was influenced by Mesopotamian tradition. Muslim peoples inherited Greek and Mesopotamian mathematics. Indians too, to some extent. Then Europeans of 16 century learned a lot from Muslim (and Indian) mathematics, including many achievements of the Greeks. Much of trigonometry, and positional number system is of non-European origin.
And why is Greek mathematics WESTERN? Greece is in Eastern Europe, by the way, and most significant Greek mathematicians worked in Africa, namely in Alexandria. And Western European civilization is very different from the Greek one. Yes, we inherited Greek mathematics but so also the "Arabs" did. (I use quotation marks because many medieval mathematicians were not Arabs but Iranians and people from Middle Asia).
It is indeed very hard to tell which tradition never experienced Greek influence. (Perhaps American-Indian is the only clear case).
Second, you mention Chinese reminder theorem and African independent discovery of Fibonacci numbers. Can we really say that these independent discoveries CONTRIBUTED anything to Western Mathematics? Did Western mathematicians really learn them from Africans and Chinese? No. There is a difference between "discover independently" and "contribute".
Let me give another clear example which is well documented. In 18th century Japanese mathematician Seki Takakazu developed the theory of determinants. Few decades earlier than his European counterparts. But did European mathematicians learn anything about determinants from him? Did Japanese mathematicians of 20th century study determinants from his work? No, they studied them from "western" sources.
After the Meiji revolution, the door for cultural exchange was wide open, Japanese students learned "western mathematics" very quickly and started to contribute to it on the highest level, since approximately 1900. But they learned it from European sources, not from native Japanese sources.
Did European mathematicians really learn anything new from pre-19 century Japanese mathematics? I strongly doubt it. There was a high quality mathematics in Japan before 19th century, but it did not contribute to modern mathematics.
I dare to claim that none of the famous mathematicians who made a substantial contribution to modern mathematics did this by developing any "non-western" tradition, no mater where this mathematician comes from. Even when some of them claim the contrary. One cannot contribute anything essential to modern mathematics without being educated in this "western tradition".
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Effect of an accelerated finishing program on performance, carcass characteristics, and circulating insulin-like growth factor I concentration of early-weaned bulls and steers.
Sixty-three Angus x Simmental calves were allotted to a bull or a steer group based on sire, birth date, and birth weight to determine effects of castration status on performance, carcass characteristics, and circulating insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) concentrations in early-weaned cattle. At 75 d of age, calves in the steer group were castrated. Calves were not creep-fed prior to weaning. All calves were weaned and weighed at an average age of 115 d and transported by truck to the OARDC feedlot in Wooster, OH. Performance and carcass characteristics were measured in three phases. Phase 1 was from 115 to 200 d of age, phase 2 was from 201 to 277 d of age, and phase 3 was from 278 d of age to slaughter. Before implantation, four bulls and four steers were selected for serial slaughter and carcass evaluation. Steers were implanted with Synovex-C at 130 d of age and with Revalor-S at 200 and 277 d of age. Serum samples were collected from all calves on the day of implantation, 28 and 42 d after implantation, and at slaughter and analyzed for circulating IGF-I concentration. Bulls gained 9.7% faster (1.75 vs 1.60 kg/d; P < 0.01), consumed 25 kg more DM (521 vs 496 kg; P = 0.11), and were 3.3% more efficient (282 vs 273 g/kg, P < 0.10) than steers in phase 1. However, steers gained 10.5% faster (1.62 vs 1.46 kg/d; P < 0.02), consumed similar amounts of DM, and were 6.5% more efficient than bulls (214 vs 201 g/kg; P < 0.06) in phase 2. Overall gains and efficiency were similar between bulls and steers; however, bulls consumed 140 kg more DM (P < 0.05), were 27 kg heavier (P < 0.05), and had to stay in the feedlot 18 more days (P < 0.05) than steers to achieve a similar amount of fat thickness. Implanted steers had greater concentrations of circulating IGF-I than bulls (P < 0.01), and the pattern of IGF-I concentration over time was affected by castration status (castration status x time interaction; P < 0.01). Synovex-C had a lower impact on circulating IGF-I concentration (implant effect, P < 0.01) than either Revalor-S implant. Eighty-five percent of both bulls and steers had marbling scores sufficient to grade low Choice or better. Bulls achieved their target fat thickness later, increased muscle growth, and deposited fat more favorably than steers, possibly due to a gradual increase in IGF-I concentration as the testicles grew rather than the large fluctuations in IGF-I concentration observed in steers following implantation.
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{
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Guzalan
Guzalan (, also Romanized as GΕ«zalΔn; also known as GavzalΔn, GΔvzΔleh, Goozalan, and GΕ«zlΔn) is a village in Yeylaq Rural District, in the Central District of Kaleybar County, East Azerbaijan Province, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 751, in 161 families.
References
Category:Populated places in Kaleybar County
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{
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Speech and language intervention for language impairment in patients in the FTD-ALS spectrum.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is the most common neurodegenerative disease that belongs to the group of motor neuron diseases. Motor deficits like reduce in tongue strength, may coexist with cognitive deficits compatible with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), also known as frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). FTD is a neurodegenerative syndrome with two main clinical variants: behavioral (bvFTD) and language or Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). ALS and FTD have significant clinical and neuropathological overlapping so that for some researchers they are "the ends of the same disease spectrum". A key intervention in this patient population is the speech language therapy (SLT), a specific form of cognitive intervention, which evaluates communication skills and designs a personalized intervention plan to improve communication abilities. It has been used in patients with aphasia of different etiologies and has been shown to be effective. There is limited research in SLT interventions in patients in FTD-ALS spectrum, and the initial findings indicate success to some extent. Due to progressive neurodegeneration in FTD-ALS spectrum, the main goal of the intervention is not the complete rehabilitation of linguistic deficits but the reduction and, if possible, the delay of language decline in order to improve patient's communication and the quality of his/her life. In this paper, we critically review the reported approaches of speech language therapy (SLT) for monitoring language impairments and the impact of interventions in patients with FTD-ALS spectrum. Initial findings are supporting more systematic treatment of speech and language impairment in patients in the FTD-ALS spectrum.
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Maui Wowie!! Who's Ridin'?
My goodness. What a place to ride and ride and ride. Yes your rather "limited", but when is the last time your max speed, comfortably, was 45-50 mph without cagers tryin' to run you over? If you haven't done a trip of either Maui or their "big Island", I recommend it. Am on business here in the islands for a month, and it's tough. Business expense account permits 'transportation' ... why not a HD???? :newsmile030: Heck, take the day off, come to the islands and lets ride!:newsmile075:
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The Illinois Prevention Research Center (IPRC) of the University of Illinois at Chicago has a primary mission to reduce health disparities through behavior change approaches by conducting health promotion and disease prevention research across the lifespan, translating research into practice and measuring the real-world effectiveness, dissemination and translation of health promotion and disease prevention programs and initiatives. The IPRC's activities concentrate in seven areas and aim specifically to: (1) Establish and maintain collaborative relationships with community and academic partners, including a Community Committee and CommunityAdvisory Board, university faculty, students, public health agencies and non-traditional partners to address data driven health disparities; (2) Engage the community and establish a research agenda to conduct participatory research on modification of health behaviors associated with increased risk for major chronic conditions such as obesity and diabetes; (3) Conduct community training, graduate student mentoring and continuing education opportunities in evidence-based public health research and practice; (4) Implement and evaluate innovative programs and interventions and communicate findings to community and professional audiences; (5) Develop a cadre of well trained researchers, practitioners, students and community members to enhance the capacity of communities, public health agencies and organizations, and prevention centers to conduct evidence-based participatory research; (6) Disseminate and translate intervention protocols and research findings to the public health community, local, state, and national policy makers, community-partners, and the research community; and (7) Identify contextual factors that may influence implementation of activities and achievement of outcomes. IPRC activities are guided by the CDC's Logic Model for the Prevention Research Center Program and informed by state-of-the-art conceptual frameworks for community-participatory research, development of intervention strategies at the individual, organizational, and environmental level, and diffusion of innovations. The evaluation of the IPRC focuses on our success in achieving the goals related to each of the seven overall aims.
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{
"pile_set_name": "NIH ExPorter"
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According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III, 1988 to 1994), between one third and one half of men and women in the United States are overweight. In the United States, sixty percent of men and fifty-one percent of women, of the age of 20 or older, are either overweight or obese. In addition, a large percentage of children in the United States are overweight or obese.
The cause of obesity is complex and multi-factorial. Increasing evidence suggests that obesity is not a simple problem of self-control but is a complex disorder involving appetite regulation and energy metabolism. In addition, obesity is associated with a variety of conditions associated with increased morbidity and mortality in a population. Although the etiology of obesity is not definitively established, genetic, metabolic, biochemical, cultural and psychosocial factors are believed to contribute. In general, obesity has been described as a condition in which excess body fat puts an individual at a health risk.
There is strong evidence that obesity is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Disease risk, such as cardiovascular disease risk and type 2 diabetes disease risk, increases independently with increased body mass index (BMI). Indeed, this risk has been quantified as a five percent increase in the risk of cardiac disease for females, and a seven percent increase in the risk of cardiac disease for males, for each point of a BMI greater than 24.9 (see Kenchaiah et al., N. Engl. J. Med. 347:305, 2002; Massie, N. Engl. J. Med. 347:358, 2002). In addition, there is substantial evidence that weight loss in obese persons reduces important disease risk factors. Even a small weight loss, such as 10% of the initial body weight in both overweight and obese adults has been associated with a decrease in risk factors such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and hyperglycemia.
Although diet and exercise provide a simple process to decrease weight gain, overweight and obese individuals often cannot sufficiently control these factors to effectively lose weight. Pharmacotherapy is available; several weight loss drugs have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration that can be used as part of a comprehensive weight loss program. However, many of these drugs have serious adverse side effects. When less invasive methods have failed, and the patient is at high risk for obesity related morbidity or mortality, weight loss surgery is an option in carefully selected patients with clinically severe obesity. However, these treatments are high-risk, and suitable for use in only a limited number of patients. It is not only obese subjects who wish to lose weight. People with weight within the recommended range, for example, in the upper part of the recommended range, may wish to reduce their weight, to bring it closer to the ideal weight. Thus, a need remains for agents that can be used to effect weight loss in overweight and obese subjects.
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"pile_set_name": "USPTO Backgrounds"
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Q:
Why does Moshe tell Hashem that he is 'heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue' - twice?
Shemot 4:10-15 is a dialogue between Hashem and Moshe where Moshe tells Hashem that he is 'heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue'.
In pssukim 14-15 Hashem tells Moshe that he will tell Aharon what to say, and that he will be Moshe's interpreter, because of his speech impediment. [see Rashi there]
So why then does Moshe say the same claim in Shemot 6:12
... How then will Pharaoh hearken to me, seeing that I am of closed
lips?"
to which Hashem answers seemingly the same answer in Shemot 7:1-2 (ie that Aharon will act as interperetor)
A:
Moshe repeats that he has a speech impediment in Shemos 6,12 because it is part of his argument to Hashem that Pharaoh would not hearken to him, as it says: "And Moshe spoke before Hashem, saying: Behold, Yisrael did not hearken to me, how then will Pharaoh hearken to me, seeing that I am of closed lips?".
The sefer Binyan Ariel explains Moshe's argument was as follows:
When Hashem told Moshe to go together with Aharon because he was "heavy of tongue" and also to accord honor to his older brother, Moshe understood that they were supposed to speak together, as it says in the Mechilta on the posuk in Shemos 12,3: "Moshe accorded honor to Aharon, and Aharon accorded honor to Moshe, and it seemed as if the speech came from both of them".
But the gemara in Rosh Hashanah 27a says that two voices speaking simultaneously cannot be heard very well, unless it is something that the person listening really wants to hear. This was Moshe's argument, that if Yisrael were not able to hear us because we were speaking together, even though we were telling something that they really wanted to hear, how is it possible that Pharaoh will hear us, "seeing that I am of closed lips". That is, since Moshe had a speech impediment and thus always spoke together with Aharon as per his understanding of Hashem's instructions, if Yisrael were not able to hear them, all the more so Pharaoh would not be able to hear them. Therefore, Hashem now clarified to Moshe that he was to speak first and then Aharon by himself.
Full text in English can be found here.
A:
[A friend of mine suggested this answer to me and it seems right: (no source though)]
The dialogue in Shemot 4:10-15 deals with Moshe's apprehension in speaking with the Jewish people.
Similarly Hashem tells Moshe in Passuk 16 that Aharon will be his interpreter- to the Jewish people.
Shemot 4:16:
And he will speak for you to the people, and it will be that he will
be your speaker, and you will be his leader.
So , until instructed explicitly, it would follow that Moshe would be speaking straight to Pharoh ( without Aharon as interpreter) which is why Moshe tells Hashem in Shemot 6:12 that he is "of closed lips".
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{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
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Nigerian 3G licensees set to pay fees in a matter of days
Winners are expected to pay licence fees that amounted to the reserve price of US$150 million each less the intention-to-bid deposit of US$15 million, within 14 business days of the award of the provisional licence.
Nigeria's telecoms regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) awarded four 3G licences March 19 to incumbent mobile operators Celtel Nigeria, Globalcom and MTN Nigeria; as well as to long distance landline operator Alheri Engineering. Winners are expected to pay licence fees that amount to the reserve price of US$150 million each less the intention-to-bid deposit of US$15 million, within 14 business days of the award of the provisional licence. Upon receipt of the cleared funds, the NCC will award the spectrum licence. The NCC originally announced the tender for the licences last year and following its advert for expressions of interest in February 2007, 17 companies responded, and four companies made formal applications. βThe four applicantsβ submissions were evaluated with respect to the compliance details outlined in the information memorandum,β explained the NCC in a statement. βEach applicant was found to have been fully compliant. In these circumstances, where the number of applicants matches the number of lots, no further allocation process is required. As such, the NCC announced that each of the applicants has been successful in its bid for a 10MHz lot in the 2GHz bandβ. Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Development Company claims to be considering bids from as many as 10 telecoms companies to set up operations in Nigeria after securing a licence in the West African country. As reported be CommsMEA in January, NCC confirmed receipt of full payment of US$400 million by the Mubadala Development Company for the award of a unified access service licence in the country. The unified licence consists of permission to operate a mobile network in GSM 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum bands. The NCC introduced a unified licensing regime in March last year, for the first time allowing operators of wireless local loop operations to roam across wide licence areas. Four unified licences were awarded in May last year, with about two-dozen companies having applied for the concessions.
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{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
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Better Parenting through Biomedical Modification: A Case for Pluralism, Deference, and Charity.
In this paper, I will argue that the moral assessment of the prenatal selection and postnatal modification biotechnologies requires a nuanced approach, which pays close attention to the variety of sometimes conflicting parental roles and reasons involved in decisions for and against their use. I will focus on several related but distinct reasons that parents have, or give, for modifying existing children or selecting future children. Many of these reasons are expressed in terms of more effective parenting. Because there is a plurality of legitimate parental goals, I will conclude that assessing parental interventions requires us to adjudicate conflicts or tradeoffs among those goals.
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{
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A fall while out training on his bicycle results in a broken left hand for Marc Marquez ahead of the Japanese GP.
While out training with brother Alex Marquez on their bicycles on Tuesday, Marc Marquez suffered a fall resulting in a broken fifth metacarpal on his left hand. The Repsol Honda rider immediately went for surgery with Dr. Xavier Mir in Barcelona. The operation was successful and Marquez will fly to the Japan for the Motul Grand Prix of Japan as scheduled. He will undergo further checks in the build up to the race,
Dr Mir: βWe have operated on Marc Marquez to treat a torsion fracture of the fifth metacarpal of his left hand. The surgery consisted of a reduction and internal fixation of the bone, through screws for compression and a neutralising titanium plate with six holes. After the insertion, the soft tissue has been closed up and we have placed a protective bandage around the finger, supporting it with the adjacent finger. Marc will remain in hospital for 24 hours, and in 48 hours will begin functional rehabilitation.β
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Q:
How to query by embedded example containing null values using hibernate?
I have a problem with a query using hibernate. The entity class EntityClass has an embedded property embedded of type EmbeddedClass and this property has a nullable property optional. When all properties are set, i can do a very simpel HQL query as:
Query query = getSession().createQuery(
"FROM EntityClass t WHERE t.embedded = :embedded");
query.setParameter("embedded", embedded);
return (EntityClass) query.uniqueResult();
But when the property optional is null, this does not work, because hibernate creates a SQL query like t.optional=? but =NULL should be IS NULL in SQL. The WHERE clause never matches, the query returns no rows.
Some further reading pointed to Example which is handling null properly. Now my code looks like:
Criteria query = getSession().createCriteria(EntityClass.class);
query.createCriteria("embedded").add(Example.create(embedded));
return (EntityClass) query.uniqueResult();
When running the code I get a ClassCastException:
java.lang.ClassCastException: EmbeddedClass
at org.hibernate.criterion.Example.getEntityMode(Example.java:279)
at org.hibernate.criterion.Example.toSqlString(Example.java:209)
at org.hibernate.loader.criteria.CriteriaQueryTranslator.getWhereCondition(CriteriaQueryTranslator.java:357)
at org.hibernate.loader.criteria.CriteriaJoinWalker.<init>(CriteriaJoinWalker.java:113)
at org.hibernate.loader.criteria.CriteriaJoinWalker.<init>(CriteriaJoinWalker.java:82)
at org.hibernate.loader.criteria.CriteriaLoader.<init>(CriteriaLoader.java:91)
at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.list(SessionImpl.java:1577)
at org.hibernate.impl.CriteriaImpl.list(CriteriaImpl.java:306)
at org.hibernate.impl.CriteriaImpl.uniqueResult(CriteriaImpl.java:328)
It has something to do with EntityPersister.guessEntityMode() returning null, because hibernate looks for the mapping of the entity class, not the embedded one.
It seems that org.hibernate.criterion.Example can not be used for an embedded class. Any idea how to to this? Is there an ohter approach?
The classes look like:
@Entity
public class EntityClass {
...
@Embedded
private EmbeddedClass embedded;
...
}
@Embeddable
public class EmbeddedClass {
private String name;
private String optional;
...
}
I use hibernate 3.3.1 and an oracle 10g if that helps.
A:
Uh, I got it:
After debugging the hibernate code, I discovered you need to build the example on the entity class. So I created an example instance of the entity, set the embedded value and excluded the unused properties on the Example criterion:
Criteria query = getSession().createCriteria(EntityClass.class);
EntityClass example = new EntityClass();
example.setEmbedded(embedded);
query.add(Example.create(example).excludeNone()
.excludeProperty("id").excludeProperty("other"));
return (EntityClass) query.uniqueResult();
|
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"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
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The UBIS BBA program is designed to provide students with the competencies and business know-how with an international perspective needed to gain employment and start a successful career in any size rm, company or organization or to enter a family business or start an entrepreneurial venture. All BBA students benet from UBISβs double degree program and earn a Swiss recognized Bachelor in Business Administration as well as an American accredited Bachelor of Science in International Business by following the specially designed UBIS program in coordination with the University of the Potomac in Washington D.C. Our Business students also benet from our Geneva facilities and international lifestyle: live and learn in the very heart of Europe.
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"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
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|
Q:
sending div id through button click java-script method parameter
can anyone please tell me how to send div id through button click java-script parameter.
Here in the below code the main div id 'ricId_1' and the class name "ric_class1 rico_class0 ric1_class1 ric2_class3" is created dynamically has to be send through javascript method cancel('divid') in the button click.The div id is not static.
<div id="ricId_1" class="ric_class1 rico_class0 ric1_class1 ric2_class3" style="width: 730px; left: 309px; top: 71.5px; z-index: 13000; display: block;">
<div class="ricTitle">
:
</div>
<div class="ricModal ng-scope" style="height: auto;">
:
<div>
<div>
<div ng-controller="Manage" class="ng-scope">
<div class="ricG ricAlign">
<div class="ricGrid"><div class="ricGridTable">
:
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div align="center" class="row btn-group">
<button onclick="cancel('divid')" class="ricButton" type="button" id="sss" ric:loaded="true">Close</button>
</div>
</div>
A:
Pass the button to cancel and use that id to get the closes ancestor with class ric_class1 rico_class0 ric1_class1 ric2_class3 having id ricId_1
Live Demo
Html
<button onclick="cancel(this)" class="ricButton" type="button" id="sss" ric:loaded="true">Close</button>
Javascript
function cancel(btn)
{
ricId_1 = $(btn).closest('ric_class1 rico_class0.ric1_class1 ric2_class3');
//or
ricId_1 = $(btn).parent().parent();
}
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
I felt major FOMO on Saturday. As I watched Steph Curry and Klay Thompson rain 3s at Oracle Arena, Luka Doncic was making his Mavericks debut in Dallas. It was only an exhibition against a middling team from China led by Justin Hamilton. And Doncic, the no. 3 overall pick, has already played better games on bigger stages against better competition overseas. But after two teams passed on Doncic on draft day, and a third gave up Doncicβs rights in a trade, a divide was created around the 19-year-old Slovenianβs career before he ever played a second in the NBA.
Saturday, Doncic quickly confirmed why so many gushed over his game leading into the draft: He dropped 16 points on 5-for-7 shooting with two assists, six rebounds, and three blocks. There is nothing more exciting than the feeling of hope a new star player can bring to a franchise, and Doncic provided that to Dallas in his first game in a Mavs uniform.
Lukaβs performance Saturday doesnβt matter in the grand scheme of things. Doncic sent NBA Twitter into a frenzy when he executed a behind-the-back crossover and kissed a tough fadeaway off the glass, but his defender on the play was Hamilton, a journeyman who didnβt play in the NBA last season. Still, the game was a reminder of why the Mavs traded up on draft night to get him. After back-to-back years in the lottery and walking the line between a proper send-off for Dirk Nowitzki and turning the page to a new era, the future looks bright again in Dallas. And because of talented young players like Doncic and upcoming cap flexibility, it might not take the Mavs all that long to get back into the playoff mix.
2018-19 NBA Preview Check out all of The Ringerβs coverage leading up to opening tip
As noted to me by The Ringerβs Jason Gallagher, a passionate Mavericks fan, the team was 12-38 last season in games that were within five points in the final five minutes. If that seems like a lot of close losses, itβs because it is. No other team has had more than 37 since 1996-97, the first recorded season for this stat. (The teams with 37 are the 2006-07 Celtics and the 2012-13 Wizards.) The Mavs won only 24 games last season, which helped their lottery odds, but they were outscored by only 3.3 points per 100 possessions, which usually equates to about 33 wins. So, they still werenβt good. But they also werenβt terrible.
The Mavs were a gritty group driven by a blend of proven veterans like Harrison Barnes and Wesley Matthews and undrafted free agents fighting for a chance such as Salah Mejri and Maxi Kleber. They shot a ton of 3s, and trailed only the Rockets and Nets in shares of field goal attempts from downtown. Their half-court offense was actually solid, ranking 12th in points per possession, per Synergy. But their defense couldnβt get stops, and they played at such a slow, deliberate pace that their transition chances were limited. Now point guard Dennis Smith Jr., the no. 9 pick from 2017, is one year older after an impressive rookie season, and theyβve added Doncic and DeAndre Jordan, both of whom can help solve their primary issues on each end of the floor.
The Mavs attempted the leagueβs lowest share of shot attempts in the restricted area, according to Cleaning the Glass, and they were 27th in free throw rate. Doncic is advanced at using his hefty frame to create and absorb contact while attacking the rim; itβs a necessary skill, since he lacks the foot speed to blow by opponents and the verticality to dunk through traffic. And you already know Jordan is a backboard destroyer.
Jordan signed a one-year, $22.9 million contract with the Mavericks and will play the Tyson Chandler role at center: screening and initiating dribble handoffs, then flying to the rim for explosive dunks. Jordan gives Doncic and Smith a major target in Rick Carlisleβs offense, which tended to lean heavily on the pick-and-roll during Chandlerβs seasons with the Mavs. If Dallas wants to adopt Houstonβs extreme system, it certainly has the pieces to give it a try with Jordan starring as Clint Capela, and Doncic and Smith as versions of James Harden and Chris Paul. With Barnes, Matthews, and a collection of younger players, the Mavs can fill the gaps with 3-and-D talent.
Jordan will help Doncic and Smith, and Doncic and Smith will help each other. Smith has been a ball-dominant player his entire life, but heβs produced when called upon off the ball. He shot 36.8 percent on catch-and-shoot 3s and excelled on cuts. He logged only 23 possessions cutting last season, and shot 13-for-16 on plays that led to lobs. Doncic can alleviate the pressure on Smith to run the offense, so itβll be on Smith to see openings in the defense and cut for easy baskets. Doncic can find him.
If thereβs one thing Doncic didnβt get to show in his debut, itβs his passing. Doncic is already advanced at reading pick-and-rolls, changing speeds, and creating angles to throw dagger passers above and through the defense. Smith is also no slouch; his dunks will get him on highlight reels, but heβs a shifty ball handler who has progressed since college in making quick decisions. Jalen Brunson, the third pick of this yearβs second round, is another young player at point guard. In todayβs age of positionless basketball, itβs a major bonus to have four or five players on the court who can run the offense.
The Western Conference is so stacked that Dallas will top out as a scrappy, lovable team that can finish somewhere around 10th place. A team with Barnes as its best player isnβt a West playoff team. With that said, Barnes, something of a forgotten man since leaving Golden State, defends well and is used in a variety of offensive roles. If Dallasβs young players do develop into stars, then Barnes will be the perfect glue guy just like he was in Golden State, only with additional iso-scoring skills.
Barnes can become an unrestricted free agent next summer if he declines his $25.1 million player option. Dwight Powell also has a player option, and Jordan will be an unrestricted free agent again. But even if Barnes and Powell both opt in, and if Jordan is re-signed to a Capela-esque contract (around $18 million annually), the Mavs will have the ability to create enough cap space to sign a player to a max contract in both 2019 and 2020. In the NFL, having a productive quarterback still on a cheap rookie contract allows funds to be spent at other positions. The same is true with the NBAβlook no further than the Celtics, who benefit from having Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, among others, on rookie deals, so they can splurge elsewhere. The Mavericks donβt resemble a destination today, but if Doncic and Smithβand their 2019 first-rounder, if it lands within the first five picksβbecome impactful players while on their rookie contracts, Dallas will suddenly have appeal.
The Mavericks have been big-name hunters in the past. In 2012, they tried to sign Deron Williams and push for Dwight Howard in a trade. It didnβt work. (Crisis averted.) In 2013, they wanted Chris Paul and Howard. (Paul stayed with the Clippers, and Howard chose the Rockets.) In 2015, they verbally agreed to sign Jordan. (But you know what happened there.) Jordan, now 30 years old, is one of their only big free-agent signings in years; Matthews and Chandler Parsons were the others, but both were limited by major injuries. It remains to be seen if they can become major players on the open market. But theyβll have the means to make a run at a max player again in the next two summers, and, this time around, theyβll have some young blood to use as part of a pitch.
Thereβs a long season ahead for the Mavericks in what could be Nowitzkiβs farewell tour. Dallas would need a lot to break right to make the playoffs. But if the team is competitive again, and Doncic replicates his success during the regular season, there will be more games like Saturdayβs that provide hope for the Mavsβ future.
|
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}
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Mature B cell lymphomas are a diverse set of diseases which share the property of having failed to complete the differentiation process into plasma cells or undergo apoptosis. PRDI-BF1 and its murine homologue Blimp-1 are transcriptional repressors and act as a molecular switch to commit activated B cells to become non-dividing plasma cells or undergo apoptosis. In this role PRDI-BF1 has broad significance for normal humoral immune responses and in malignancies of mature B cells and plasma cells. We hypothesize that failure to induce PRDI-BF1 expression or function contributes to the persistence of lymphomas and as such therapies designed to rescue PRDI-BF1 function may be important in treating lymphoma. Artificial overexpression of PRDI-BF1 leads to apoptosis in multiple lymphoma lines. Furthermore the hypothesis is supported by our finding that treatment of lymphoma cells with chemotherapeutic agents such as proteasome or histone deacetylase inhibitors leads to an early induction of PRDI-BF1 expression. We have made the recent discovery that PRDI-BF1 directly recruits the histone methyltransferase G9a to mediate silencing of interferon-beta. This suggests chromatin remodeling is the means by which PRDI-BF1 drives terminal differentiation of B cells and kills lymphoma cells. The impact of chromatin remodeling driven by PRDI-BF1 in this process will be investigated. PRDI-BF1 is transcriptionally regulated by unknown mechanisms. This will be investigated and will provide the first detailed understanding of transcriptional regulation at this critical developmental time point and may suggest new avenues to induce PRDI-BF1. Finally, PRDI-BF1 function requires a highly conserved SET-like domain but its activity is unknown. We will identify the proteins interacting at this site and determine their role in PRDI-BF1 activity. Thus this proposal will shed new light on the events occurring during differentiation and may indicate new targets to affect the growth and persistence of lymphomas. [unreadable] [unreadable]
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{
"pile_set_name": "NIH ExPorter"
}
|
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
All concerned parties arrive in the linoleumed halls of the 7th grade, wary and all too knowing. The Saturday prior was likely a birthday, or a reward for good grades, any excuse for a phalanx of larval females to gather in a basement and share secrets. Secrets often prefaced with," I've never told anyone this..." or "Since we're talking about..." There is a nauseated frenzy at a slumber party, an unyielding urge to force untold stories out of the guests and a primal desire to unburden the young soul. It is a ritual of compassion and cruelty and the hostess is the queen bee (This is a fact regardless of social position. She could be the cheeriest cheerleader or the floutiest band nerd, in her house she is empress.). Crushes are revealed. Unspeakable family skeletons rattle forth. Insecurities are admitted to and sympathized with. There are often tears - some from despairing sobs, others from hysterical laughter. And the next morning, Sunday, queasy stomach in tow, the girls fly home for an afternoon of "Family Ties" re-runs and dozing.
Then Monday arrives.
The girls eye one another in paranoid conspiracy. Who will blab? Anyone? After a night of exposing ones innermost self, will you still be accepted? Was the bond counterfeit? Does Derek know you like him? Like, like him like him? Will you be called into the guidance counsellors office to discuss family issues, mental illness, learning disabilities? Or will one of the girls, in a preemptive strike against you, tell others her own secret, disguised as yours. You are really effing screwed then.
To your amazement, Monday passes without incident. You sleep well for the first time since last Friday, safe in the belief that your comrades were true to their word. Only on pain of death will you be exposed.
The following morning, you jaunt to your locker and spin the dial, ready to face an easy day. The metal door of the locker swings open to reveal a plush stuffed toy fox, with a condom on its head. Your heart sinks as the clanging bells of teen girl laughter ring down the hall. Your red face glances over and sees First Real Fall Tuesday, icy cold in her gaze, arching her perfectly coiffed eyebrow. With a swish of her ponytail, she turns and heads to Civics.
You should NEVER have confessed that you think the animated fox in Disney's Robin Hood is sexy.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
It's been a while since I was in something on stage that didn't involve white face.
Photo by Fuzzy Gerdes
Ever since I was 11 years old and in my first show, I've been playing boys, men, and androgynous women. My first show was Oliver! and, you guessed it, I played Oliver Twist. The idea of gender being a character choice has always appealed to me, as has testing the boundaries of what we consider masculine or feminine.
It's interesting coming off of Soiree DADA and DaBo, a character dominant on nearly every level, into R., woman struggling with gender and power, and helpless to affect some sort of change in her life. It's been a challenge for sure. Luckily, my counterpart Casey is one of the most present and open players I've gotten the chance to work with. We have a blast.
I think Hendrickson is a woman of vision when it comes to this sort of thing. She's a supportive director and the challenge has been eased by her guidance.
The cast and crew is fantastic. Crazy Committed. It is a pleasure to work with these folks.
And getting to work with Dianna as a Stage Manager again is always a treat. Bad. Ass.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
A while back, in a post I cannot find, I listed a few guilty pleasure foods. To wit:
Pork RindsBeef JerkyDeviled Ham (Not SPAM. I want to be very clear about that.)
(Looking at this list it all seems a little Depression Era, doesn't it? When the shit comes down, I will be living large.)
Very few people would admit to enjoying such adulterated meat products, but I can't help myself. And it's not as if, in consuming them, I am transported by complexity of flavor. They are meat-ish and salty. Cure it, fry it, smash it, dry it. -j-j- will eat it.
Among these foods is the Gyro (pronounced Yee-ro. Not Jie-roor Gee-ro. I believe either pronunciation is acceptable these days, but I still bristle. It's like calling Goethe, Go-thee, an ugly Chicago-ism I have yet to forgive.). Surely, you've seen it. It's that spit of hulking brown rotating by the grill at most hot dog stands. It makes its weary revolution hour in and hour out, drying on the the stake. God knows what they do with it at the end of the day.
When one orders Gyros, they slice strips off the mass (which might be lamb or something), grill it up and serve it on a pita with onion, tomatoes and tzatziki(yogurt and cucumbers). It is messy, it destroys your insides, repels your friends, and is a culinary abomination.
I love it.
I will only allow myself to order Gyros on rare occasions. And lucky me, I had just such an occasion a few days ago at BarbaYianni Grecian Taverna in Lincoln Square.
After rehearsal, I met Notnits up on Lincoln and Western. German Fest was ravaging the area and the corner was thick with sizzled sausages and sozzled suburbanites.
I'm not very smart about eating, especially when I'm working on a project. Sometimes I forget to do it, and then wonder why I have "out of body" feelings and crank out at the slightest perceived provocation. This was one of those times. There were too many people around, and it was hot. My usual happy greeting was replaced by a peck on the cheek and a gruff, "I need to eat. Now."
BarbaYianni is a restaurant that I have often wondered about, but have never ventured into. I like Greek food, I think, but only in the most casual, American way. Greek salads, Gyros, etc. So, when I saw it was half empty, I pointed the way and cave-manned, "Eat here."
It's a nice place. Very comfortable and easy going. If I recall correctly, they have some paintings of exposed brick and grapes on the walls, a decorative choice common for mid-range Italian and Mediterranean restaurants. I suppose it's meant to carry us away to Crete, however the effect falls a little short. One feels more carried away to the best Italian Eatery in Glen Ellyn.
I ordered a Malbec and took the hungry opportunity to order the Gyros plate. Ordering gyros at a sit down restaurant feels out of place to me. It's a fast food item. But maybe with a glass of wine and some ambiance, it will be fancy.
Fancy it not what I would call it. Plentiful, yes. But fancy, no. The waitress arrived and plopped a plate of steaming brown strips in front of me (complete with all the trimmings) as well as a plate of potatoes and peas covered in red sauce. I spread the tzatziki over the meat and pita and what not and took a bite.
The gyros were about what I expected: Dry, salty, lamby(maybe). Nothing out of the ordinary. To be fair (and this may echo the sentiment in my Falafill review) can one REALLY distinguish between a bad gyro and a good one? I wonder what that tastes like - a truly gourmet gyro.
In this instance, I cannot complain. It was what I wanted. I could only eat about half of it, but it was still decent enough to wrap up and take home. The peas and potatoes were not quite so good. Fairly bland red sauce, and the potatoes were a little on the mushy side.
Overall, I liked BarbaYianni fine. It's a comfortable place and food is serviceable. I got what I came for. I'm not sure that I would go again but if I do, I'll try whatever the house specialty might be, rather than the most basic fast food item.
And probably best not to go when my body is entering phase 2 starvation mode.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Tuesday said said she'd make coffee but she didn't and now you have to go to work without caffeine.
Tuesday pushed in front of you when you were getting on the bus.
Tuesday blamed you for the toner being low in the copier, even though she's the one who sends weekly 27-page-dead-tree memos to everyone the office.
Tuesday ate the half a meatball sub you brought for lunch.
Tuesday corrected your grammar in front of the boss, and your boss agreed with him. They were both wrong.
Tuesday says almost nothing, but clears his throat at 45 second intervals all day.
Tuesday bumped into you and you dropped your train pass. When you picked it up (after, not one, not two, but three false grabs on the sidewalk) you saw the train pulling away and Tuesday was in the window seat that should have been yours.
One day, Tuesday will get his comeuppance. His tiny, aggravating comeuppance.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
1. All over the city sidewalks you can see the ghosts of tiny disasters. Nothing too radical or tectonic. Just evidence left behind that someone was recently disappointed. Or confused.
(Every so often, there will be a ghost of an advanced disaster. I once followed a trail of blood from dumpster around a block to the front door of a house. I Nancy Drewed my way to the conclusion that whoever it was had cut themselves on some glass and had to go for stitches. Of course, I never discovered the real story. Maybe there was foul play and I misread the clues.)
Often the ghost involves food:
A torn paper bag, surrounded by 4 oranges. One is half eaten.
An opened styrofoam container, skidded over with cake and icing. The icing is pink and blue. There is a large Reebok shoe print in the middle.
A hamburger with one bite out of it, resting on a short wall at the bus stop.
An empty Frosty cup on the ground. Five feet away is the actual Frosty.
Part of a CD by the curb.
A whole unopened package of sausage links resting in the sun.
I wonder what happened in the aftermath. What typhoon did the wings of that smirched cake set off?
2. Tonight, walking from Ashland to Broadway, I discovered a face up penny in the crosswalk. I almost passed it over. I've mentioned my preoccupation with face up pennies before, and being fairly superstitious, I turned right around in front of the coolster dudes at Schuba's and claimed it.
I figured this penny to be especially lucky since it was A) Beat to hell and B) in a busy cross walk. Luck builds with potential danger in retrieval. (I once saw a penny on the third rail of the EL tracks. Untold ecstasy awaits the brave.)
When I came up from picking it up, however, the bus passed me by.
I'm still holding out hope. Maybe I'll win the lottery tomorrow.
Speaking of which...
3. The Mega Millions Jackpot has advertisements like this up all over town:
Flumβ
mox
1837, cant word, origin uncertain, probably from some forgotten British dialect. Candidates cluster in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, southern Cheshire and also in Sheffield. "The formation seems to be onomatopoeic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily." OED
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
There are some breakfast cereals that can translate from milk-in-bowl to dry-in-hand with ease. Life Cereal, Frosted Flakes, Frosted Shredded Wheat and Coco Puffs fall into this category, with their limited crumbles, easy to handle size. (There might be some debate on this. Coco Puffs have the roll under the fridge factor, and, as one reaches the bottom of the box of Frosted Flakes, the easy to handle flake size reduces to unmanageable dust.)
Cereals like Fiber One, Fruity Pebbles or Honey Smacks are less adaptable. The individual pieces don't stack well so it's like carrying a fistful of instant avalanche. And good luck getting all of the Pebbles into your mouth.
Rice Krispies fall into this second classification. (In addition to being almost cruelly taste free.)
The Ides of September Tuesday does not seem to care about this. She has brought the box from kitchen and is now sitting next to you on the couch, her toes tucked between the cushions.
Moments before, you could hear her rattling around in the kitchen. The cupboard would open and then shut. The rattle of old ranch dressing bottles would chime out as she pulled open the fridge. You could feel the chilled air escaping as she stood, idle, in front of the glowing shelves. The fridge door would shut. And then open again, thirty seconds later.
The exhausted refrigerator motor clicks on, begging her to close the door.
You try not to sound irritated. "What you see is what we have."
"Jeez. I was just asking." The fridge closes. And there is silence. Then it opens again.
"Are we out of milk?"
You do not change your position, though your eyes shoot tranquilizer darts at the direction of the kitchen. "I guess so."
She sighs and closes the fridge door again. Then, a rustling of cereal boxes.
TIoST appears in the living room, carrying her box of Rice Krispies. She joins you on the couch.
"You're gonna eat those without milk?"
"Uh-huh." She shoves her hand into the box. "Want some."
"No thanks."
"Okay." And with that, she produces a little mound of puffed rice and whips it to her mouth. Ricey pebbles shoot all over the place and into the cushions of the couch. From throat she utters the sound of uh-oh, which sounds like "mm-mm".
She then crawls close to your ear and her lips part. "Yisten. Oo cam still heayoodaSmap, Kwackleamd Bop in mahmouf."
You close your magazine. There is no way you can read with the deafening and unmistakable roar of Rice Krispies in your ear.
I was never a swooner for Patrick Swayze. The year Dirty Dancing came out, all my girlier friends were falling all over themselves. (Dirty Dancing also caused a stir in my youth because it was filmed on location at Lake Lure, situated about an hour away from my hometown. A few of my older friends were extras.) I had just discovered the Lost Boys and was more inclined towards Jason Patrick or Keifer Sutherland. (I was not a Corey girl.)
Swayze seemed nice enough...if a little long in the tooth to be cavorting around a bunch of college kids. But I never dreamed of the day when he would Meringue me off into the sunset.
Even so, I can appreciate his icon status, and I'm a little sad to see him go.
I'm afraid my experience with the song "Unchained Melody" has been hampered by its relationship to the movie Ghost.
When Ghost came out in 1990, and was nominated for Best Picture, I think was joined by many around the world in my total confusion. Whuh-HUH? I suppose it makes sense. Almost every Best Picture nominee is a variation on our favorite topics, Death and Sex. But Ghost? Really?
The scene when Demi Moore and Swayze are overcome with desire next to the potting wheel has been the subject of some well earned parody (they're just so into it.). The fact that "Unchained Melody" underscores the wet-clay seduction has been a factor in my avoidance over the years.
But I gave it a listen last night and the Blue Eyed Soul of the Righteous Brothers can transcend previous notions. It's quite a beautiful song.
Monday, September 14, 2009
1. This morning a woman opened the door of a cab street-side, and another car plowed into it, losing its side mirror. She stepped from the car, confusion all over her face, but tinged with a sense of If I just close the door, and get into the train station, maybe I won't have to be responsible.
I didn't see the aftermath, except a cop storming up to the cab driver wagging his finger. I think the woman actually got away.
2. There were two guys in neon green body stockings doing some performance art at the bus stop downtown. The spandex covered the whole of them, including the face.
I was at first struck - and somewhat indignant - that I couldn't tell if their gyrations were art or advertising. But then I noticed the folks at the bus stop looking on in a sort of bored weltschmerz.
If a couple of green encased men dance at a bus stop in the city, and no one cares, does it even matter if it's art or ad? Nope.
A human's ineptitude at handling technology grows in relation to the public nature of the technology:
ATM use by one's self = quick and agileATM use with line forming behind one = Utter confusion and anguish
5. This morning I had a cinnamonroll from Ann Sather. The guy who waited on me remembered that I was friendly to him on my last visit. He added extra icing and heated it up for me, even though I didn't ask.
He might do this for everybody that comes through the door, but I like to think my being nice and the extra icing are related.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Your eyes bat open and your brain tries to wade through the waters of sleep onto sandy shore. Your body is covered in sweat (hadnβt it been cool when you went to bed? You even put the extra comforter on and burrowed down into the sheets. Now in early Septemberβs cruel mood swings you are caught between autumn chill and sweltering Indian summer. There is no winning.) and your mouth is like an exhaust pipe that belches hot breathes of old beer and hot dogs.
Youβre probably still drunk.
Sleep shows no signs of returning, so you roll over, thump out of bed and drag yourself into the bathroom.
Once there your thumb flicks on the light and your eyes stay shut, the blackness they see is exchanged for maroon. Hopefully your eyes will adjust.
You pad to the sink and open your eyes, only to catch a glimpse in the mirror of what you fear most. It is you. You, my friend, are the Tuesday after Labor Day.
Why is Labor Day on a Monday? Why canβt it be on a Friday? Why is it that every time a weekday holiday arrives we canβt seem to exercise any self control? Suddenly all is chaos and tomorrow never comesβ¦until it does. And on Labor Day, Tomorrow is Tuesday.
Friday, September 4, 2009
I wrote this piece about a year and a half ago. It's based on the painting "Night Windows" by Edward Hopper.
This is a scene I have mulled over several times, trying to get it to work. I haven't really made any revisions to it, but I think there's something in it somewhere.
(As a point of clarification, when people are looking out the window it is the image from the painting that they see. As isf they are the ones looking into the window.)Here is the image:
NIGHT WINDOWS
(A run down room in a transient hotel. There is a single bed, rumpled having been slept in, SL. Next to it is a small nights stand and table lamp. Immediately up stage is a door. Across the room is a doorway leading to a bathroom. Upstage are two large picture windows, out of which another building is visible. It is very near and itβs windows gape open. All lights in these outside rooms are dark, however there is a dim glow just below the sight line and some shadowy movement, indicating that there may be some life in a room below.
There is also some light coming from just above, out of another window.
Underneath the window, on the floor, there is an ashtray, overflowing with dead cigarettes and some candy wrappers.
The hotel room is dark - the shapes of the furniture in the room are outlined by the dim glow of the city lights outside.
Outside the door there is the sound of a distant elevator βdingβ as it reached the floor. Instantly following it are footsteps marching down the hall. They stop in front of the door. A key in the lock, the door opens.
Standing in silhouette is GWEN. She is breathing heavily as she stares into the room. She reaches for the light switch. As she does this, a door slams down the hallway followed by heavy footsteps running towards her. It is MARTIN. He stops, out of breath, behind her. GWEN turns on the lights. She is dressed as if for a party)
GWENIs this it?
MARTIN (Still breathing heavily)Gwen, pleaseβ¦
GWENThis is it? (Calling out) Chuck?
(Pause. No Answer.)
MARTINDonβt go in there, Gwen, please donβtβ¦
GWENWhaddaya mean, βdonβt go inβ?
(GWEN takes a dramatic step into the room. She continues, looking around, leaving MARTIN by the door.)
GWENHuh. Doesnβt look like much.
MARTINIt isnβt. It isnβt much at all. In fact, itβs not anything.
(GWEN laughs for a second and then cups her hand over her mouth, crying. She turns and rushes into the bathroom slamming the door.)
MARTINOh, god, Gwen please donβt cryβ¦
GWENWill you stop saying my name please?
MARTINGw-
(GWEN opens the bathroom door)
GWENYou shut up! Shut. Up. Stop saying my name- youβve said it at least, what, eighteen times in the last fifteen minutes and that average has got to end here, do you understand me? Just cut it out!
MARTINFineβ¦yes.
(GWEN goes back into the bathroom. MARTIN stands for a moment and then looks heads up to the window. He peers out, lingering for a moment at the glow below. The bathroom door opens and he snaps out of it. GWEN re-appears, her eyes are read and puffy.)
GWENIβm going to wait for him. You should leave, probably, or something.
MARTINI think I should stay. I could-
GWENHow long have you known about this place?
MARTINGwe-
GWENI swear to god, Martin, if you say my name one more timeβ¦(A beat) Answer my question.
MARTINWhat difference could that possibly- it can make no possible difference, Gwen, how long Iβve known.
GWENThe night manager-or whatever he is- downstairs. I said, βIβll have the key to Chuck Kildaireβs room please.β And he said, βWell, then, Missyβ -He called me βmissyβ, can you believe it? βWell, then missy, just who in heck are you?β
MARTINWhatβd you say?
GWENβHis goddamn wife, thatβs who.β I thought his head was going to pop.
(She laughs and then her face saddens again. A beat, she notices all the cigarettes and candy wrappers on the floor next to the window. She gets up and walks to the window. MARTIN stiffens. She stares at the mess.)
GWENYou know it is near impossible for him to keep anything clean-(In an instant, she notices the activity in the room across the alley below. She looks at all the trash and then back out the window, putting it together) Whoβs that?
MARTIN (Completely unconvincing)Who?
(She glares at him)
GWENYou know very well βWho.β
MARTINGwen, we should be getting back. I told, Abbie I would giver her a ride home and now itβs-(He looks at his watch) well, the partyβs probably over by now and whatβs she gonna do?
GWENNo one forced you to give me a ride here.
MARTINNo one should drive yourβ¦state of mind.
GWENA-DOR-able. Who. Is. That? (She points out the window on βthatβ.)
MARTINI donβt know.
GWENIs it her?
MARTINNo.
GWENWell, then WHO IS IT?
MARTINI told you, Gwen, I donβt know.
GWENWhatβs going on here? I deserve some answers. I find out, most unceremoniously, from Katy Dennis, of all people that perhaps I may not always know what my husband is up to. And While I thank you, truly, from the bottom of my fragile heart, for owning up about this place, beyond that you have been a complete and utter BUST in the information department.
(She looks out the window.)
GWENSo. Does she always lounge around like that? In some skimpy pink nightgown?
(Pause. MARTIN is at a loss as GWEN stares down into the unseen room. MARTIN approaches her from behind and tentatively puts his hands on her shoulders. GWEN raises her head and turns around to look at him. A beat. She touches his cheek but almost instantly thinking better of it, retracts her hand.)
GWEN (Stepping back and away from him)Iβm starving. I didnβt get a chance to eat a thing before the, uh, explosion.
(Pause.)
MARTINThere was a little diner around the cornerβ¦Iβll see if I canβt get something. A sandwich?
(GWEN nods and MARTIN makes his way out. The door closes and his footsteps plod down the hall. A door opens and closes in the distance and he is gone.
GWEN looks around the room, walking aimlessly. She brushes off the bed and sits in the downstage edge, bouncing a little. She looks back over at the window, confusion across her face.
After a few beats, the elevator bell rings down the hall, and footsteps march down the hall.
In a panic, GWEN lunges over to the light switch above the bed and turns it off as quietly as she can. She edges over to the head of it and sitsβ¦keeping still.
There is the sound of a key in the lock. The door swings open and light fills the room, although GWEN is still disguised in shadow. CHUCKβs silhouette stands in the doorway.)
CHUCKGwen?
(GWEN does not answer, but tries to pull herself up tighter. CHUCK enters and slams the door. He does not turn on the light.
CHUCKβs breathes heavily for a moment, and heads for the window. He mumbles for a beat, leaning on the sill. Pause. In one quick motion, CHUCK pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and matches. He lights one, the flame illuminating his face for a second. He shakes it out and stands, staring down though the window to the apartment below. He sighs, placing the cigarettes on the sill.
GWEN leans forward. Both of their outlines are visible, GWEN watching CHUCK, CHUCK watching the woman below. A long silence.)
CHUCKI donβt even know her.
(GWEN knows heβs talking to her)
CHUCKThis place isnβt what you think it is. Sometimes I just have toβ¦be away.
(GWEN does not answer. CHUCK finishes his cigarette, holds for a beat, and stamps it out. He walks to the door and opens it, light flooding the room once again. His shadow remains in the door for a beat, and then he shuts the door. His footsteps walk away from the room, down the hall. The elevator bell rings and the doors close. He is gone.
GWEN lets out a long loud breath. Gets up and moves towards the window. She picks up the cigarettes and takes one out. Lighting it. She chuckles, enjoying the moment.)
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Recently, I discovered a forgotten note to myself. It was written in the notes section of a palm pilot (God. Remember those? It was like revisiting an Apple IIe.) and it read:
Why do I keep eating unsatisfying food?
I have a murky recollection of writing this down - I think it came on the heels of eating a dry cookie that tasted like drugstore suntan lotion. Since recovering this note, I've been mulling over my food satisfaction levels. The compulsion to consume any old hairball out of the convenience store is a strange reflex. I am almost NEVER happy with what I've purchased, it doesn't taste good and I wind up resenting the loss of a good $1.59.
So I'm going to keep track of new things I eat and, as a new feature here at Shame, Inc., each week I will review the Meat Hut or Food-a-teria from whence it came. The restaurant need not be new to the world. Just new to me.
I want to make clear that I have no experience in culinary writing. I am merely recounting my personal experience. I am only what I am: a person who eats.
This week: Falafill located at 3202 N. Broadway.
I've been drooling over Falafill ever since the sign went up a few weeks ago. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to sample its wares.
At around 12:30, I marched over to Falafill carrying a four-pack of Scott toilet paper, without a bag (I had just been to the Walgreens to pick up the toilet paper and exited the drugstore sans bag - the result of a series of microscopic errors which added up to "Managers should not work the cash registers".). When I opened the door, I was hit with a sudden self conscious wave about the toilet paper as some flagrant admission that, yes indeed, I DO use the bathroom, thank you very much. And considering the volatile nature of chick peas in general, it would appear that I came to the restaurant prepared.
Falafill is set up just the way Americans like their eateries: Clean, white and sterile enough for a tracheotomy. Or to sell Frozen Yogurt.
As you approach the counter, there is a cooler filled with exotic beverages (including cans of Nescafe which, my friend Tina told me, they apparently drink a lot of in Egypt. Ever since she told me that I have softened my previously snooty stance on instant coffee.)
The menu is fairly simple: Lots of Falafel. Sandwiches, Salads, and a few combo items offering hummus and fries (there are also sweet potato fries, which I did not order - but I may next time.)
They could stand to revise their traffic patterns during a lunch rush. After an extended wait in line, I ordered my falafel sandwich and stood to the side clutching my toilet paper (One or two fellow customers eyed me with some suspicion. Makes sense, my proximity to the bathroom was close.). It's a small place and there is not much of a waiting area.
After an e-fricking-ternity, I finally received my sandwich.
Falafill has an extensive side and condiment bar. I dumped some lemon tahini sauce over the sandwich and left. There was plenty more to sample, but the toilet paper was getting in my way.
The sandwich itself was pretty good. The lemon tahini was a spit gland shocker. The Falafels were soft in the inside without being undercooked and the outside was nice and crisp. Truth be told, though, could I distinguish a bad Falafel from a good one? Can you?
My only real gripe about the sandwich is the use of a truly unspectacular pita. It was just one of those plain old whole wheat burlap sacks you can buy at the grocery. A mere vehicle for the falafel...but I wouldn't want to eat it by itself. (Which is how I feel about bread and sandwiches. If I wouldn't want to eat it on its own, why bother?)
But why the inflated price? I payed $5.16 for a few fried chick pea balls and a pita. It was good, but I can get pretty much the same thing for $3.25 down the street at Aladdin's. Or ANY Mediterranean fast food joint, for that matter.
I don't think there are going to be any riots over this price hike. I seem to recall a quiet hullabaloo when Starbucks charged over a buck for a cup of coffee, but that died down in short order. Why? Because it was fashionable, addictive and non-threatening.
Falafill may not be addictive but it is fashionable, in that sterile, non-threatening way. I think it will survive.
Overall:
Was it what I wanted? Yes.Did it taste good? Yes.Right price? Eh.Would I go back? Yes.
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5G mobile networks which provide high-speed mobile internet services, allowing users to download entire movies in seconds
China's three major state telecom operators rolled out 5G wireless technology Thursday, as the country races to narrow its technology gap with the US amid a bruising trade war.
China Mobile, the country's largest carrier, announced its 5G services were available in 50 citiesβincluding Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhenβwith packages starting from 128 yuan ($18) a month.
Rivals China Telecom and China Unicom are also offering services at comparable prices in major cities, according to notices on their websites.
The ultra-fast mobile internet serviceβwhich is 100 times faster than existing 4G networksβallows consumers to download full-length films within seconds, or use apps with virtual reality.
The technology will also pave the way for driverless cars, further automation in factories, and allow users to remotely control appliances such as coffee makers and ovens via the internet.
China is expected to be a front-runner in the adoption of 5G services with over 170 million 5G subscribers by next year, according to estimates by China Telecom.
South Korea will be in second place with a predicted 75,000 users, followed by the US with 10,000, analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein said in a research note last week.
"China will promote the deep integration of new generation information technology and the real economy," said Chen Zhaoxiong, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology at a technology conference Thursday.
"This involves accelerating the integration and application of 5G in industries, transportation, energy, agriculture, education and health," Chen said, according to a statement on the ministry's website.
Beijing has been pushing for a quick rollout of the technology, and China's state economic planner said in January that developing a 5G network was one of its "investment priorities" this year.
Despite the success of 5G networks at home, Chinese telecom equipment giants have faced regulatory push back abroad.
The US Federal Communications Commission on Monday said it was considering blocking telecom carriers from buying equipment from Chinese tech companies Huawei and ZTE.
The US is also threatening crippling sanctions on Huawei, which is expected to be a leading player in offering 5G network hardware.
Washington has expressed fears that Huawei's equipment could contain security loopholes that allow China to spy on global communications traffic, and has been lobbying European countries to stay clear of it.
The company has repeatedly denied the US accusations.
Explore further New US rules would require carriers to remove Chinese equipment
Β© 2019 AFP
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Recovery of copper from oxidic copper bearing raw materials can be realized by leaching the raw materials with sulfuric acid at pH 1 to 2.5 followed by copper recovery by electrowinning after solvent extraction. However, especially with primary sulfide minerals, copper can be leached with sulfuric acid only at high temperatures and pressures resulting in a pregnant leach solution containing high sulfuric acid concentration due to high level of oxidation of elemental sulfur. This makes solvent extraction of copper expensive as excessive amount of acid in the solution has to be neutralized prior to the solvent extraction stage.
There are several discloses in the literature for the recovery of metals, in particular copper, from a copper-bearing sulfide ores where either hydrochloric acid or high chloride concentration has been utilized. Although leaching can be performed in reduced pressure and temperature as compared to sulfuric acid processes a high chloride concentration in pregnant leach solution decreases copper extraction yield in solvent extraction and makes the process more unattractive.
WO2004035840 for example relates to a method for the recovery of metals, in particular copper, from a copper-bearing raw material, whereby the material is leached into a chloride-containing solution. The leaching of the raw material is performed oxidatively and at a sufficiently high redox potential that the copper in the copper chloride solution from leaching is mainly divalent. The chloride solution obtained, which contains copper and potentially other valuable metals, is fed to liquid-liquid extraction. In the extraction the copper is first transferred to the organic phase with extraction and then to a sulphate solution in stripping, which is fed to copper electrowinning.
US2010/0031779A1 on the other hand discloses a process for recovering copper from an acid aqueous solution containing cupric chlorides and alkali metal and/or alkali earth metal chlorides by a solvent extraction with a cation exchange extractant, comprising the step of processing a solvent extraction in the presence of sulfate ions.
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Afc asian cup 2019 qualifiers
Sport The United Arab Emirates Football Association was fined US$150,000 (115,571.3 pounds) and its national team ordered to play a home game behind closed doors after sandal-throwing local fans marred an Asian Cup clash against Qatar, the Asian Football Confederation said on Monday. 11 Mar 2019 10:50PM Bookmark REUTERS: The United Arab Emirates Football Association was fined US$150,000 (115,571.3 pounds) and its national team ordered to play a home game behind closed doors after sandal-throwing local fans marred an Asian Cup clash against Qatar, the Asian Football Confederation said on Monday.Eventual champions Qatar defeated hosts UAE 4-0 in the semi-final of the continental championship on Jan. 29, a game in which forward Almoez Ali was pelted with footwear as he celebrated his team's second goal.Qatar's last two scorers - captain Hassan Al-Haydos and Hamid Ismail - were also the target of missiles at the Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi.The AFC said the UAE FA was β¦ [Read more...] about UAE FA fined for crowd trouble in Asian Cup semi-final with Qatar
After the massive victory against Thailand, India prepares to take on hosts United Arab Emirates (UAE) in their second group-stage encounter on Thursday, January 10. When does the match start and how to watch it live The match between India and UAE will kick off at the Zayed Sports City Stadium in Abu Dhabi at 8 pm local time, 12:00 am SGT and 4 pm GMT. India vs UAE preview Not even the most ardent follower of Indian football would have predicted the outcome β never mind the 4-1 scoreline β that India achieved against Thailand in the first game. Sunil Chhetri struck twice while midfielder Anirudh Thapa added a third with an audacious chip before Jeje Lalpekhlua found the net in Indian colours after 10 months. Coach Stephen Constantine will be pleased at the ruthlessness with which his attackers converted the chances in their first match. But UAE will be a much tougher test and the Indian defence will, once again, be overworked. The likes of Sandesh Jhingan and Anas β¦ [Read more...] about India vs UAE: AFC Asian Cup 2019 live streaming, TV channel, start time & possible lineup
The 17th edition of the AFC Asian Cup will commence on Saturday, January 5 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and 24 teams across Asia will battle it out to be declared the best team in the continent.None of the matches will start before 6 pm local time, 7 pm SGT and 11 am BST. The specific time of every match is listed below under the 'Full Schedule' section.AFC Asian Cup 2019 PreviewIndia heads into the tournament ranked 97 in the world and 15in the continent. They have been placed in a tough group alongside hosts Thailand, Bahrain and hosts UAE.The 24 teams have been divided into six groups of four teams each. The top two teams from each group will qualify for the round of 16 and the remaining for spots will be filled by the four best third-placed teams.There are plenty of strong teams in the tournament and it is difficult to pick an outright favourite but going by the performances in the World Cup, South Korea and Japan will fancy their chances of going all the way.Japan will be β¦ [Read more...] about AFC Asian Cup 2019: Live streaming, TV listings and match details
Azkals make history, edge Tajikistan to enter 2019 AFC Asian Cup (philstar.com) - March 27, 2018 - 9:40pm (UPDATED 10:00 p.m.) MANILA, Philippines β From minnows to Southeast Asian contender, the Philippine Azkals have taken the next step and joined the elite teams of the whole of Asia. With history on the line, the resilient Azkals dished out a performance-to-remember in front of more than 4,600 home supporters, formalizing their first-ever qualification to the AFC Asian Cup with a come-from-behind 2-1 thriller over tough Tajikistan Tuesday night in the Group Qualifiers at Rizal Memorial Stadium. Kevin Ingreso headed in the equalizer in the 73rd minute and skipper Phil Younghusband drilled the go-ahead spot-kick in the 89th to propel the Pinoy booters to victory that sent them to the Continent's showpiece tournament along with powerhouses like Japan, South Korea, Australia,and Saudi Arabia. With the pulsating triumph, the β¦ [Read more...] about Azkals make history, edge Tajikistan to enter 2019 AFC Asian Cup
MANILA, Philippines β The Philippine Azkals will try to do on Tuesday what they could not get done back in November -- secure a berth in the 2019 AFC Asian Cup. To do so, they have to get past a stubborn Tajikistan squad at the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium. The Azkals currently lead Group F of the AFC Asian Cup qualifiers with nine points after two wins and three draws in their previous five matches. As it stands, they only need a draw in order to advance to the AFC Asian Cup for the first time ever. However, head coach Thomas Dooley and skipper Phil Younghusband made it clear that they want to win at home. READ: Phil Younghusband more focused on getting the W against Tajikistan "We have to be prepared; we have to be focused. Our focus is winning the game," said Dooley at the pre-match press conference on Monday. "If it's a tie, it's okay. But we want to win the game." "We're looking forward to the game, and we're going to the game with good confidence," added Younghusband. β¦ [Read more...] about News
Azkals take on Tajikistan with Asian Cup berth on the line
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There is a myriad of countries that are great to raise a family in. But why settle for great if you can have one of, if not the bestβ¦
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TumblrForiOSUpdatedWithNewCamera,PhotosetCreationAndMore
The official universal iOS app of Tumblr has just tumbled into another major update, which brings several notable enhancements. And foremost among these enhancements is a redesigned camera.
On the iPhone or iPod touch, the Tumblr app's camera has new buttons for setting the flash function, switching between the rear and front cameras, and enabling or disabling grid view. These buttons are also present on the iPad, except for the flash setting, of course, since there's no flash function to speak of on any of Apple's tablet models.
Aside from the new buttons, the new camera in Tumblr for iPhone and iPod touch also includes a scrollable view of your photo library. But on the iPad, the photo library view is separated from the app's camera. Either way, from this view, you can easily select multiple photos to add to your post, thereby creating a photoset.
Indeed, Tumblr for iOS now lets you create photosets. So, you don't have to do so using Tumblr's desktop site or its dedicatedPhotoset app.
The new version of Tumblr for iOS now also lets you like posts by double-tapping them (as in Instagram) and change your avatar by tapping it in your profile.
In addition, when creating a link post, the app now automatically fetches the webpage title after you copy or enter a URL.
Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad running iOS 5.0 or later, Tumblr for iOS is available in the App Store for free.
If you're interested in Tumblr apps other than Tumblr's own official ones, check out our Tumblr Apps for the iPhone and Tumblr Apps for the iPad AppGuides.
[gallery link="file" order="DESC"]
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Prices for Chinese solar panels exported into the U.S. are seen to climb by an average of 14 percent due to duties that may be announced later this year, says GTM Research. This will translate into roughly a 10-cent-per-watt increase in the price of solar panels from China. Shayle Kann, VP of research at GTM, says that the increase will negate the price advantage the Chinese makers have had. The anticipated import duties will make panels made in Southeast Asia by U.S. companies First Solar Inc and SunPower Corp. more competitive against the most dominant Chinese producers.
GEβs CEO Makes Final Push for Alstom Bid
Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric Co.βs chief executive officer, is looking to make a final push for its bid for Alstom SAβs energy assets to counter an offer made recently by Siemens AG. Immelt came to Paris to present new details of GEβs $17 billion plan. GE refined some details of its proposal ahead of the June 23 deadline, including the structure of Alstomβs renewable energy, grid and transport units. GE confronts a $19.3 billion counterbid by Siemens AG together with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Hitachi Ltd.
Germany May Install Least Solar Power Capacity in 6 Years
Germany, the worldβs largest solar market by total capacity, will be installing the fewest panels since 2008 as subsidies fell faster than prices. Compared from the same period last year, solar installations suffered a 45 percent drop for the first five months, adding only 818 MW. The government has cut subsidies for solar to reduce the cost of its plan to remove nuclear sources and expand renewables. BSW- Solar lobby expressed that Germany may miss its target of 2.5 GW to 3.5 GW if additions do not gather pace.
11 Member States Exceeded EU Air Pollution Limits During 2012
The European Environment Agency (EEA) recently revealed that 11 EU member states have exceeded air pollution limits in 2012. Included those who went over the legal limits were France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. The other member states were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg and Malta. Ironically, despite the fact that the UK is now under threat of EU legal sanctions over its air quality, it is among the member states that is on=track to comply with the limits set by the National Emission Ceilings Directive (NECD).
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Cardboardia is a Russian collaborative art project to create temporary communities built entirely out of cardboard. Participants create cardboard structures and art, and choose a role to play in the community. The 9th cardboard town was erected November 1-6 in Ulyanovsk, Russia. To see more checkout the Cardboardia Flickr and Vimeo sites.
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Q:
What is the difference between browser.pause() and browser.enterRepl()?
In protractor, there is the browser.pause() function:
Beta (unstable) pause function for debugging webdriver tests. Use
browser.pause() in your test to enter the protractor debugger from
that point in the control flow.
element(by.id('foo')).click();
browser.pause();
// Execution will stop before the next click action.
element(by.id('bar')).click();
And, also, there is a less-known one - browser.enterRepl():
Beta (unstable) enterRepl function for entering the repl loop from any
point in the control flow. Use browser.enterRepl() in your test. Does
not require changes to the command line (no need to add 'debug').
element(by.id('foo')).click();
browser.enterRepl();
// Execution will stop before the next click action.
element(by.id('bar')).click();
From the provided documentation and examples, it is clear that they both are used for debugging the tests. But, it is not clear, what is the difference between the two.
When should we use pause() and when enterRepl()?
A:
It's explained in the docs in general, but I'll try to get a bit deeper.
Protractor has two modes for debugging: DebuggerRepl and CommandRepl.
Repl here stands for Read-eval-print-loop which usually means that whatever command you type in, it gets evaluated right away in the current context and you are provided with a result immediately. For example, the console in Chrome Developer Tools is kinda a REPL for Chrome's implementation of JavaScript/DOM, or when you run node in terminal, you get a REPL for Node.js's JavaScript context - you can type commands and get the result.
When you use browser.pause() you are activating DebuggerRepl. It brings you a Repl where you can execute commands of this mode. You usually see this list of commands in the terminal:
press c to continue to the next webdriver command
press d to continue to the next debugger statement
type "repl" to enter interactive mode
type "exit" to break out of interactive mode
press ^C to exit
So you can go to the next WebDriver command using c command or jump to the next browser.pause() statement in your test using d command. They are executed right away as you use them. So this mode basically allows you to jump over page states and explore the result. (Note: this mode provides more commands; they do work, but I'm not sure what is the meaning of their output and if they are useful for a Protractor user at all.)
When you use browser.enterRepl() you are activating CommandRepl mode. It allows you to use Protractor methods which you would use in tests, but in an interactive mode. You get access to element, browser and protractor objects, so you could run for example:
> $('.hello').getText();
> 'World'
It prints you back the result immediately, so it's sort of a sandbox where you can query the DOM on the current page state and see the results.
As you may have noticed, the browser.pause() list of commands has a line:
type "repl" to enter interactive mode
It means that when you are in DebuggerRepl mode, you can execute the repl command to activate CommandRepl mode for the current page state where you've just run browser.pause(), so you can play with DOM as if you've just used browser.enterRepl(). You can go back to DebuggerRepl mode using the exit command. But if you've entered to CommandRepl mode using browser.enterRepl(), you can't switch to DebuggerRepl mode.
Also, CommandRepl mode can be activated with a feature called elementExplorer. It can be used without any written tests; it just opens a URL in CommandRepl mode.
tl;dr
To summarize, I believe that they supposed to be used according to how they are called.
browser.pause() - I want a browser to pause exactly in that place so I can see what's happening on the page. Then, on my command, I want it to jump to the next state so I can see what is happening here. If I need more information for current state, I can run repl and use the Protractor API (browser, element, protractor) to investigate. I can then exit this mode and continue jumping through states.
browser.enterRepl() - I want a browser to pause exactly in that place and let me investigate a page using the Protractor API (browser, element, protractor) right away, and I don't need to be able to jump between states of the page.
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Anne Harkavy and Will Fischer
Opinion contributor
When Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie testifies Wednesday before a joint congressional hearing on VA efforts to modernize health care access and services for veterans, we urge him to do what this administration has refused to do to date and answer a question of critical concern: Is a shadow council of President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago golf buddies still holding meetings and exerting unlawful influence over the makeup of VA leadership and policy decisions aimed at privatizing VA health care services?
We know that prior to his confirmation, then Acting Secretary Wilkie flew to the president's private Florida golf estate to meet with the Mar-a-Lago "council" β Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter, Palm Beach concierge doctor Bruce Moskowitz, and financial consultant Marc Sherman, all members of the presidentβs private club β and thanked the group for creating a "template" that set a new direction for the agency.
We also know that, despite having no government or U.S. military experience, these three men met more than two dozen times, behind closed doors, to use their prominent position of influence to try to steer VA projects. For example, the VA tasked them with reviewing a $10 billion contract for the largest health information technology project in American history. And at least one project they worked on was one in which a member of the trio may have had a personal interest.
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Specifically, records show that the group recommended the VA develop a mobile app for veterans that would be adapted from a platform owned and developed by Moskowitz, one of its members. And Moskowitzβs son Aaron was brought on board as a manager of the project and included on a call with Apple CEO Tim Cook to discuss the app.
Federal law imposes important transparency requirements when the government enlists private interests to recommend or formulate public policy, in part, to guard against special interests advancing their own agenda without the public knowing or using their privileged positions to promote their personal concerns. This is why we sued the Trump administration: to stop it from unlawfully relying on the advice of Mar-a-Lago members in ways that crowd out the voices of actual veterans and raise concerns of self-dealing.
Brazenly, in seeking to have our lawsuit thrown out, the VA has gone so far as to argue that if our allegations of influence are true, federal transparency laws do not apply because the group has exerted too much power over veterans policy.
Veterans shouldn't have to sue to be heard
It's insulting that veterans have to sue to have a voice when it comes to Trump administration veterans policy. But suing has proven necessary because, at each turn, the VA has failed to serve veterans. The VA has refused to come clean about the Mar-a-Lago group's influence, instead digging its heels in and shielding the illegal troika from public scrutiny.
For example, when Reps. Tim Walz and Elijah Cummings (senior Democrats on the House Veterans Affairs and House Oversight committees, respectively) demanded records that bear on the so-called council's influence and access within the VA, they were denied. When Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Maggie Hassan requested that the VA Office of Inspector General open an investigation into the group, they too were denied.
The Inspector General cited our ongoing lawsuit in denying the senators' request. On Wednesday we called on the Office of the Inspector General to reconsider its refusal to open an investigation. We do not believe that our lawsuit should stand in the way of the office carrying out its statutory obligation to investigate and report on matters affecting VA programs and operations. The public seeks, and deserves, transparency about the Mar-a-Lago group's influence over policies affecting Americaβs veterans.
Veterans deserve to know who's running the VA
In September, Sen. Patty Murray asked Wilkie: βAre there any VA officials consulting with the Mar-a-Lago crowd now?" He replied at that time: "Not that I know of." The commitment to our nationβs veterans must be greater than loyalty to the presidentβs golfing buddies, and so questions about the Mar-a-Lago group's influence must be repeated until they are fully and accurately answered. We are calling on Secretary Wilkie to provide that full and accurate accounting of the level of influence the Mar-a-Lago trio has held over the VA.
Itβs unconscionable that the Trump administration continues to stonewall the public on how private interests are affecting veteransβ access to critical health care. The millions of veterans who rely on the VA deserve answers from Secretary Wilkie. The American people deserve to know the truth.
Anne Harkavy is the Executive Director of Democracy Forward. Will Fischer is an Iraq War veteran, and Director of Government Relations for VoteVets.org. Follow Will Fischer on Twitter: @will_c_fischer
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Daily variation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor and cortisol in women with normal menstrual cycles, undergoing oral contraception and in postmenopause.
Plasma brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels are associated with the hormonal status of women. Moreover, the suprachiasmatic nucleus appears to be implicated in the modulation of BDNF central levels. We aimed to investigate whether BDNF circadian rhythms exist in women and if there is a relationship with cortisol circadian rhythmicity. Moreover, we aimed to establish whether the hormonal status influences BDNF diurnal variations. A total of 30 women were studied: 10 fertile ovulatory women, 10 women undergoing oral contraceptive (OC) therapy and 10 post-menopausal women. Basal BDNF and estradiol levels were assayed in blood samples collected after overnight fasting at regular intervals (08:00, 12:00, 16:00, 20:00, 24:00). BDNF and cortisol levels were measured in samples collected during the follicular and luteal phases in ovulatory women and once a month in OC and post-menopausal women. Luteal BDNF levels were significantly higher than follicular levels in fertile women (P < 0.001). In OC women, BDNF levels were similar to the follicular BDNF levels, whereas in post-menopausal women, they were significantly lower (P < 0.001). BDNF showed a diurnal rhythm in the follicular phase and in women undergoing OC, although the diurnal rhythm was blunted in the luteal phase. In post-menopausal women, BDNF and cortisol levels significantly decreased during the day. BDNF has a diurnal variation in women that is somewhat analogous to cortisol variation; however, the amplitude of the variation in BDNF levels appears to be influenced by ovarian function. Interactions between BDNF, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and sex steroids might play a critical role in the human homeostasis and adaptation.
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{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
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THE IRISH GREYHOUND Board (IGB) spent almost β¬18,000 on public relations consultants in the three months after an RTΓ Investigates programme exposed shocking welfare abuses in the industry last year.
The IGB, which receives annual state funding of around β¬16 million, hired top communications firm Heneghan PR a week after the documentary claimed that 6,000 greyhounds were being killed every year.
Records released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal efforts to restrict media coverage of stadium closures, and to ignore press queries relating to welfare issues as the authority sought to manage the fallout from the controversy.
Heneghan PR β predominantly the firmβs MD Nigel Heneghan, and former government press secretary Eoghan Γ Neachtain β also advised the IGB in relation to its appearance before the Oireachtas agriculture committee, and its unsuccessful complaint against RTΓ over the documentary last year.
The company also assisted with a separate complaint to RTΓβs Liveline last August, in which the IGB expressed βdisappointmentβ in an initial draft at not being invited to contribute to a discussion on the radio show about the treatment of greyhounds.
However, Nigel Heneghan removed the reference to βdisappointmentβ in an email to the IGBβs press officer βbecause they could say if you are that disappointed, why donβt you come on air tomorrow β which is what we want to avoidβ.
He added: βThey could still ask us, but the updated wording might make it easier to say no!β
A number of greyhound stadiums closed in the months following the RTΓ documentary. Emails between the IGB and Heneghan PR reveal a strategy of βlimiting stories to local coverage if we only release locally for nowβ.
βI agree with [the IGB press officer] in terms of endeavouring to keep it local in the short term,β wrote Nigel Heneghan.
In the case of Longford Greyhound Stadium, it was decided not to inform local media of its closure at all. The stadium had not issued a statement locally due to a poor relationship with the media, according to the IGB press officer.
βOn that note, it might be a case of alerting Longford media to the story if we send our statement out of the blue,β he wrote.
βMy suggestion again is to put it up on our own website for now and deal with queries from there.β
IGB CEO Ger Dollard intervened in a discussion about how to deal with repeated queries from a Mail on Sunday journalist concerning the welfare of a greyhound owned by a syndicate of current and former Oireachtas members.
βI would ignore the emails,β he wrote. βNigel can tell her if he wishes that he has sent on to the IGB and is awaiting a response?β
#Open journalism No news is bad news Support The Journal Your contributions will help us continue to deliver the stories that are important to you Support us now
The strategy appears to have worked, as Nigel Heneghan wrote on August 11: βNothing in Mail on Sunday β good.β
A total of β¬17,785.80 was paid to the PR firm by the IGB in the first three months after the RTΓ documentary was aired.
A spokesman for the organisation said that it maintains consistent engagement with all media, and has endeavoured to respond to a large number of media queries at all times.
βThe situations regarding the closures of Lifford and Longford greyhound stadia were, at the time suggested, fluid and changeableβ¦ A decision was made to prioritise informing local media in these areas of impending closures before national media to ensure the greyhound community in these areasβ¦ were fully and adequately informed,β he said.
He added that the journalist who inquired about the Oireachtas syndicate was βextensively engaged withβ but the βongoing submission of queries on a welfare case was seen as unreasonable, and the IGB chose not to further respondβ.
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Should liver transplantation be performed for patients with hepatitis B?
Because of the almost universal recurrence of hepatitis B surface antigenemia (HBsAg) after liver transplantation, some centers have questioned whether these patients are appropriate allograft candidates. Since January 1984, 51 patients with hepatitis B (HBV) underwent OLT at our center. No therapy was given to prevent reinfection. Three patients underwent retransplantation. The indications for transplant included fulminant HBV (13 patients), chronic HBV (33 patients), and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCCA) in addition to HBV (5 patients). Incidental HCCA was found in 2 of the 33 patients thought to have only chronic HBV. Actuarial survival for the entire group was 57% at 1 year and 54% at 3 years. Of the 23 patients who died, only 4 deaths were attributable to recurrent HBV liver disease. Four patients survived less than 4 days due to primary graft nonfunction. Ten patients died in the first 3 months from sepsis. Although all patients who died beyond 30 days had recurrent HBsAg, only 4 deaths were attributable to recurrent HBV. The remaining 5 deaths were caused by portal vein thrombosis, bile leak, lymphoma, pancreatitis, and sepsis occurring at 15 months. Excluding the 4 patients who died from primary graft nonfunction, actuarial survival was 63% at 1 year and 60% at 3 years. Of the 28 survivors, 24 are HBsAg positive; however, only 5 have recurrent HBV liver disease. Multiple factors were evaluated to determine their influence on survival; i.e., HBV serology, United Network for Organ Sharing status, fulminant versus chronic HBV, incidence of rejection, immunosuppression, transfusion requirements, and presence of HCCA. Of these, only the presence of HCCA adversely affected outcome. Of the 7 patients with HCCA and HBV, 6 patients died within the first 6 months and 1 patient has recurrent HBV liver disease at 25 months. Actuarial survival excluding those patients with HCCA was 64% at 1 year and 61% at 3 years. Based on our results, patients with HBV and associated HCCA have a poorer prognosis and should probably be excluded from transplantation. Although the survival for patients with HBV undergoing liver transplantation is inferior to that expected in patients with some other diagnoses, long-term survival can be achieved in a majority of these patients despite recurrence of HBsAg. We believe that appropriately selected patients with a diagnosis of HBV alone should continue to be candidates for liver allografts.
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{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
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Q:
Angular 2 routing in ES5?
The Angular 2 ES5 cheat sheet says to do this:
var MyComponent = ng.router.RouteConfig([
{ path: '/:myParam', component: MyComponent, as: 'MyCmp' },
{ path: '/staticPath', component: ..., as: ...},
{ path: '/*wildCardParam', component: ..., as: ...}
]).Class({
constructor: function() {}
});
However, I can't figure out how to specify the @Component stuff on that class so that I can actually instantiate it. For example,
ng.router.RouteConfig([...]).Component({})
throws an exception because the result of .RouteConfig doesn't have a .Component method. Similarly, the result of .Component doesn't have a .RouteConfig method. How do you get this set up?
A:
I've done the following way which seems to work well.
app.AppComponent = ng.core
.Component({
selector: 'the-app',
template: `
<h1>App!!!</h1>
<a [routerLink]="['Children']">Children</a>
<a [routerLink]="['Lists']">Lists</a>
<router-outlet></router-outlet>
`,
directives:[
app.ListsComponent,
app.ChildrenComponent,
ng.router.ROUTER_DIRECTIVES
]
})
.Class({
constructor: [ng.router.Route, function(_router) {
this._router = _router; // use for navigation, etc
}]
});
app.AppComponent = ng.router
.RouteConfig([
{ path: '/', component:app.ListsComponent, name:'Lists' },
{ path: '/children', component:app.ChildrenComponent, name:'Children' }
])(app.AppComponent);
Since both ng.core.Component and ng.router.RouteConfig are decorators you can write:
app.AppComponent = ng.core.Class(...);
app.AppComponent = ng.core.Component(...)(app.AppComponent);
app.AppComponent = ng.router.RouteConfig(...)(app.AppComponent);
Hope that helps.
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{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
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A variant of a descriptive epidemiological study of cancer with the aid of a minicomputer.
The presented method of descriptive epidemiological study with the aid of a computer was designed using the model of an average district with a data file of carcinoma incidence from the period 1975-1983. The method is based on processing the statistical characteristics of a data file and on their evaluation. Plotting the coordinates of the communities and of the boundaries of the district constitutes the frame for the construction of maps. The population is divided into age groups of 5 years, incidence is standardized with respect to the age standard of the district. The selection of boundaries (isolines) of zones in the maps is based on the evaluation of the distribution of incidences and on the relative number of inhabitants in communities classified according to the standardized values. The application of the study to the work of centers for clinical oncology is discussed.
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{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
}
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Acura is about to undergo a dramatic renaissance. For several years this brand has soldiered on with some gaping holes in its line-up β RL anyone? (Yeah, that hole is so big it echoes.) In some senses, it is a brand without a flagship because the flagship sedan is so overlooked that it might as well not exist. It doesnβt have any coupes (unless you count the ZDX crossover. I know, that was a reach), sports cars, hybrids or diesels and its entry-level sedan doesnβt even offer the brandβs excellent AWD system.
Acura sales were down almost 12 per cent in Canada last year (and down about 25 per cent since 2007), though no one can accurately say how much the tsunami in Japan affected the parts supply chain and production capacity, despite most Acura models being produced in North America. Speaking of production, the MDX and ZDX are produced right here in Canada at Hondaβs Alliston, Ontario plant. With CSX production winding down and the RL, TSX and ZDX models sales faring poorly, Acura became predominantly a truck seller, with the MDX and RDX accounting for over half of its vehicles sold in Canada last year.
2012 Acura MDX Elite. Click image to enlarge
But the future is bright. Acura just debuted the NSX concept at the Detroit Auto Show, and despite the lack of an interior, it is a convincing reinterpretation of the seminal Acura supercar, abiding by the mid-engine layout, exotic, supercar-worthy design, and application of Honda hybrid technology and all-wheel-drive as befitting the Acura brand. Alongside the NSX, Acura introduced the second generation RDX and upcoming ILX compact luxury sedan, which will put them back on the map with entry-level luxury shoppers looking for a small car or crossover.
On the sedan side, the TSX and TL are both standouts offering warm performance and exceptional value that keep people coming back to the Acura brand, though controversial styling may be hurting their adoption rate. Without question, the greatest strength in the Acura line-up for several years has been the MDX SUV, with sales consistently topping 5,000 units annually for the past 5 years. It may be odd that Hondaβs luxury brand has been anchored by a mid-size SUV considering Hondaβs reputation is rooted in small, efficient cars, but the MDX is to the luxury SUV market what the Fit is to small cars: efficient packaging ahead of its time, strong and nimble performance β yet economical to run β and good value even if it might not win the feature-per-dollar contest. The MDX may not have anything as brilliant as the Fitβs Magic Seats, but it came to market with three rows of seating without bloating into a full-size SUV, which served to make it a reasonable solution to a wide variety of tastes and needs.
2012 Acura MDX Elite. Click image to enlarge
Then again, taste is one area that Acura wasnβt afraid to experiment with, and while many lambasted Acuraβs various grille and trunk treatments, the MDX has resonated with high-income households looking for one car that fits all needs or as a luxury winter carry-all. A recent trip through Forest Hill, one of Torontoβs most affluent neighbourhoods, and I was crossing paths with MDX models of various generations at practically every turn and intersection. Granted, thatβs a fairly limited sample, but itβs worth far more to Acura to have MDXs in a handful of those driveways (or better yet, at the school drop-off) than any number of reviews on a site even as esteemed as this one.
Personally, I find the current grille a little blasΓ© compared to the 2007β2009 model years, with its twin, perforated grille shields, but I have to give Acura credit for consistency across the line-up and finding a look that works from compact sedan all the way up to its SUVs. Once you get past the grille, the angular headlights may not sport the latest LED gimmickry (though Iβm sure itβs coming soon), but they suit the sharply creased edges and even proportions that make this SUV seem much smaller than its 4,867 mm length (longer than either the 4,807-mm Volvo XC90 or 4,829-mm Land Rover LR4).
That length helps accommodate the third row of seats and 425 litres of cargo even with all seats up and 1,215 litres behind the second row, compared with 249 litres and 615 litres for the XC90, or 280 litres and 1,192 litres for the LR4. Max cargo volume with all seats flat is 2,364 litres for the MDX, to the XC90βs 1,837 and the LR4βs 2,558. Overall, utility definitely goes to the MDX (power tailgate as base equipment, thank you very much, Acura), although it should be noted that the third row is not a comfortable option for full-size adults in any of these SUVs.
Although by no means unique to this segment, I always feel the need to share when seats are at an ideal height for easy installation of car seats and insertion of children into said car seats for both me and my vertically-challenged wife. Our two-year-old daughterβs favourite feature was the rear entertainment system that meant another week of Barbie and Leap Frog movies whenever we drove anywhere. (It should also be noted that if I never have to listen to another Barbie movie again, it will be too soon. Unfortunately, I likely have many years of Barbie movies and accessories in my future, no doubt.)
|
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|
424 P.2d 96 (1967)
George E. STILES, Petitioner,
v.
Warden Ray PAGE, State Penitentiary, McAlester, Oklahoma, Respondents.
No. A-14181.
Court of Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma.
February 15, 1967.
George E. Stiles, pro se.
No response by State.
NIX, Presiding Judge:
This is an Original Proceeding in which the petitioner, George E. Stiles, seeks a Writ of Mandamus from this Court directing the Warden of the State Penitentiary to credit petitioners time served with some number of days spent in jail, and on bail, before being received at the penitentiary.
However, this petition must fail on its face. Petitioner states that he was sentenced from the District Court of Oklahoma County for the crime of "Grand Larceny, After Former Conviction of a Felony."
This Court has held, as in the Application of Roberson, Okl.Cr., 400 P.2d 459, that:
"All inmates in state penal institution who are serving their first terms with good conduct record and who have no infraction of rules and regulations of penal institution shall be allowed, as deduction from term of imprisonment, jail term, if any, served prior to being received at penal institution." (Emphasis ours)
The only inmates who receive credits for their jail time, are first offenders.
"Defendant who was sentenced after former conviction of felony was not entitled to deduction for jail time served prior to being received at penal institution."
Application of Neal, Okl.Cr., 373 P.2d 1022.
The Writ prayed for, is accordingly denied.
BUSSEY and BRETT, JJ., concur.
|
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|
The present invention concerns a method for establishing radiofrequency links via a telecommunication satellite having several spots, designated multispot satellite, between at least one terrestrial station (designated as gateway) and a service area composed of a plurality of elementary covering zones, designated as cells, each cell comprising a plurality of terrestrial terminals. This type of satellite allows the use of several antenna spots on board the satellite to cover contiguous geographical zones or cells, instead of a single broad spot.
Such multispot satellites allow several radiofrequency links to be established occupying the same frequency band on different spots.
In the case of a broadband satellite telecommunication system, the satellite is used in a bidirectional manner, i.e. at the same time for: relaying data emitted by a terrestrial station towards a plurality of terrestrial terminals: this first link of the point-multipoint type constitutes the forward link; relaying towards the terrestrial station the data emitted by the terrestrial terminals this second link, of the multipoint-point type, constitutes the return link.
It will be noted that a radiodiffusion service by satellite can be considered as equivalent to the forward link of a bidirectional system such as described above.
An example of forward link in a multispot configuration is illustrated in FIG. 1.
Signals are sent towards a multispot satellite 3 on an uplink LM by a terrestrial station 2 such as a gateway connected to an internet backbone 5. These signals are then processed at the level of the satellite 3 then retransmitted on a downlink LD in the form of a plurality of spots forming elementary covering zones or cells C1 to C8 in which terrestrial terminals 6 are situated. Each cell C1 to C8 is associated with a spot SP1 to SP8. It will be noted that in the case of configuration 1, the eight cells C1 to C8 associated respectively to the eight spots SP1 to SP8 form a group of cells served by the same terrestrial station 2. The return link of the terrestrial terminals 6 towards the terrestrial station 2 functions in an identical manner with an inverse direction of communication.
The coordination of the frequencies between operators is carried out within the framework of a regulation decreed by the International Union of Telecommunications (IUT): thus, by way of example, the Ka band for Region 1 (Europe, Africa, Middle East) is defined in Table 1 below:
TABLE 1Forward linkUplink (of the terrestrial station)27.5 GHz to 29.5 GHzDownlink (towards the terrestrial19.7 GHz to 20.2 GHzterminals)Return linkUplink (of the terrestrial terminals)29.5 GHz to 30.0 GHzDownlink (towards the terrestrial17.7 GHz to 19.7 GHzstation)
Other bands such as band Ku can likewise be used.
Given that the gain of an antenna is inversely proportional to the opening of the spot, it is necessary to use multispot antennae to cover an extensive zone with a homogeneous and high gain. The greater number of spots, the smaller the opening of each spot will be. Thus, the gain on each spot and hence the gain on the service area to be covered will be increased. As we have mentioned above, a service area to be covered is formed by a plurality of contiguous cells (elementary covering zones), a spot being associated with each cell. A homogeneous multispot covering zone SA is represented in FIG. 2a), each cell being represented by a hexagon FH such that the covering zone is composed of a plurality of hexagons FH in which Οcell is the external dimension of the cell expressed by the angle of the satellite associated with the covering. However, the antenna spot associated with each cell is not capable of producing a hexagonal shape, a good approximation consisting in considering a plurality of circular spots FC such as represented in FIG. 2 b). The association of a spot with a cell is carried out taking into account the best performances of the satellite for said spot, in particular in terms of EIRP (Effective Isotropic Radiated Power) and of merit factor G/T (ratio gain over noise temperature): a cell is determined as the part of the service area associated with the spot offering the highest gain on this zone from all the spots of the satellite.
Configuration 1, as represented in FIG. 1, uses a technique designated frequency re-use: this technique allows the same range of frequencies to be used several times in the same satellite system so as to increase the total capacity of the system without increasing the attributed band pass.
Frequency re-use schemes are known, designated as color schemes, making a color correspond to each of the spots of the satellite. These color schemes are used to describe the attribution of a plurality of frequency bands to the spots of the satellite with a view to radiofrequency transmissions to be realized in each of these spots. In these schemes, each color corresponds to one of these frequency bands.
In addition, these multispot satellites allow polarised transmissions to be emitted (and received): the polarisation can be linear (in this case the two directions of polarisation are respectively horizontal and vertical) or circular (in this case the two directions of polarisation are respectively circular left or circular right). It will be noted that in the example of FIG. 1, the uplink leaving the station 2 uses two polarisations with four channels for each polarisation, respectively Ch1 to Ch4 for the first polarisation and Ch5 to Ch8 for the second polarisation: the use of two polarisations allows the total number of terrestrial stations to be reduced. The eight channels Ch1 to Ch8, after processing by the payload of the satellite 3 will form the eight spots SP1 to SP8 (one channel being associated with one spot in this example).
According to a scheme with four colors (red, yellow, blue, green) with a frequency spectrum of 500 MHz for each polarisation, the transmissions being polarised in one of the two polarisation directions: circular right or circular left, each color is associated with a band of 250 MHz and a polarisation direction.
In the whole of the following description, we will take the following convention: the color red is represented by hatched lines toward the right; the color yellow is represented by dense points; the color blue is represented by hatched lines toward the left; the color green is represented by dispersed points.
A color is thus associated with each spot of the satellite (and hence a cell) so that the spots of a same βcolorβ are non-adjacent: the contiguous cells therefore correspond to different colors.
FIGS. 3a) and 3b) take up again the example of FIGS. 2a) and 2b) with a scheme having four colors. FIG. 3a) illustrates a homogeneous multispot covering zone, each cell being represented by a hexagon associated with a color so that the contiguous cells therefore correspond to different colors. FIG. 3b) represents the circular spots associated with each cell (the color of which is identical to that of the associated cell).
An example of a scheme with four colors for the coverage of Europe is represented in FIG. 4. In this case, 80 cells are necessary to cover Europe. This scheme allows there to be a European coverage towards and from terminals using a spectrum of 500 MHz but with the re-use of the frequencies. The coverage for the terrestrial stations is less constraining and can be provided by a sub-assembly of spots or a separate coverage.
This type of scheme is equally applicable in uplink and in downlink. At the satellite level, the creation of a spot is made from a horn radiating towards a reflector. A reflector can be associated with a color so that a coverage with four colors is ensured by four reflectors.
FIG. 5 illustrates a frequency plan broken down into an uplink frequency plan PMVA on the forward link, a downlink frequency plan PDVA on the forward link, an uplink frequency plan PMVR on the return link and a downlink frequency plan PDVR on the return link. The notations RHC and LHC designate respectively the right and left circular directions of polarisation.
The PMVA plan corresponding to the uplink on the forward link (of the terrestrial station to the satellite) has 2 GHz available frequency spectrum so that 16 channels of 250 MHz band pass are generated by a terrestrial station (8 channels for each polarisation). These 16 channels, after processing by the payload of the satellite will form 16 spots. In this example, 16 spots (and hence 16 cells) are generated by a terrestrial station.
It will be noted that the scheme with four colors, for the forward link, associates one of the following four colors with each spot of a pattern of four adjacent spots: a first color red corresponding to a first band of 250 MHz (lower part of the available spectrum of 500 MHz) and to the circular right polarisation direction; a second color blue corresponding to the same first band of 250 MHz and to the circular left polarisation direction; a third color yellow corresponding to a second band of 250 MHz (upper part of the available spectrum of 500 MHz) and to the circular right polarisation direction; a fourth color green corresponding to the same second band of 250 MHz and to the circular left polarisation direction.
On the return link, the polarisations are inverted so that the colors red and yellow have a circular left polarisation and the colors blue and green have a circular right polarisation.
However, such a configuration is liable to involve certain difficulties.
|
{
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}
|
Haji Fazlur Rehman
Haji Fazlur Rehman (born Fazlur Rehman) is an Indian politician who has been a Member of Lok Sabha for Saharanpur since 2019.
Personal life
Rehman graduated from the Aligarh Muslim University in 1972. His family is well known and respected among people of Uttar Pradesh.
Political career
On 27 February 2019, Mahagathbandhan, the grand alliance of Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal announced that Rehman would contest the upcoming 2019 Indian general election from Saharanpur constituency on the symbol of Bahujan Samaj Party. On 23 May 2019, Rehman was elected to the Lok Sabha after defeating Raghav Lakhanpal of Bharatiya Janata Party, his nearest rival by a margin of 22,417 votes. Rehman was polled 5,14,139 votes.
References
Category:Indian politicians
Category:Living people
Category:Bahujan Samaj Party politicians
Category:17th Lok Sabha members
Category:Year of birth missing (living people)
|
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}
|
PBS has renewed the drama β its first original scripted production in more than a decade β for a second season, the public broadcaster said Wednesday.
βWe are thrilled with the overwhelmingly positive response to βMercy Streetβ and the return of high-quality American drama on PBS stations,β said Beth Hoppe, PBS chief programming officer and general manager, general audience programming, in a prepared statement. βWeβre looking forward to a second season offering more fascinating stories inspired by historical events. The effort from everyone involved, including the producers, directors, historical consultants, actors and PBS stations, resulted in an extraordinary series that exemplifies PBSβ world-class programming.β
PBS may be in search of a new flagship drama. The very popular βDownton Abbeyβ recently concluded, leaving the broadcaster in search of a new scripted property around which to rally.
The drama explores lifein Alexandria, Virginia in the Spring of 1862. The border town between North and South is the longest-occupied Confederate city of the war and ruled under martial law, The drama follows the stories of multiple characters, whose lives intersect at Mansion House, a family luxury hotel transformed into a Union Army hospital.
The first season was executive produced by Ridley Scott and David W. Zucker of Scott Free; Lisa Q. Wolfinger; and David Zabel. PBS said its January 17 premiere reached more than 5.7 million viewers, and that the seriesβ six episodes have streamed 2 million times (from January 14-February 28) across available platforms, which include PBS station websites, PBS.org and PBS apps for iOS, Android, FireTV, Roku, Apple TV, Xbox 360 and Windows 10.
|
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}
|
A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Wednesday that Ohio must allow most unlawfully purged voters to vote in November. In September the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down [JURIST report] the procedure implemented by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted that effectively eliminated inactive registered voters if they failed to respond to letters requesting confirmation of their status and addresses. The court acknowledged the logistical difficulties posed by the upcoming election and provided guidance on how to allow as many purged voters as possible to vote in the election:
Despite the imperfect circumstances now faced by the parties and Ohio voters purged under Ohioβs Supplemental Process, it is the Courtβs hope that the remedies detailed in this Opinion and Order will successfully restore the rights of many Ohio voters prior to the upcoming election.
Husted commented [press release] on the ruling and expressed that the state will comply with the courtβs ruling.
The right to vote has become especially contentious as the presidential election approaches. Earlier in October the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida issued an order [JURIST report] requiring Florida to provide a method for voters to fix signature problems arising from vote-by-mail ballots. The judge was highly critical of the stateβs opposition to allowing these voters to ensure their votes are counted, calling it an odd and unconstitutional double-standard resulting in disenfranchisement of thousands of Florida voters. Also in October a federal court issued [JURIST report] a preliminary injunction in favor of the Pyramid Lake and Walker River Paiute Native American tribes challenging Nevadaβs voting procedure of failing to provide polling places on Native American reservations. In July voter restrictions were overturned in North Carolina, Kansas and Wisconsin [JURIST reports].
|
{
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
}
|
The role of miR156 in developmental transitions in Nicotiana tabacum.
Plants undergo a series of developmental transitions during their life cycle. After seed germination, plants pass through two distinct phases: the vegetative phase in which leaves are produced and the reproductive phase in which flowering occurs. Based on the reproductive competence and morphological changes, the vegetative phase can be further divided into juvenile and adult phases. Here, we demonstrate that the difference between juvenile and adult phase of Nicotiana tabacum is characterized by the changes in leaf size, leaf shape as well as the number of leaf epidermal hairs (trichomes). We further show that miR156, an age-regulated microRNA, regulates juvenile-to-adult phase transition in N. tabacum. Overexpression of miR156 results in delayed juvenile-to-adult transition and flowering. Together, our results support an evolutionarily conserved role of miR156 in plant developmental transitions.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
}
|
Regulation and Controls Needed for Police 2.0 Practices
The increasing use of advanced surveillance technologies by law-enforcement officers in the United States raises issues for citizensβ fundamental rights.
Automatic licence plate readers, surveillance cameras and facial recognition software β these are all examples of modern surveillance techniques whose use is now increasing by leaps and bounds across the United States. In 1997, about 20% of all US police departments were using some type of surveillance technology. By 2007, that figure had risen to over 70%, according to an article by Stephen Rushin, Professor of Law at the University of IllinoisCollege of Law. βThis radical shift in policing is the beginning of what I call the digitally efficient investigative state,β he writes. In this new environment, advanced technology is being implemented in a bid to substantially improve the effectiveness of police investigations and surveillance. However a serious issue raised by the professor is that these technologies are being used by state and local police departments without any consistent rules.
Monitoring the community rather than individuals?
In the United States, the spotlight is currently on the much-publicised activities of the National Security Agency, and βwe donβt tend to think of our local police force as being particularly scary, intimidating or worrisome,β underlines Professor Rushin. He points out that these technologies could be used not only to track down a βwantedβ suspect but also to keep tabs on an entire community. This ability to keep everyone under surveillance at the same time at the very least βought to pose significant privacy concerns to law-abiding citizens,β he argues. Up to now, there has been a general belief that citizens had no expectation of privacy in public places. However, suggests Rushin, this was probably because people saw the authoritiesβ surveillance capability as rather limited. Nowadays, given the new techniques in this field, any local police officer can gather large quantities of data on an individual person or a whole section of the population without having to apply for a court order. This consequently raises questions over data storage and integrity.
Legislation needed
Professor Rushin argues that the federal legislative bodies ought to be taking the lead in regulating the use of surveillance techniques and limiting the retention, access to and sharing of data obtained by efficient digital public surveillance technologies. Meanwhile the state authorities also have a duty to act, he says. The article puts forward a βmodel statuteβ intended to address some core issues around information privacy and data confidentiality issues, along the same lines as rules for the use of commercial data. A key challenge will be to provide for the specific needs of different police departments while guaranteeing basic consistency in data collection and use across the United States, points out Stephen Rushin.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
|
Fibrinogen: a comparison of an immunoturbidimetric method with four conventional methods.
A rapid and simple immunochemical method for fibrinogen determination is described. The method is based on measuring the turbidity caused by antigen-antibody complexes with an enzyme analyser using diluted antiserum as a starting reagent. This immunoturbidimetric method correlates well with the immunodiffusion method and with two of the thrombin methods. Its correlation with the precipitation method according to Low was a little weaker.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
}
|
/*
*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
* under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
* Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at
* your option) any later version.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
* WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
* General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
* along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
* Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
*
* In addition, as a special exception, the author gives permission to
* link the code of this program with the Half-Life Game Engine ("HL
* Engine") and Modified Game Libraries ("MODs") developed by Valve,
* L.L.C ("Valve"). You must obey the GNU General Public License in all
* respects for all of the code used other than the HL Engine and MODs
* from Valve. If you modify this file, you may extend this exception
* to your version of the file, but you are not obligated to do so. If
* you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your
* version.
*
*/
#pragma once
#define DEFINE_DECAL(name)\
{ name, 0 }
enum decal_e
{
DECAL_GUNSHOT1 = 0,
DECAL_GUNSHOT2,
DECAL_GUNSHOT3,
DECAL_GUNSHOT4,
DECAL_GUNSHOT5,
DECAL_LAMBDA1,
DECAL_LAMBDA2,
DECAL_LAMBDA3,
DECAL_LAMBDA4,
DECAL_LAMBDA5,
DECAL_LAMBDA6,
DECAL_SCORCH1,
DECAL_SCORCH2,
DECAL_BLOOD1,
DECAL_BLOOD2,
DECAL_BLOOD3,
DECAL_BLOOD4,
DECAL_BLOOD5,
DECAL_BLOOD6,
DECAL_YBLOOD1,
DECAL_YBLOOD2,
DECAL_YBLOOD3,
DECAL_YBLOOD4,
DECAL_YBLOOD5,
DECAL_YBLOOD6,
DECAL_GLASSBREAK1,
DECAL_GLASSBREAK2,
DECAL_GLASSBREAK3,
DECAL_BIGSHOT1,
DECAL_BIGSHOT2,
DECAL_BIGSHOT3,
DECAL_BIGSHOT4,
DECAL_BIGSHOT5,
DECAL_SPIT1,
DECAL_SPIT2,
DECAL_BPROOF1, // Bulletproof glass decal
DECAL_GARGSTOMP1, // Gargantua stomp crack
DECAL_SMALLSCORCH1, // Small scorch mark
DECAL_SMALLSCORCH2, // Small scorch mark
DECAL_SMALLSCORCH3, // Small scorch mark
DECAL_MOMMABIRTH, // Big momma birth splatter
DECAL_MOMMASPLAT,
DECAL_END
};
typedef struct
{
char *name;
int index;
} DLL_DECALLIST;
extern DLL_DECALLIST gDecals[DECAL_END];
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Github"
}
|
Caffeine can trigger engineered cells to release insulin Description:Chevanon Wonganuchitmetha/EyeEm/Getty
A cup of coffee after a meal might be enough to keep diabetes under control, thanks to cells that have been engineered to release insulin when they detect caffeine.
Type 2 diabetes develops when the body loses its ability to regulate glucose levels in the blood. Some people manage this by taking frequent pin prick samples to measure their blood sugar levels, and using this information to adjust the supply of insulin from a pump worn against the skin.
Meal times are an especially taxing event, as the amount of sugar consumed must be estimated, and an appropriate dose of insulin scheduled. To get around this, Martin Fussenegger, a biotechnologist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues have developed an alternative thatβs powered by coffee.
The team took human kidney cells and engineered them to produce insulin. They also added a receptor that would trigger the release of this insulin when caffeine was present.
Caffeine control
They then implanted these cells into 10 mice with type 2 diabetes, and gave them coffee with their meals. Tests revealed this was enough to enable the mice to control their blood sugar levels as well as non-diabetic mice.
The risk of accidentally triggering a dose of insulin appears to be small. βTo my knowledge there are no other significant sources of caffeine in food,β says Fussenegger. βEven very small trace amounts of caffeine will not trigger the system.β
Journal reference: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04744-1
Read more: Men more likely to get diabetes if they have overweight wives
|
{
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
}
|
The ad tech renaissance - taylorbuley
http://bokonads.com/the-ad-tech-renaissance/
======
oxymoron
I'll concede that the analysis isn't completely without merit, but having
spent the last few years in ad tech, I sincerely hope that there won't be a
revival. It's a race to the bottom. Publishers are struggling and are
increasingly willing to accept ever more outrageous ad products. Advertisers
are desperate for advertising that actually works, but will mostly only do
what agencies tell them, and the agencies are only interested in maximizing
their own margins. In the middle we've got any number of middle men scrambling
for some pieces of the cake, sometimes but usually not providing some value,
leaving the publishers with a pathetic fraction of the advertiser spend.
So essentially we've got a whole bunch of companies with no growth desperately
vying for the attention of 23-year old media buyers who in turn are mostly
interested in getting someone to take them clothes shopping and picking up the
bill. These companies are doing it mostly by doing ever more intrusive things,
since advertisers can't accept that the reason their ads don't perform is that
nobody wants their stuff and keeps looking for a silver bullet.
I've come to believe that the only reasonable justification for most
advertising is that it's in some sense a way for other industries to subsidize
journalism. Since that's going away, I'm looking forward to the inevitable ad
tech carnage ahead, and if a potential next wave actually brings higher
quality advertising and better end user experiences I'll happily eat my shoes.
~~~
vosper
All of this, plus the vast amounts of bot traffic that no one wants to look
too closely at, because everyone except the advertiser is making money off of
it...
~~~
ec109685
Bot traffic is accounted for in the price advertisers pay for ads. Advertisers
don't run unprofitable ads.
~~~
simo7
Advertisers do run unprofitable ads and marketing campaigns all the times.
And they are fine with that too. That's the case of VC-backed startups: they
accept a negative ROI to get the chance to start making money one day.
Then you have the less consciuous ones, which might be big brands who want to
experiment a bit with new media/ad formats.
In any case, if you think about it, the real losers are...the honest
publishers. Because the money on the table is not increased by fraud, it's
just shared in a way that takes something away from good publishers to
bad/fake ones.
~~~
ec109685
I agree honest publishers are at a definite disadvantage. Advertisers aren't
because the roi calculation they come up with judges their campaigns based on
its performance, which incorporates good and bad clicks over time.
------
djur
I don't see any mention of ad blockers. Are these seen as having a significant
effect on the online advertising industry? Are there any serious proposals to
deal with them other than continuing the ad-blocker-blocker-blocker... arms
race?
It seems that there's an increasing understanding among publishers that low-
quality and intrusive ads encourage their visitors to use ad blockers or
another site. Several relatively high-profile sites (like The New Yorker) have
stopped using networks like Outbrain and Taboola. (Obnoxious ads from the
latter, along with autoplaying video ads on numerous sites, resulted in me
finally installing an ad blocker after resisting for years.)
Adblock Plus offered a way forward with its "Acceptable Ads" program but it
seems like that has been roundly rejected by both advertisers and blocker
users. Maybe publishers and advertisers could work together to develop a
stricter set of advertising guidelines that show respect for users? I suppose
such a program is essentially doomed without cooperation from Google and
Facebook, and I don't know if they'd be willing to work with the little fish
(or each other).
It seems like an intractable problem. I'm not convinced technology (machine
learning! the solution to all problems!) is capable of providing the solution.
~~~
tomjen3
The problem is that most ads suck. Facebook knows more about me than I do, but
they can't come up with ads for things I want. What possible chance does a
random newspaper have?
~~~
pascalxus
I completely agree. 99.99% of the ads I see on facebook are for things I don't
want. They really need to get more AI and more information about the user for
better targeting. They may have world class targeting, but it still sucks
compared to advertisement that can read my mind (doesn't exist yet).
~~~
pdkl95
A common misconception is that targeting is about _your_ interests. An AI
won't select ads for things you want. Instead, it will use all of that
tracking data to select ads that are more effective at misleading you or
_changing_ your interests.
~~~
tomjen3
What is easiest? Sell me things that I already want but don't know about, or
changing my interests and then convince me to buy a particular product?
Incidentally 5 years after moving into an apartment I still need a good
curtain for the kitchen. If I see an ad for a place I can upload measurements
and get the results sent to me I would be very happy to pay.
------
niftich
_> The end of impressions and banners in favor of views and "publisher
rendered" (aka native) creative_
Native advertising, which I'd re-phrase as 'sponsored content' or 'content
placement', I can actually enjoy, if the sponsorship is made clear and the
topic is genuinely relevant to the audience. After all, who better to tell
what kinds of content readers want to see besides the publisher who puts it
out there? But it _has_ to fit -- out-of-place content will be painfully
obvious, and cause further user aversion for ads.
But the thing is: all of this can be accomplished without ad networks that
track your travels through the web. The client can engage the publisher
directly or through a broker. Where does that leave today's adtech?
~~~
andygates
That seems unduly optimistic. The content will be uploaded from the same old
terrible content farms, and be the same old rubbish only with a heavier local
server load.
------
soared
Very interesting read, thanks OP! I've started using some platforms with
integrated ml, and it seems to be much better. Its difficult to get used to
starting a campaign, and instead of meticulously setting up targeting (males,
$50k income, denver, into football and skiing, etc) the ml lets you just ..
upload an ad and a web page. No targeting. Click GO and it will find your
customers. If Google or facebook can get into this space they'll succeed
greatly because they have so much data and users already trust them.
~~~
mars4rp
can you please name those platforms ???
~~~
soared
I'm at an agency and have access to some closed betas, but I've been pretty
impressed with StackAdapt for their native. They just added video and display
I believe but I haven't used them. You do a little bit of manual targeting but
their ml really does well.
~~~
fumar
When you say "does well," what type of goal or kpi are referring to?
~~~
soared
White paper downloads for elderly people. For some reason their interface
underreports conversions though. But we've tied their traffic directly to
purchases! One note though.. like some other channels you're buying a mixed
bag. There is a lot of low quality traffic, but the diamonds in the rough do
make up for it.
------
keldaris
Since there's rarely any widely interpretable public data available, articles
like this and many others are my best gauge for noting that even the Internet
advertising industry itself recognizes that it's dying. This is very pleasant
to observe.
Personally, I can't remember the last ad I've seen while browsing. The
combination of AdBlock Origin (with a very generous combination of various
blocklists), Ghostery / Privacy Badger and NoScript effectively renders most
adtech useless. The few remnants that refuse to be blocked I happily skip
outright rather than enable. As far as I'm concerned, the only acceptable form
of advertising consists of things like hardware companies supplying free
samples to review sites without any preconditions and even there a slippery
slope exists, as evidenced by the sad state of the games "journalism"
industry, where corruption is endemic.
And the best part is that, unlike many political and social issues, users
really do have all the power here, and it's trivially easy to exercise it.
Install a few trusted browser extensions and you've helped hasten the demise
of a harmful parasite of an industry, and improved your own security at the
same time. And nowadays it's easy to persuade even non-technical users to do
this due to how disgusting and intrusive ads have become.
~~~
kirso
Congratulations! You are in the 10% of people who have adblock :) Within the
600B advertising industry. You get the point right? Normal people think
different. In addition, mobile is overtaking everything and adblocking there
is more tricky, thats why Facebook is generating 80%+ of their revenues via
mobile ads (fun fact, in 2010 it was 0%). You can ask your parents for
instance whether they know how to limit ad tracking.
------
lcw
I _feel_ like another piece missing from why these companies are "flat" year
over year is the fact that they are running into a wall of what people will
tolerate. I don't think that there will be a renaissance like the author
concludes. As a guy who worked in ad tech these tricks have been exhaustively
tried. I think right now the industry trend is to pay for premium content
rather then be inundated with Ads especially when it comes to games, video and
music. I imagine we will see this pattern continue especially with the mobile
gaming industry figuring out the key to everyone's wallet: in app purchases.
------
manigandham
This article is mostly bullshit.
AppNexus is one of the major SSPs (sell-side platforms) but they still have
major fraud and legacy tech issues. They are also one of the primary causes of
miserable user experiences across the web. They will not be part of any adtech
renaissance.
Google won't flinch if margins really do go down to single-digit margins.
They're already built for worse conditions than today and are just pacing the
market, as seen with the whole header bidding scenario. They also have Google
Cloud rapidly scaling and will likely be a bigger source of revenue than their
entire ads division in a few years.
Meanwhile AppNexus can barely survive on their current margins and will be out
of business if it hits single-digits. The disintermediation mentioned in this
article will also apply just as harshly to AppNexus.
The lame insights about machine learning and formats aren't anything special.
This is why Google and Facebook get all the money already, because they have a
much faster, cleaner, more relevant, and more effective ad experiences. The
renaissance is already here and it's getting increasingly harder to compete
with these data behemoths. It's not impossible though and there are several
niche focused ad startups, but there's no big sea change about to happen. This
is all just business as usual.
------
awongh
This is a space I wish I knew more about- but it seems like it has it's own
sub-culture that to me, is hard to parse.
Can someone tell me what some of the things are that he refers to in this
article?
\- dfp, dsp, ssp, gdn, dbm, adx, dcm, dfp
Is there a good technical-minded rundown of all the players in the ecosystem
and what they do? Internet ad industry information is impossible to google
because it mostly turns up spam.....
~~~
wastedhours
I've tried to find a long form piece on it (ideally a physical book as
reference), but failed.
DSP: Demand Side Platform, is the tool agencies and advertisers use to buy the
ad spots automatically based on tracking profiles.
SSP: Supply Side Platform, is the tool publishers use to sell their ad spots
(publishers push an impression to an SSP, a DSP will evaluate it and an agency
will buy an ad on it - Google is main SSP and DSP [I think?] so people are
wary about them.)
DFP: DoubleClick for Publishers perhaps, as in, ad tech for media sites to
manage the display process (guess it could be called Google's SSP).
DBM: DoubleClick Bid Manager, is Google's DSP
ADX: guessing just an ad exchange, so a place advertisers and publishers do
the deal.
GDN: Google Display Network, posh AdSense where you can place your ads across
3rd party sites, not just the SERP.
Then we get into the world of Header Bidding (which, as far as I understand
it, is even more tech to bypass your usual SSP/DSP process to get the best
deal from different ad exchanges) and that whole murky world...
I've only been on the advertiser end, speccing a programmatic campaign through
a specialist agency. It makes me nervy as our only marketing attribution is
last touch and that rarely works with broad reach display. Retargeting is a
much more valuable one to explore.
If anyone would be interested in a guide, I can look to put one together with
definitions and a few anecdotes from some players? Username @ gmail.
~~~
ssharp
I think it's worth adding how DSPs and ADXs fit together. There are only a
handful of ad exchanges out there -- Google ADX, OpenX, AppNexus, etc. Some
brands and agencies are large enough to buy inventory directly through these
but for most brands and agencies, it's too expensive and cumbersome to do so.
This is where DSPs fit in. DSPs buy large batches of inventory from the ad
exchanges and resell them to brands and agencies and try to add value where
they can.
------
intrasight
I've come to believe that this isn't a technology problem. It's a people
problem - specifically a "publisher people are lazy" problem. That lazyness
made them hand their value over to Google and Facebook, and now there's just
no easy way to get it back.
------
cm2012
85% of new ad dollars are going to fb and google. Everyone else is fighting
for scraps.
~~~
kirso
Not actually true, these scraps are still worth billions => google AppLovin
------
petercooper
I know it's not for everyone but I hope more publishers can work out a shift
to a no-graphics-needed-to-render-this "advertisers<->publishers" approach.
Are your readers the sort of people advertisers want to connect with? Great!
Sell space and support to them. Or is your audience so diverse and ephemeral
that advertisers don't care? Move into publishing stuff that's useful to an
audience advertisers value, because when everyone else is slipping down the
ladder, it's a great time to try climbing it.
------
na85
>The internet needs an ad tech renaissance, one based on creating real value
for publishers and marketers,
Could not disagree more.
Advertising as a whole needs to die in ignominy. Obviously that'll never
happen, but we should be working towards ways to make advertising obsolete or
unprofitable, and we should be ostracizing people like the author who try to
or want to make things better for advertisers.
The promise of the internet was users as first-class citizens, not users as
mindless consumers of hostile advertising.
~~~
SerLava
Hostile advertising and advertising in general aren't the same thing.
I'd be the first to point out that advertising has motivated a wide array of
terrible things, especially in the last few years. But advertising at its
barest sense can be and usually is a net positive force.
~~~
na85
>Hostile advertising and advertising in general aren't the same thing.
Are you sure?
~~~
SerLava
Good point.
------
monochromatic
We don't need an ad tech renaissance. We need to burn it to the fucking
ground.
~~~
HugoDaniel
^ this.
------
majewsky
> The tracking tech renaissance
FTFY
------
TheAdamist
I don't know if it was due to manual ad reviewers being on holiday or what,
but i was getting a bunch of ad hijacking or malvertisements over the weekend
from legit websites. If even legit sites can't keep up with this then no
wonder everyone is running ad blockers just to keep safe from legit sites.
------
dedalus
really nice article detailing some nuances
~~~
dedalus
really surprised by the downvote without any reason. so much for tolerance of
opposite views. The author is an authority in adtech (CEO of App Nexus). I
expressed an opinion of the piece (which you are free to disagree with and
maybe the disagreement is downvoting??)
------
fieryeagle
Very good read that highlighted the current state of the industry - G and FB
reign as kings. I'd expect the fraud cycle to restart in gaming industry
seeing that display and mobile are essentially saturated.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Q:
jQuery conditional statement to check if a select option has either of 4 values selected
I am working on this project that has a reservation form which allow users specify which sort of service they require. I have a select menu with eight (8) options and I have two divs which would either show/hide depending on the value of the option been selected. Seen below is the select element:
<select name="serviceChoice" id="serviceChoice">
<option value="A">Option A</option>
<option value="B">Option B</option>
<option value="C" selected="selected">Option C</option>
<option value="D">Option D</option>
<option value="E">Option E</option>
<option value="F">Option F</option>
</select>
<div id="field_1" class="optionBox">I have several form fields</div>
<div id="field_2" class="optionBox">I have several form fields</div>
I have written my jQuery code to alternate between these divs, however I would like to know if there is a shorter better way to get this done. I would also like to clear the values of any input elements in a div which has been hidden due to the choice of the user. My code is as follows:
(function($){
$('#field_1').show();
$('select[name=serviceChoice]').change(function(){
if( $('select[name=serviceChoice] option:selected').val() == 'A' ) {
$('.optionBox').hide();
$('#dropOff').show();
} else if ( $('select[name=serviceChoice] option:selected').val() == 'B' ) {
$('.optionBox').hide();
$('#pickUp').show();
} else if ( $('select[name=serviceChoice] option:selected').val() == 'C' ) {
$('.optionBox').hide();
$('#pickUp').show();
} else if ( $('select[name=serviceChoice] option:selected').val() == 'D' ) {
$('.optionBox').hide();
$('#pickUp').show();
} else {
$('.optionBox').show();
}
});
})(jQuery);
A:
// You can use the document.ready as both encapsulation as well as
// to make sure the DOM is ready for operation.
$(function ($) {
// Unless these are dynamic (the set could change), it's better to cache them
var optionBox = $('.optionBox');
var dropOff = $('#dropOff');
var pickUp = $('#pickUp');
var field1 = $('#field_1');
field.show();
// Your select box has an ID. They are faster than attribute selectors
// in both parsing ase well as fetching from the DOM
$('#serviceChoice').change(function () {
// The current context of this function is the DOM element, which is the select
// You can use it to get the value, rather than using a selector again. Removes
// the need for jQuery to parse the selector and look for it in the DOM
switch ($(this).val()) {
case 'A':
optionBox.hide();
dropOff.show();
break;
case 'B':
case 'C':
case 'D':
optionBox.hide();
pickUp.show();
break;
default:
optionBox.show();
}
});
});
Minus the comments, here's what you get:
$(function ($) {
var optionBox = $('.optionBox');
var dropOff = $('#dropOff');
var pickUp = $('#pickUp');
var field1 = $('#field_1');
field.show();
$('#serviceChoice').change(function () {
switch ($(this).val()) {
case 'A':
optionBox.hide();
dropOff.show();
break;
case 'B':
case 'C':
case 'D':
optionBox.hide();
pickUp.show();
break;
default:
optionBox.show()
}
})
});
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a support frame and, more particularly, to a support frame that is stably installed on a ground where it is difficult to maintain balance such as an uneven ground or a slope.
2. Description of the Related Art
For example, according to the support frames for beach umbrellas that are used at present, weight is ensured at the lower end by cement or a casting (cast iron), a support of the beach umbrella is coupled to the center to support the support frame, a support side is stuck in the ground, and the support of the beach umbrella is placed thereon.
The existing support frames should be used for their use environments and functions and users have to purchase those support frames having different functions. Further, a weight type of support frame is difficult to carry and support frames that are designed to be stuck in a support floor can be used only on the ground and the like, where support pins can be stuck.
That is, the existing support frames are designed to support beach umbrellas that are supported at the center, so they are not enough for supporting a beach umbrella or an object of which the center of gravity is inclined.
Further, legs of the present invention can be moved and fixed at 180 degrees in a tripod shape to be available for a support frame having a tripod-shaped support such as the tripod for a camera.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a support frame that can support an object regardless of the ground such as a flat ground, an uneven ground, a slope, asphalt, or cement and that can support a beach umbrella of which the center of gravity is inclined, a support frame that is stuck in the ground, and an object supported in a tripod-shaped support such as the tripod for a camera.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "USPTO Backgrounds"
}
|
It was discovered that access checks for getEnclosingClass, getEnclosingMethod and getEnclosingConstructor were not performed properly. An untrusted Java application or applet could possibly use this flaw to disclose potentially sensitive information.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
|
Q:
python access a column after groupby
I would like to replace null value of stadium attendance (affluence in french) with their means. Therefore I do this to have the mean by seasons / teams :
test = data.groupby(['season','domicile']).agg({'affluence':'mean'})
This code works and give me what I want (data is dataframe) :
affluence
season domicile
1999 AS Monaco 10258.647059
AS Saint-Etienne 27583.375000
FC Nantes 28334.705882
Girondins de Bordeaux 30084.941176
Montpellier HΓ©rault SC 13869.312500
Olympique Lyonnais 35453.941176
Olympique de Marseille 51686.176471
Paris Saint-Germain 42792.647059
RC Strasbourg Alsace 19845.058824
Stade Rennais FC 13196.812500
2000 AS Monaco 8917.937500
AS Saint-Etienne 26508.750000
EA Guingamp 13056.058824
FC Nantes 31913.235294
Girondins de Bordeaux 29371.588235
LOSC 16793.411765
Olympique Lyonnais 34564.529412
Olympique de Marseille 50755.176471
Paris Saint-Germain 42716.823529
RC Strasbourg Alsace 13664.875000
Stade Rennais FC 19264.062500
Toulouse FC 19926.294118
....
So now I would like to do a condition on the season and the team. For example test[test.season == 1999]. However this doesn't work because I have only one column 'affluence'. It gives me the error :
'DataFrame' object has no attribute 'season'
I tried :
test = data[['season','domicile','affluence']].groupby(['season','domicile']).agg({'affluence':'mean'})
Which results as above. So I thought of maybe indexing the season/team, but how ? And after that how do I access it ?
Thanks
A:
Doing test = data.groupby(['season','domicile'], as_index=False).agg({'affluence':'mean'}) should do the trick for what you're trying to do.
The parameter as_index=False is particularly useful when you do not want to deal with MultiIndexes.
Example:
import pandas as pd
data = {
'A' : [0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2],
'B' : list('abcdefghi')
}
df = pd.DataFrame(data)
print(df)
# A B
# 0 0 a
# 1 0 b
# 2 0 c
# 3 1 d
# 4 1 e
# 5 1 f
# 6 2 g
# 7 2 h
# 8 2 i
grp_1 = df.groupby('A').count()
print(grp_1)
# B
# A
# 0 3
# 1 3
# 2 3
grp_2 = df.groupby('A', as_index=False).count()
print(grp_2)
# A B
# 0 0 3
# 1 1 3
# 2 2 3
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
After an extremely long wait, Valve is launching preorders today for a small group of Steam Machines, console-like gaming computers running the company's own Linux-based Steam OS. According to Polygon, customers will be able to preorder an Alienware Steam Machine through Steam or GameStop. They'll also be able to preorder the Steam Link, which lets players stream games from a high-powered PC to other machines in their house, and the Steam Controller, Valve's more versatile take on a console gamepad. All three will be available in stores on November 10th, with a limited number of preorders shipping October 16th instead.
The controller and the Link are $49 each, and Alienware's Steam Machine starts at $449 (including a controller). That gets you what looks like a mid-range PC, with Intel's lower-end Core i3 processor, a 500GB hard drive, and a relatively modest 4GB of RAM. The machines go up to $749, with the most expensive model running a Core i7, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. As with other gaming PCs, users can upgrade these parts themselves as they age, but they can't do the same with one of the most important parts: the custom Nvidia GeForce GTX graphics card, which is built into the motherboard. The graphics card is supposed to perform at the level of a GTX 860M or better, which makes it more powerful than a console but less powerful than a high-end PC. Of course, it's also quite a bit cheaper than those PCs.
These will be the first machines with Valve's custom controller
Alienware is only one of several companies building Steam Machines, and a number of them are expected later this year. Today, PC maker CyberPower will also be taking preorders through its own site for a November release. Technically, anyone can make their own "Steam Machine," and several companies (including CyberPower) already have. It's just a PC running Steam OS, which is free and currently available in beta. But these will be the first machines to actually use Valve's controller, which is supposed to be a major selling point β it's as couch-friendly as an Xbox or PlayStation pad, but the analog sticks have been replaced with (allegedly) more precise trackpads and virtually every control on it can be remapped for specific games. While plenty of games work fine with a normal console controller, this is meant for the subset that's either too old or two PC-specific to make the jump.
The major limiting factor is that Valve's operating system will only run Linux games, unless players use the Link to stream them from a separate Mac or PC. Valve has been pushing Linux compatibility in preparation for the launch, and between 1,000 and 1,200 games are supposed to be supported by November. That's between a quarter and a third of Valve's total library, based on the over 3,700 games it touted late last year.
This is a long-overdue release for a concept that's been hyped since 2013. Steam Machines were meant as a way to nudge console owners onto a PC path, and the first wave was officially announced in January of 2014. But they were released somewhat unofficially, especially after Valve ended up redesigning its controller, and there weren't clear reasons to use Steam OS instead of Windows or another flavor of Linux. Now, they're getting an official boost from Valve, incidentally set for release around the same time as Valve and HTC's Vive VR headset. The two projects might have limited overlap, though β like the Oculus Rift, the Vive is almost certainly going to require a high-powered gaming rig. And that's something that many Steam Machines emphatically won't be.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
}
|
The device, which can reduce pain almost immediately, works by stimulating nerves and blocking the pain from passing to the brain.
Pulse stickers are applied to where pain is felt. Users can then turn the device on and adjust the intensity depending on the level of pain.
Professor Bari Kaplan from Beilinson Womenβs Hospital, who is also medical advisor to the Livia production team, said: βOver 50% of women suffer from primary menstrual cramps, for which they consume large amounts of painkillers.
βLivia uses a pain relief method that does not involve drug consumption.
βThe idea is to close the βpain gates.β The device stimulates the nerves, making it impossible for pain to pass.
βThe method Livia uses has been proven effective in several clinical studies and I strongly recommend the use of the device to relieve PMS pain at any time.β
The device comes in a range of colours and has been praised for being discreet yet effective.
One person who trialled the device said: βI always needed to take loads of pills, and even then it didnβt help. Now I usually donβt need any pills at all.β
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
|
Well... maybe we can see him walk, too. Because he's got places to go. Though he doesn't seem to be making much progress...
|
{
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
}
|
Q:
NHibernate QueryOver with SelectList
I have multiple queries against one table. As not all columns/properties are needed I specify the columns with the help of select list. Take the following method as example. This method is working
public IEnumerable<ResultDto> GetEntityAsDto(eStatusBinderProduktion fromState, eStatusBinderProduktion toState)
{
EntityClass entityAlias = null;
ResultDto resultAlias = null;
var query = Session.QueryOver<EntityClass>(() => entityAlias)
.Where(() => entityAlias.ProduktionStatus >= (byte)fromState)
.And(() => entityAlias.ProduktionStatus <= (byte)toState);
query.SelectList(list => list
.Select(() => entityAlias.PrimaryID).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.PrimaryID)
.Select(() => entityAlias.SecondaryID).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.SecondaryID)
);
return query.TransformUsing(Transformers.AliasToBean<ResultDto>())
.List<ResultDto>();
}
As I need to define the SelectList in multiple methods, I tried to to move the SelectList into a separate method.
The following code is not working, NHibernate throws the exception
NHibernate.QueryException: 'could not resolve property: entity.PrimaryID of: MyProjectNamespace.DAL.Interfaces.Entities.EntityClass'
"
public IEnumerable<ResultDto> GetEntityAsDto(eStatusBinderProduktion fromState, eStatusBinderProduktion toState)
{
EntityClass entityAlias = null;
ResultDto resultAlias = null;
var query = Session.QueryOver<EntityClass>(() => entityAlias)
.Where(() => entityAlias.ProduktionStatus >= (byte)fromState)
.And(() => entityAlias.ProduktionStatus <= (byte)toState);
MapPropertiesOfEntityToResult(entityAlias, resultAlias, query);
return query.TransformUsing(Transformers.AliasToBean<ResultDto>())
.List<ResultDto>();
}
private void MapPropertiesOfEntityToResult(EntityClass entity, ResultDto resultAlias, IQueryOver<EntityClass, EntityClass> query)
{
query.SelectList(list => list
.Select(() => entity.PrimaryID).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.PrimaryID)
.Select(() => entity.SecondaryID).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.SecondaryID)
);
}
Additional information:
- The mappings are correct
- table is filled with test data
A:
We do not need alias for filling SelectList. We can profit from the Type parameters coming with IQueryOver<TRoot,TSubType>:
//private void MapPropertiesOfEntityToResult(EntityClass entity
// , ResultDto resultAlias, IQueryOver<EntityClass, EntityClass> query)
private void MapPropertiesOfEntityToResult( // no need for entity
ResultDto resultAlias, IQueryOver<EntityClass, EntityClass> query)
{
query.SelectList(list => list
//.Select(() => entity.PrimaryID).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.PrimaryID)
//.Select(() => entity.SecondaryID).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.SecondaryID)
.Select(entity => entity.PrimaryID).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.PrimaryID)
.Select(entity => entity.SecondaryID).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.SecondaryID)
);
}
The entity is now a parameter of the passed Function and its type is coming from IQueryOver definition
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
Q:
Do we have to explicitly recycle the bitmap if we don't need it?
Bitmap has a recycle method, but do we have to invoke it explicitly if we don't need it any more?
For example, an ImageView has a bitmap now. When user click a button, it will set a new bitmap to the ImageView.
Do we have to recycle the original bitmap before assign the new one?
A:
yes you have if you are targeting devices with Android older the 3.0. That's will avoid you to incour in the OutOfMemoryException.
Note: Before android 3 the Bitmap memory is allocated in the native heap. The java object will retains low memory from the GC perspective.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
Frey Samsioe
Carl Axel Frey Samsioe (9 October 1890, HΓΆrby, MalmΓΆhus County β 20 March 1972) was a Swedish civil engineer, specializing in road construction and water-power engineering.
C. A. Frey Samsioe graduated in 1912 in engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and in 1935 received his doctorate in engineering. He was employed at the Swedish construction company VattenbyggnadsbyrΓ₯n in 1912β1916 and 1919β1955, as well as at the Whangpoo Conservancy Board in Shanghai in 1917β1918. He was elected in 1931 as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
In 1924 in London, Samsioe presented a paper at the first World Power Conference. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1924 at Toronto.
References
Category:Swedish engineers
Category:Swedish civil engineers
Category:KTH Royal Institute of Technology alumni
Category:1890 births
Category:1972 deaths
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Wikipedia (en)"
}
|
Internet Entertainment Writers Association Awards 2004
The winners of the 2004 Internet Movie/Television Awards, given by the Internet Entertainment Writers Association, are listed below.
Movie Awards
Internet Movie Awards 2004
2004
The winners of the Internet Movie Awards:
Favorite Actor in a Leading Role: Johnny Depp - Finding Neverland
Favorite Actor in a Supporting Role: Clive Owen - Closer
Favorite Actress in a Leading Role: Natalie Portman - Garden State
Favorite Actress in a Supporting Role: Natalie Portman - Closer
Favorite Director: Michel Gondry - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Favorite Picture: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Favorite Screenplay: Garden State - Zach Braff
Favorite Song: "Let Go" by Frou Frou - Garden State
Favorite Soundtrack or Musical Score: Garden State
Favorite Visual Effects: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Breakthrough Performance: Zach Braff - Garden State
Worst Picture: Catwoman
Television Awards
Internet Television Awards 2004
2004
Drama Series:
Comedy Series:
The winners of the Internet Television Awards:
Favorite Primetime Comedy Series: Friends
Favorite Primetime Drama Series: Alias
Favorite Primetime Non-scripted Reality or Game Series: American Idol
Favorite Late Night Variety Programming: The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
Favorite Actor in a Primetime Comedy Series: Matt LeBlanc - Friends
Favorite Actor in a Primetime Drama Series: Kiefer Sutherland - 24
Favorite Actress in a Primetime Comedy Series: Jennifer Aniston - Friends
Favorite Actress in a Primetime Drama Series: Jennifer Garner - Alias
Category:2004 film awards
Category:2004 television awards
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Wikipedia (en)"
}
|
NEW HAMPSHIRE'S EAST-WEST HIGHWAY: As early as 1944, the National Interregional Highway Committee included an east-west highway through northern New England as part of a proposed 48,300-mile Interstate highway network. However, the proposed alignment traversed sparsely populated areas near the Canadian border, and as it failed to meet minimum present and future traffic requirements, and the route subsequently was dropped from consideration in 1947.
By the dawn of the 1950s, work had progressed on the Maine and New Hampshire turnpikes, which eventually carried the I-95 designation. The passage of the 1956 Federal Highway Act included the proposed routes for I-89, I-91, I-93, but there still was no east-west route connecting these highways between Massachusetts and Quebec.
In 1956, Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Shaw proposed three north-south freeways in the state, tied together by an east-west freeway along the NH 101 corridor from Vermont to the Seacoast region. The statewide network of freeways would have cost $600 million, in contrast to the $132 million allocated for the Interstate system. It was to have been financed with a state sales tax, which was blasted immediately by the Republicans who held most of the statewide offices.
One early section of the NH 101 Expressway from NH 114 to I-93 in Manchester got approved for construction. About two-thirds of this segment--from the F.E. Everett Turnpike east to the southern I-93 "split"--was built as part of the original I-193 around Manchester, and the section of NH 101 built immediately to the west was designed as a link to I-93 and the Everett Turnpike. After two years of construction, the NH 101 / I-193 link opened in 1961. The original I-193 designation on this link (as well as on the Everett Turnpike link to the north) was changed to I-293 in 1977 upon completion of I-93 on the east side of Manchester.
PIECE BY PIECE: In 1959, the New Hampshire Department of Public Works and Highways (NHDPW&H) commissioned the firm of Fay, Spofford, and Thorndike for a $6 million study examining the feasibility of a four-lane expressway connecting I-93 in Manchester with I-95 (New Hampshire Turnpike) and the Seacoast. This was the first of several studies on the highway, but with the state focused on building its Interstate highway mileage, the construction of a four-lane NH 101 Expressway was seen as a lower priority.
Nevertheless, work began on two sections of controlled-access NH 101 as the study was being commissioned.
The first section of the Manchester-to-Hampton Beach expressway was the Exeter Bypass, a five-mile-long "super-2" bypass that stretched from EXIT 9 (NH 27) east to EXIT 12 (NH 111). This section opened in August 1960. For many years, Epping Road transitioned directly into the "super-2" section from the west. Just east of EXIT 11 (NH 108), a stub of the original bypass was reconfigured as a connector road to NH 88 (Holland Way).
The second section was a 2.6-mile-long segment from the northern I-93 "split" east to EXIT 2 (Hooksett Road) in Auburn that was built between 1959 and 1961. This section was four-lane original construction for most of the distance, though the expressway narrowed to a "super-2" just west of its terminus at EXIT 2.
Subsequent to the completion of the study, three additional sections of "super-2" bypass had opened as follows:
In 1963, the NHDPW extended the original "Exeter Bypass" section by 10.5 miles to Hampton Beach; the road had become known as the "Exeter-Hampton Expressway." The expressway addressed concerns about the lack of access to Hampton Beach as a new two-lane bridge was built over a wetlands area just west of town. The "super-2" segment still exists in its original configuration east of EXIT 13 (NH 27) in Hampton, and there are no current plans to upgrade this segment.
A 2.9-mile-long "super-2" segment from EXIT 2 in Auburn east to EXIT 3 (NH 43) in Candia was opened in 1965. This segment ended originally at a "T"-intersection with NH 43. In 1972, the four-lane freeway conversion was extended 1.5 miles to a point just east of EXIT 2 (the prior terminus of the four-lane freeway segment was west of EXIT 2).
A 6.9-mile-long "super 2" segment from EXIT 5 (NH 102 / NH 107) in Raymond east to EXIT 8 (North Road) in Brentwood opened in 1968. This section ended at "T"-intersections at each end. Moreover, the original alignment at EXIT 5 veered slightly north of current NH 101 alignment; the westbound exit ramp at EXIT 5 traces this old alignment.
All of the controlled-access "super-2" segments were designed to be expanded to four lanes by converting the existing roadway to an eastbound roadway and building a new westbound roadway.
The original routing of NH 101 exited the expressway at EXIT 11 (NH 108) in Stratham, while a separate designation--NH 51--continued east along the Exeter-Hampton Expressway to Hampton Beach. (At the time, the NH 101 designation was routed along NH 108 and what is now NH 33 northeast into Portsmouth.) On July 1, 1995, the NH 101 designation was applied to its current routing east to Hampton Beach in advance of the completion of the expressway.
These 1998 photos show the NH 101 Expressway under reconstruction at EXIT 9 (NH 27 / Epping Road) and EXIT 10 (NH 85 / Newfields Road). Both photos were taken in Exeter, the original terminus of the two-lane Exeter-Hampton Expressway. (Photos by Alexander Svirsky, granitehighways.com.)
ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT AN INTERSTATE HIGHWAY DESIGNATION: By the end of the 1960s, two substantial gaps remained from EXIT 3 in Candia east to EXIT 5 in Raymond (about eight miles), and from EXIT 8 in Brentwood east to EXIT 9 in Exeter (about three miles). Moreover, only the Interstate (I-193, later I-293) section in Manchester and a brief section of NH 101 east of I-93 in Manchester had four lanes; the rest were "super-2" segments.
State officials tried to enlist the help of the Federal government to finish the NH 101 Expressway, and even sought to garner an Interstate designation for a cross-state NH 101 Expressway that would have tied together proposed bypasses further west in Amherst and Keene. In 1970, the states of New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire collaborated on a 174-mile Interstate highway stretching from the Seacoast west to the Albany-Troy area of New York State; 103 miles of the proposed Interstate were to have been in New Hampshire. Part of what was to become the new I-92, the route was among a total of approximately 10,000 miles submitted under the guidelines of the 1968 Federal Highway Act, which called for a total of 1,500 new Interstate miles. However, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) ultimately rejected this proposal.
A TOLL ROAD PROPOSAL: Following the rejection of the proposed I-92 in 1971, some members of the New Hampshire State Legislature advocated a $74 million plan to build NH 101 as a four-lane turnpike between Manchester and the Seacoast. Construction was to have begun in 1972 on a 35-mile-long turnpike stretching from I-93 to NH 1A in Hampton Beach, and upon the scheduled completion deadline of 1976, it was to have cost 60 cents to travel the entire length of the road. In absence of tolls, it was estimated that project would be completed by late 1990s (which ended up being underestimated by only a couple of years).
However, officials from Rockingham and Hillsborough counties objected to the structure of the toll financing, stating that local residents would fund the road through tolls, but that the tolls would go elsewhere in the state. Furthermore, the routing of the NH 101 Expressway already was approved even before tolls were proposed, though the financing was not in place.
This 2006 photo shows the I-293 section of the westbound NH 101 Expressway approaching EXIT 2 (NH 3A) in Manchester. This section of expressway, which was rebuilt in the mid-2000s, uses the exit numbering convention found on I-293, not the Manchester-to-Hampton Beach section of NH 101. (Photo by Steve Anderson.)
FILLING THE REMAINING GAPS AND DUALIZING ROUTE 101: After a decade of inaction in the 1970s--save for a 1.5-mile-long conversion to four-lane freeway in the area of EXIT 2 in Auburn--progress on completing the NH 101 Expressway accelerated only slightly in the 1980s. The NHDPW&H began work in 1981 on filling in the eight-mile-long gap between EXIT 3 in Candia and EXIT 5 in Raymond with a four-lane freeway on new right-of-way south of the existing NH 101, which at the time was routed over NH 43 (Old Candia Road), and NH 27 (Raymond Road and Raymond Bypass).
At the same time, the NHDPW&H upgraded the existing "super-2" section from just east of EXIT 2 to EXIT 3; this section was to tie into the new four-lane freeway then under construction. Both projects were completed in 1986.
Completion of the three-mile-long gap between EXIT 8 and EXIT 9, as well as the conversion of the existing "super-2" sections of NH 101 to a four-lane freeway east of EXIT 5, remained mired in the environmental impact review process through much of the 1980s. The key obstacles were the potential removal of 106 acres of wetlands along the route, as well as the condemnation of a number of homes in the area of EXIT 9 in Exeter. During this time, large signs posted by the New Hampshire Department of Transportation (NHDOT) tallied the number of deaths along the "super-2" segment since 1985, drawing attention of officials to the need to upgrade this section of NH 101. Work on one bridge that was to carry North Street over the proposed NH 101 extension (at the current EXIT 8 in Brentwood) began in the late 1980s, but it soon was called the "bridge to nowhere" as it was still uncertain that the NH 101 Expressway would be completed.
Nevertheless, the state was behind construction of the route, and in 1989 the State Legislature called completion of NH 101 its highest transportation priority. The NHDOT reached a preliminary agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for completing the expressway in 1991. Under this plan, 30 bridges were to be replaced (mostly concrete frame overpasses) or built on new right-of-way, two traffic lights were to be removed at NH 88 and NH 85, and bridges and roadways along an older section of the NH 101 Expressway in Bedford were to be rehabilitated. In addition, 130 acres of new wetlands were to be created to compensate for the 106 acres that were to be lost in the project. The proposal received final approval from the federal government in 1992.
Work on the $220 million "Epping-Hampton gap" and widening project began in 1993. The first phase of the project, which twinned the 1968 "super-2" section from EXIT 5 east to EXIT 8, was completed in November 1998. The next phase filled in the missing three-mile-long gap between EXIT 8 and EXIT 9, and twinned the existing "super-2" east to the Squamscott River in Exeter; this phase was completed in September 1999. On November 16, 2000, the final "super-2" segment between the Squamscott River and EXIT 13 (NH 27) in Hampton was twinned, giving motorists an uninterrupted stretch of four-lane freeway from Manchester to Hampton for the first time.
ROUTE 101 TODAY: According to the NHDOT, the NH 101 Expressway carries approximately 80,000 vehicles per day (AADT) along the I-293 segment in Manchester, while the average section between Manchester and Hampton carries about 45,000 vehicles per day.
To accommodate growing volume, the NHDOT spent $13 million in the mid-2000s to widen the I-293 / NH 101 "multiplex" to six lanes from the Merrimack River Bridge east to the southern I-93 "split." Around this time, the NHDOT advanced a $12 million plan to widen NH 101 to six lanes from the northern I-93 "split" east to EXIT 1 (NH 28 Bypass) in Manchester; this plan now is on hold. In 2009, the NHDOT repaved 9.5 miles of the NH 101 Expressway from Epping east to Exeter; the cost--at $1 million per mile--was financed in part by federal stimulus funds.
This 2006 photo shows the eastbound NH 101 Expressway approaching unmarked EXIT 14 (US 1) in Hampton. This easternmost section of NH 101 is the only remaining section that has not been converted into a four-lane, dual-carriageway freeway, and there are no current plans to do so. (Photo by Steve Anderson.)
THE NEW I-193: The NH 101 Expressway should be re-designated I-193 from NH 114 in Bedford east to US 1 in Hampton, and perhaps as far east as NH 1A in Hampton Beach. The new I-193 would mark the return of this designation to the Granite State and identify clearly an important route from central New Hampshire to the Seacoast. The I-293 designation that exists now on part of NH 101 in Manchester then would be shifted south along the entire length of the Everett Turnpike (now marked I-293 only north of NH 101).
As part of the conversion, the four-lane freeway conversion would be extended east of EXIT 13 (NH 27) in Hampton to Glade Path (about one-half mile west of NH 1A) in Hampton Beach, with the US 1 interchange (currently no exit number) in Hampton rebuilt as a reduced-footprint, single-point-diamond interchange (SPUI) and excess land converted into wetlands. There also would be a grade separation at Landing Road in Hampton, where there currently is a traffic signal.
Interchanges would be renumbered as follows (with old exit numbers in parentheses):
It is possible this route once again may be considered part of a future I-92, and given its length (at 42 miles including I-93 overlap versus only 18 miles for I-97 in Maryland) and place in the national Interstate numbering grid, such a designation already may be justified in its present form. However, it is unlikely that any expressway would be extended west of Bedford, particularly given strident opposition in southwestern New Hampshire and southern Vermont.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
|
define(function() {
/**
* cssToDOM takes a kebab-case string and converts it to camelCase
* e.g. box-sizing -> boxSizing
*
* @access private
* @function cssToDOM
* @param {string} name - String name of kebab-case prop we want to convert
* @returns {string} The camelCase version of the supplied name
*/
function cssToDOM(name) {
return name.replace(/([a-z])-([a-z])/g, function(str, m1, m2) {
return m1 + m2.toUpperCase();
}).replace(/^-/, '');
}
return cssToDOM;
});
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Github"
}
|
Ask HN: Best encrypted cloud storage option? - kotrunga
What is the best option for storing my files in the cloud, completely encrypted and secure?<p>Not like Dropbox, or other services where a government entity could force the company in giving up someone's files. Completely secure.<p>If rolling my own from home is the best option, any software recommendations?<p>Thanks!
======
nokcha
I use Tarsnap for storing backups of my files. Data is encrypted client-side,
so the server can't decrypt it. Tarsnap is designed for backups, though, not
for general file storage.
Some encrypted cloud storage offerings are mentioned here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16451396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16451396)
------
mtmail
I'm using
[http://duplicity.nongnu.org/features.html](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/features.html)
incremental backup with GnuPG encryption.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
}
|
Q:
Create a map of spatial clusters LISA in R
I would like to create a map showing local spatial cluster of a phenomenon, preferably using Local Moran (LISA).
In the reproducible example below, I calculate the local moran's index using spdep but I would like to know if there is as simple way to map the clustes, prefebly using ggplot2. Help ?
library(UScensus2000tract)
library(ggplot2)
library(spdep)
# load data
data("oregon.tract")
# plot Census Tract map
plot(oregon.tract)
# create Queens contiguity matrix
spatmatrix <- poly2nb(oregon.tract)
#calculate the local moran of the distribution of black population
lmoran <- localmoran(oregon.tract@data$black, nb2listw(spatmatrix))
Now to make this example more similar to my real dataset, I have some NA values in my shape file, which represent holes in the polygon, so these areas shouldn't be used in the calculation.
oregon.tract@data$black[3:5] <- NA
A:
Here is a strategy:
library(UScensus2000tract)
library(spdep)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
# load data
data("oregon.tract")
# plot Census Tract map
plot(oregon.tract)
# create Queens contiguity matrix
spatmatrix <- poly2nb(oregon.tract)
# create a neighbours list with spatial weights
listw <- nb2listw(spatmatrix)
# calculate the local moran of the distribution of white population
lmoran <- localmoran(oregon.tract$white, listw)
summary(lmoran)
# padronize the variable and save it to a new column
oregon.tract$s_white <- scale(oregon.tract$white) %>% as.vector()
# create a spatially lagged variable and save it to a new column
oregon.tract$lag_s_white <- lag.listw(listw, oregon.tract$s_white)
# summary of variables, to inform the analysis
summary(oregon.tract$s_white)
summary(oregon.tract$lag_s_white)
# moran scatterplot, in basic graphics (with identification of influential observations)
x <- oregon.tract$s_white
y <- oregon.tract$lag_s_white %>% as.vector()
xx <- data.frame(x, y)
moran.plot(x, listw)
# moran sccaterplot, in ggplot
# (without identification of influential observations - which is possible but requires more effort)
ggplot(xx, aes(x, y)) + geom_point() + geom_smooth(method = 'lm', se = F) + geom_hline(yintercept = 0, linetype = 'dashed') + geom_vline(xintercept = 0, linetype = 'dashed')
# create a new variable identifying the moran plot quadrant for each observation, dismissing the non-significant ones
oregon.tract$quad_sig <- NA
# high-high quadrant
oregon.tract[(oregon.tract$s_white >= 0 &
oregon.tract$lag_s_white >= 0) &
(lmoran[, 5] <= 0.05), "quad_sig"] <- "high-high"
# low-low quadrant
oregon.tract[(oregon.tract$s_white <= 0 &
oregon.tract$lag_s_white <= 0) &
(lmoran[, 5] <= 0.05), "quad_sig"] <- "low-low"
# high-low quadrant
oregon.tract[(oregon.tract$s_white >= 0 &
oregon.tract$lag_s_white <= 0) &
(lmoran[, 5] <= 0.05), "quad_sig"] <- "high-low"
# low-high quadrant
oregon.tract@data[(oregon.tract$s_white <= 0
& oregon.tract$lag_s_white >= 0) &
(lmoran[, 5] <= 0.05), "quad_sig"] <- "low-high"
# non-significant observations
oregon.tract@data[(lmoran[, 5] > 0.05), "quad_sig"] <- "not signif."
oregon.tract$quad_sig <- as.factor(oregon.tract$quad_sig)
oregon.tract@data$id <- rownames(oregon.tract@data)
# plotting the map
df <- fortify(oregon.tract, region="id")
df <- left_join(df, oregon.tract@data)
df %>%
ggplot(aes(long, lat, group = group, fill = quad_sig)) +
geom_polygon(color = "white", size = .05) + coord_equal() +
theme_void() + scale_fill_brewer(palette = "Set1")
This answer was based on this page, suggested by Eli Knaap on twitter, and also borrowed from the answer by @timelyportfolio to this question.
I used the variable white instead of black because black had less explicit results.
Concerning NAs, localmoran() includes the argument na.action, about which the documentation says:
na.action is a function (default na.fail), can also be na.omit or > na.exclude - in these cases the weights list will be subsetted to remove NAs in the data. It may be necessary to set zero.policy to TRUE because this subsetting may create no-neighbour observations. Note that only weights lists created without using the glist argument to nb2listw may be subsetted. If na.pass is used, zero is substituted for NA values in calculating the spatial lag.
I tried:
oregon.tract@data$white[3:5] <- NA
lmoran <- localmoran(oregon.tract@data$white, listw, zero.policy = TRUE,
na.action = na.exclude)
But run into problems in lag.listw but did not have time to look into it. Sorry.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
Portal venous gas and thrombosis complicating superior mesenteric artery syndrome (Wilkie's syndrome) in a child.
We report a case of a 10-year-old girl presenting with portal venous gas and thrombosis associated with superior mesenteric artery syndrome. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of superior mesenteric artery syndrome complicated by gastric wall pneumatosis, portal venous gas, and thrombosis in childhood. Although these complications usually lead to bowel resection in adults and result in a high mortality rate, our pediatric patient was successfully treated nonoperatively with intensive care management and jejunal tube feedings. Presence of portal venous gas may occur in superior mesenteric artery syndrome in children and does not necessarily lead to bowel injury, allowing conservative medical management as a first-line treatment.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
}
|
23 F.3d 403NOTICE: Fourth Circuit I.O.P. 36.6 states that citation of unpublished dispositions is disfavored except for establishing res judicata, estoppel, or the law of the case and requires service of copies of cited unpublished dispositions of the Fourth Circuit.
Raymond STOKES, Plaintiff-Appellant,v.David A. WILLIAMS; Thomas R. Lanyi, Defendants-Appellees.
No. 93-7156.
United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.
Submitted: April 21, 1994.Decided: May 9, 1994.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, at Alexandria. James C. Cacheris, Chief District Judge. (CA-92-1177-AM)
Raymond Stokes, Appellant Pro Se.
Pamela Anne Sargent, Assistant Attorney General, Richmond, Virginia; William Rittenhouse Culbreth, Russell, Cantor, Arkema & Edmonds, P.C., Richmond, Virginia, for Appellees.
E.D.Va.
AFFIRMED.
Before ERVIN, Chief Judge, MICHAEL, Circuit Judge, and CHAPMAN, Senior Circuit Judge.
PER CURIAM:
1
Appellant appeals from the district court's order denying relief on his 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 (1988) complaint. Our review of the record and the district court's opinion discloses that this appeal is without merit.* Accordingly, we affirm on the reasoning of the district court. Stokes v. Williams, No. CA-92-1177-AM (E.D. Va. Aug. 10, 1993; Sept. 24, 1993). We dispense with oral argument because the facts and legal contentions are adequately presented in the materials before the Court and argument would not aid the decisional process.
AFFIRMED
*
Although Stokes did not receive the notice required by Roseboro v. Garrison, 528 F.2d 309 (4th Cir.1975), on this record we find this to be harmless error. Fed.R.Civ.P. 61
|
{
"pile_set_name": "FreeLaw"
}
|
Leg ulcers in patients with myeloproliferative disorders: disease- or treatment-related?
Leg ulcers are a relatively frequent problem in patients with myeloproliferative disorders under treatment with hydroxyurea (HU). The pathogenesis is currently unknown and may be multifactorial. Concomitant arterial or venous disease may play a contributing role in the development of these wounds. Vasculitis, cryoglobulinemia and pyoderma gangrenosum should be considered if typical clinical signs are present. We report on 3 patients with myeloproliferative disorders who developed HU-induced leg ulcers and review the literature. HU-induced leg ulcers share clinical features which can help to differentiate them from leg ulcers of other etiologies: occurrence under long-term treatment with HU at a dose of at least 1 g/day, localization in the malleolar region and spontaneous healing when HU is discontinued. We conclude that differentiation between disease-related and treatment-induced leg ulcers can be difficult and may not always be possible. In HU-induced leg ulcers, cessation of the drug typically leads to wound healing.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
}
|
6.0.2 Download Coming Soon
The 6.0.2 Download onto live servers began in the background today, and was removed after a short time, thanks to concerns about the size of the download. However, Community Manager Zarhym reported that the download will begin again, with more details on the new file system.
Zarhym
As some of you may have noticed the background downloader for patch 6.0.2 began today. After discovering issues with the size of the download, however, we have deactivated it for the time being. We'll let you know once when we're ready to start the 6.0.2 background downloader again, as well as provide you with some additional details on how it works and what you can expect when downloading the 6.0.2 patch in advance of its release on live realms.
New Beta Build Soon
The beta realms are coming down for maintenance--this is a bit later than usual as they usually take 8 hours or more to complete.
Zorbrix
Greetings All!
The Beta realms will be shutting down for maintenance in order to deploy a new build. I'll be updating this thread with information and time estimates as I receive them. I don't have an ETA yet, but these pushes usually take at least 8 hours, if not more.
I'll be leaving this thread open for general discussion as long as people remain civil and follow forum rules.
Realms are still up as of this post, but should be coming down shortly.
Hogs Battle Pet Removed
Hogs, created as a "decoy" pet in early alpha datamining, is confirmed to be removed for Warlords' launch. Previously Hogs has been associated with several beta achievements, including WoW's 10th anniversary.
Site Updates
Warlords of Draenor data improvements continue on Wowhead, here are some of the more interesting things we've done in the past few days!
Our Building database was one of the first Garrison sections we added to Wowhead, and we decided it was time to spruce it up. You can now also browse building by their in-game images for the Alliance and Horde! These images can be sorted by Name, Plot Size, and Level.
We've got another round of site updates to share with you today! We've added information about legacy achievements and exclusive glyphs to the database, as well as new item bonus information based on Blizzard's sweeping data changes for 6.0.
To see other recent developments on Wowhead, check out our What's New page.
Item Data Changes in Warlords
Items in Warlords of Draenor are receiving a lot of internal changes that we have to adapt to here at Wowhead. Our goal is to have our users think that nothing has changed when using our database and tools, but we're quite busy behind-the-scenes.
Instead of each version of an item being linked to a unique item ID, all versions are consolidated into one item ID in Warlords of Draenor. An item can now have a number of bonuses applied--ranging from a Raid Difficulty to a gem socket. So in 6.0, there will be one item ID associated with all versions of a Siege of Orgrimmar item, like Korven's Crimson Crescent.
Warlords of Draenor and 6.0 items now display item bonuses on their Wowhead pages. Here's some examples of items with bonuses:
6.0 Siege of Orgrimmar items like Korven's Crimson Crescent now have raid difficulty and Warforged bonuses. All of our comments and screenshots will be consolidated and moved over to these new pages in 6.0 to reduce database clutter.
Warlords of Draenor quest items like Frostwolf Hunting Crossbow now display uncommon, rare, and epic versions. When completing a Draenor quest, the reward has a low chance to be rare or epic.
Warlords of Draenor dungeon items like Robes of Swirling Light now display a Heroic option as well as bonuses that modify the required level and item level. We're not sure what purpose these later options serve--perhaps different versions drop in various instances?
Everyone loves achievements, so we've added even more site achievements to Wowhead this week!
You can now get achievements for using our recently-added tools and features, including building a Garrison with the Garrison Calculator, pinning a charcter in the Profiler, and making a Sounds playlist. We've also rewarded users for using our popular features like transmog sets and the modelviewer.
As usual, a list of all of the different achievements and their criteria, as well as who has earned them and how many times, can be found in the Website Achievements category, found under the Community menu. Users can view their own achievements in the Achievements tab found on their user page.
Achievements are only awarded to registered users, so if you're looking for a reason to de-lurk and register, now is the time.
Today the Wowhead team is excited to announce the launch of the Character Planner, as well as a new section in the Warlords database!
Character Planner
For the character planner, we wanted to create a tool that not only recommends gear, but suggests fun things you'd like to try in game! The new Character Planner suggests achievements and guides you'd be interested in, as well as gear upgrades and zones that have the most upgrades.
To get started with the Character Planner, go to http://wowhead.com/planner and enter in your realm and character. If you have a character in the Profiler, just click on the "Character Planner" option in the header and it will automatically load the planner for that character!
Today the Wowhead team is proud to present our front-page design revamp! We've all wanted this for a while and we're thrilled to finally share it with you.
Each expansion, we evaluate how we present our site's content and if we can do anything better. For Mists of Pandaria, we refined the layout of Wowhead News to better serve our community--we streamlined the design, added some features to the sidebar, and changed the domain.
For Warlords of Draenor, we want our community to be better informed about our frequent database updates as well as our in-depth content previews. Many users love our news coverage and blogs announcing new site tools, but we've also heard from other users that they aren't aware of these posts due to the front page layout.
The new front page will make it easier to follow all of our database developments, such as updated Warlords of Draenor data from alpha builds, our new Garrison Calculator, and Profiler updates letting you view your character with their Warlords of Draenor model. In addition, the front page layout highlights other popular content on Wowhead such as patch previews, news roundups, user guides, and important recent tweets from our unique Blue Tweet Tracker.
The search box on all pages is now bigger and easier to click, plus you can start typing anywhere on the page when not focused on a form element to start searching.
The rest of the site looks the same outside of some minor style changes and Class Guides now accessible from the top navigation menu.
Thanks again for your feedback on the revamp preview blog. If you find any layout issues, please report them here in the comments or to .
Edit: We have addressed some styling issues with the footer, item tabs, the item comparison tool, and talent calc landing page, as well as mobile support, monitors with small widths, and ratings icons. There are still some tweaks we want to address such as quote boxes on darker forum posts and "Save" and "Cancel" buttons overlapping with "Add Reply" on database comments.
Each expansion, the Wowhead team evaluates how we present our content and if we can do anything better. For Mists of Pandaria, we refined the layout of Wowhead News to better serve our community--we streamlined the design, added some cool features to the sidebar, and changed the domain.
Looking forward to Warlords of Draenor, there are some improvements we want to make. Many users love our news coverage and blogs announcing new site tools, but we've also heard from other users that they initially miss these posts due to the site's design. The current front page is a bit cramped with the search box, dropdown menus, and news featurebox practically on top of each other!
Our goal at Wowhead is to provide as much information to players as possible, so the Wowhead team has been hard at work on a front-page redesign. We're putting more of our current content on Wowhead's front page--Alpha previews, guides, and news roundups including current Twitter posts from the Blue Tweet Tracker. The layout tweaks also allow us to highlight more features such as Class Guides on the navigation menu and the Blue Tracker on the sidebar.
Below you'll find some screenshots of our upcoming revamp. While the front page is mainly getting changes, we've included a few pictures of popular pages to see how the fonts, styling, and new header affects them.
After publishing this blog, we've updated some design elements and posted new images reflecting these changes. Thanks again for your feedback.
These images are from a previous design draft which we've left up for comparison purposes.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
|
% Datasets for `Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks' by B.D. Ripley
% =====================================================================
%
% Cambridge University Press (1996) ISBN 0-521-46086-7
%
% The background to the datasets is described in section 1.4; this file
% relates the computer-readable files to that description.
%
%
%
% Cushing's syndrome
% ------------------
%
% Data from Aitchison & Dunsmore (1975, Tables 11.1-3).
%
% Data file Cushings.dat has four columns,
%
% Label of the patient
% Tetrhydrocortisone (mg/24hr)
% Pregnanetriol (mg/24hr)
% Type
%
% The type of the last six patients (u1 to u6) should be
% regarded as unknown. (The code `o' indicates `other').
%
%
%
% synthetic two-class problem
% ---------------------------
%
% Data from Ripley (1994a).
%
% This has two real-valued co-ordinates (xs and ys) and a class (xc)
% which is 0 or 1.
%
% Data file synth.tr has 250 rows of the training set
% synth.te has 1000 rows of the test set (not used here)
%
%
%
% viruses
% -------
%
% This is a dataset on 61 viruses with rod-shaped particles affecting
% various crops (tobacco, tomato, cucumber and others) described by
% {Fauquet et al. (1988) and analysed by Eslava-G\'omez (1989). There
% are 18 measurements on each virus, the number of amino acid residues
% per molecule of coat protein.
%
% Data file viruses.dat has 61 rows of 18 counts
% virus3.dat has 38 rows corresponding to the distinct
% Tobamoviruses.
%
% The whole dataset is in order Hordeviruses (3), Tobraviruses (6),
% Tobamoviruses (39) and `furoviruses' (13).
%
%
%
% Leptograpsus crabs
% ------------------
%
% Data from Campbell & Mahon (1974) on the morphology of rock crabs of
% genus Leptograpsus.
%
% There are 50 specimens of each sex of each of two colour forms.
%
% Data file crabs.dat has rows
%
% sp `species', coded B (blue form) or O (orange form)
% sex coded M or F
% index within each group of 50
% FL frontal lip of carapace (mm)
% RW rear width of carapace (mm)
% CL length along the midline of carapace (mm)
% CW maximum width of carapace (mm)
% BD body depth (mm)
%
%
%
% Forensic glass
% --------------
%
% This example comes from forensic testing of glass collected by
% B. German on 214 fragments of glass. It is also contained in the
% UCI machine-learning database collection (Murphy & Aha, 1995).
%
% Data file fglass.dat has 214 rows with data for a single glass
% fragment.
%
% RI refractive index
% Na % weight of sodium oxide(s)
% Mg % weight of magnesium oxide(s)
% Al % weight of aluminium oxide(s)
% Si % weight of silicon oxide(s)
% K % weight of potassium oxide(s)
% Ca % weight of calcium oxide(s)
% Ba % weight of barium oxide(s)
% Fe % weight of iron oxide(s)
% type coded 1 to 7
%
% The type codes are:
%
% 1 (WinF) window float glass
% 2 (WinNF) window non-float glass
% 3 (Veh) vehicle glass
% 5 (Con) containers
% 6 (Tabl) tableware
% 7 (Head) vehicle headlamp glass
%
% The ten groups used for the cross-validation experiments (I believe)
% are listed as row numbers in the file fglass.grp,
%
%
%
% Diabetes in Pima Indians
% ------------------------
%
% A population of women who were at least 21 years old, of Pima Indian heritage
% and living near Phoenix, Arizona, was tested for diabetes
% according to World Health Organization criteria. The data
% were collected by the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and
% Kidney Diseases (Smith et al, 1988). This example is also contained in the
% UCI machine-learning database collection (Murphy & Aha, 1995).
%
% The data files have rows containing
%
% npreg number of pregnancies
% glu plasma glucose concentration in an oral glucose tolerance test
% bp diastolic blood pressure (mm Hg)
% skin triceps skin fold thickness (mm)
% ins serum insulin (micro U/ml)
% bmi body mass index (weight in kg/(height in m)^2)
% ped diabetes pedigree function
% age in years
% type No / Yes
%
% Data file pima.tr has 200 rows of complete training data.
% pima.te has 332 rows of complete test data.
% pima.tr2 has the 200 rows of pima.tr plus 100 incomplete rows.
%
%
% Note: there were no column information in the data, hence the names
% were generated automatically
%
%
% Information about the dataset
% CLASSTYPE: nominal
% CLASSINDEX: none specific
%
@relation prnn-viruses
@attribute col_1 INTEGER
@attribute col_2 INTEGER
@attribute col_3 INTEGER
@attribute col_4 INTEGER
@attribute col_5 INTEGER
@attribute col_6 INTEGER
@attribute col_7 INTEGER
@attribute col_8 {0,1,2,3}
@attribute col_9 INTEGER
@attribute col_10 {0,1,2,3,4,7}
@attribute col_11 {3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11}
@attribute col_12 {11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,21}
@attribute col_13 {4,5,6,7,8,9,12,15}
@attribute col_14 {4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,14}
@attribute col_15 {0,1,2,3,4,5,6}
@attribute col_16 INTEGER
@attribute col_17 INTEGER
@attribute col_18 {0,1,2,3,4,5}
@data
25,9,9,19,12,8,20,0,10,0,6,21,8,7,4,7,17,5
26,9,9,20,13,8,20,0,10,0,6,21,8,7,4,7,17,5
25,9,9,22,10,10,23,0,13,0,6,19,5,6,4,8,16,5
15,10,21,13,18,12,22,1,9,2,4,11,5,10,1,14,8,2
17,11,22,15,14,10,23,1,11,2,4,11,5,9,1,13,9,1
22,17,17,16,10,15,13,1,7,2,3,14,9,9,2,12,6,2
21,18,18,15,11,15,16,1,7,2,3,14,6,8,2,12,7,2
20,9,16,15,16,6,19,1,7,3,4,14,4,11,1,16,11,3
22,10,17,18,13,6,21,1,8,3,4,13,4,11,1,15,10,3
17,13,14,16,4,9,14,1,13,0,11,13,5,7,1,4,11,5
12,11,9,12,6,5,12,1,9,1,7,12,5,6,0,4,8,2
18,16,16,16,8,6,14,1,14,0,9,12,4,8,0,2,11,3
18,16,15,19,8,6,11,1,15,1,7,13,5,8,0,2,9,3
17,13,13,22,8,4,18,1,10,3,8,11,7,6,1,2,10,2
16,13,16,21,9,3,17,1,10,4,7,12,7,5,1,2,11,3
22,19,10,16,10,4,18,1,12,2,8,11,6,8,0,1,8,2
20,10,24,10,6,9,21,0,7,0,7,18,4,9,1,4,8,2
20,21,12,15,9,7,11,1,9,3,8,14,6,7,0,1,10,3
20,21,12,15,9,7,11,1,9,3,9,14,5,7,0,1,10,3
18,11,24,10,9,6,19,0,12,0,7,14,4,11,0,4,9,1
20,12,23,10,8,5,20,0,13,0,6,13,4,11,0,4,10,1
18,19,18,16,8,4,12,0,12,0,10,15,8,6,1,1,12,1
17,16,17,15,8,6,14,1,14,0,9,12,4,8,0,3,11,3
19,17,14,16,8,6,14,1,14,0,8,12,4,8,0,2,12,3
19,17,15,16,8,5,14,1,14,0,8,12,4,8,0,2,12,3
19,15,16,16,8,6,14,1,15,0,8,12,4,8,0,2,12,3
17,17,16,19,8,6,11,1,15,1,7,13,5,8,0,2,9,3
18,17,15,19,8,6,11,1,15,1,7,13,5,8,0,2,9,3
22,19,10,16,10,4,18,1,12,2,8,11,6,8,0,1,8,2
22,19,10,16,10,5,17,1,12,2,8,11,6,8,0,1,8,2
18,20,10,18,6,8,17,1,14,1,5,16,4,7,0,2,9,2
18,16,16,15,8,6,13,1,14,1,8,12,4,8,1,2,12,3
20,21,12,15,9,7,11,1,10,3,8,14,7,7,0,1,9,3
20,21,12,15,9,7,11,1,10,3,9,14,5,7,0,1,10,3
18,12,23,10,9,5,20,0,14,0,7,12,4,11,0,4,10,1
18,12,21,10,10,5,18,0,13,0,8,12,4,12,0,4,10,1
17,12,22,10,8,5,18,0,14,0,5,13,4,10,0,3,9,1
17,16,16,16,8,6,15,1,14,0,9,12,4,8,0,2,11,3
19,17,15,17,7,6,15,1,14,0,8,12,4,8,0,2,10,3
18,16,16,19,8,6,11,1,15,1,7,13,5,8,0,2,9,3
18,17,15,17,8,6,15,1,14,0,8,12,4,8,0,3,9,3
15,12,14,23,8,3,17,1,9,4,7,15,6,6,1,2,11,2
13,11,14,22,7,3,17,1,10,4,8,13,6,6,1,3,11,2
16,11,15,23,10,4,18,1,10,3,7,12,6,5,1,2,9,3
14,11,14,25,11,3,19,2,10,2,7,12,6,5,1,2,9,3
11,11,15,24,10,5,18,1,11,1,7,14,5,7,2,3,11,2
15,9,12,21,8,4,21,1,10,3,7,15,7,6,1,3,10,3
15,11,15,22,7,3,19,1,8,3,4,14,6,5,1,2,10,2
27,8,13,25,12,26,21,1,20,0,11,18,5,7,5,7,19,3
27,8,13,25,13,27,21,1,19,0,11,18,6,8,5,7,19,3
27,7,12,25,12,26,21,1,20,0,11,17,6,8,5,7,19,3
26,8,13,25,13,26,21,1,19,0,11,18,6,8,5,8,19,3
28,6,13,24,12,30,22,1,18,0,11,18,6,8,4,7,19,3
27,8,14,25,13,26,21,1,18,0,11,18,6,8,5,7,19,3
24,15,18,14,10,14,19,1,14,7,5,19,4,6,2,12,10,4
25,14,15,15,9,12,14,0,8,3,6,12,4,14,1,10,8,0
29,11,12,23,9,15,23,0,16,1,10,13,5,8,3,6,23,5
28,15,22,21,7,32,21,1,13,2,8,16,12,5,5,8,9,1
29,14,22,20,9,20,20,2,15,2,9,16,7,6,6,10,13,2
29,16,18,18,8,32,22,1,14,2,9,18,15,4,4,8,9,1
31,14,21,20,9,21,20,3,15,2,8,17,6,7,6,10,13,1
|
{
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}
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Errata for Java Examples in a Nutshell
The errata list is a list of errors and their corrections that were found after the product was released. If the error was corrected in a later version or reprint the date of the correction will be displayed in the column titled "Date Corrected".
The following errata were submitted by our customers and approved as valid errors by the author or editor.
Page xiii
(This change was made to the 12/98 reprint but please note this
information if you have a previous printing of the book.)
Under the section "Java Example Online," add the following section regarding
licensing information:
Licensing Information
You may study, use, modify, and distribute these examples
for any non-commercial purpose, as long as the copyright
notice at the top of each example is retained. If you would
like to use the code in a commercial product, you may purchase
a commercial use license from the author for a nominal fee.
Visit http://www.davidflanagan.com/javaexamples/ for information
on obtaining such a license.
Please note that the examples are provided as-is, with no
warranty of any kind.
Anonymous
Printed
Page xiii
1st para.: the correct URL for the examples is
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9781565923713
Anonymous
Apr 01, 1998
Printed
Page index
now starts on page 369 and has been
rerun to reflect the removal of the appendix
Anonymous
Dec 01, 1998
Printed
Page 1
last paragraph, second sentence: changed "They" to "There"
Anonymous
Apr 01, 1998
Printed
Page 1
The last paragraph did read :
"There were referring, of course"
now reads
"They were referring, of course"
Anonymous
Apr 01, 2000
Printed
Page 6
Example 1-3: lines 8 and 9
int current, prev=1, prevprev=0; // Initialize some variables
for(int i = 0; i < 20; i++) { // Loop exactly 20 times
now reads
int current, prev=1, prevprev=1; // Initialize some variables
System.out.print("1 1 "); // Output the initial two values
for(int i = 2; i < 20; i++) { // Loop, outputting remaining values
and in the paragraph above, in line 5
"First, it again uses a for statement to loop 20 times."
now reads
"First, it again uses a for statement as its main loop."
*margin_height -- how much space...left and right
*margin_width -- how much space...top and bottom
now reads
*margin_height -- how much space...top and bottom
*margin_width -- how much space...left and right
Anonymous
Dec 01, 1998
Printed
Page 124
paragraph 1, line 1:
An important features of the Frame class ...
should read
An important feature of the Frame class ...
The program went into infinite loop when reading Japanese file.
File f;
FileReader in = null;
try {
f = new File(directory, filename); // Create a file object
in = new FileReader(f); // Create a char stream to read it
int size = (int) f.length(); // Check file size
// This size is the file size in byte. ------(1)
char[] data = new char[size]; // Allocate an array big enough for it
int chars_read = 0; // How many chars read so far?
while(chars_read < size) // Loop until we've read it all
chars_read += in.read(data, chars_read, size-chars_read);
// chars_read is total read size in unicode char ------(2)
textarea.setText(new String(data)); // Display chars in TextArea
this.setTitle("FileViewer: " + filename); // Set the window title
}
The author's response: This is an embarrassing mistake, and I am grateful to
you for noticing it. In general, I have difficulty catching
internationalization errors like this since I do not have a system that uses
or can display Japanese text. (And even if I did, I could not develop
meaningful examples, since I have no comprehension of the language...)
Of the two solutions you propose, I prefer the first one. We should show an
example that is guaranteed to work in all cases. However, to improve the
efficiency, I would recommend that you modify the example to read more than
one line at a time. You use a BufferedReader, which makes reading individual
lines efficient, but I fear that appending individual lines to the TextArea is
not efficient. So I propose code like this:
f = new File(directory, filename); // Create a file object
in = new FileReader(f); // Create a char stream to read it
char[] buffer = new char[4096];
int len;
while((len = in.read(buffer)) != -1) {
String s = new String(buffer, 0, len);
textarea.append(s);
}
Note that I have not tested this code, with English text or with Japanese
text. I'm just trying to give you an idea of what I'm suggesting. I think
this code is properly internationalized, and should always work. If it does
not, go ahead and use the code you proposed.
Anonymous
Printed
Page 163
paragraph 2, line 6:
"it creates and display a FileViewer window" should be "it creates and
displays a FileViewer window".
Page 330
After the line "Object value = rs.getObject(i+1);", added the line
if (value != null)
and changed indentation of the next line so the code now reads:
Object value = rs.getObject(i+1);
if (value != null)
overwrite(line, colpos[i] + 1, value.toString().trim());
(Don't change the indent of the second "overwrite" line.)
Finally, since we added a line, we cut the blank line before:
// Finally, end the table with one last divider line
(appendix) completely removed
Anonymous
Dec 01, 1998
Printed
Page 381
Example 6, line 10 from the bottom: changed
// Add some items to the Edit menu
to
// Add some items to the View menu
Anonymous
May 01, 1998
Printed
Page 381
Example 6, line 10 from the bottom: changed
// Add some items to the Edit menu
to
// Add some items to the View menu
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
|
Q:
How do I create a React Native project using Yarn?
I am running the following commands in the DOS console on a Windows 7 (64-bit) machine.
npm install -g yarn
yarn add global react-native
yarn add global react-native-cli
react-native init sample
After running react-native init sample, the console was closed.
The error log shows:
D:\Mobile>"$basedir/../../Users/pramaswamy/AppData/Local/Yarn/.global/node_modules/.bin/react-native.cmd" "$@"
D:\Mobile>exit $?
A:
I think you're adding global dependencies wrong, and you shouldn't need to install react-native, globally or locally. react-native init will create a package.json with react-native listed as a dependency.
You should be able to install react-native-cli globally with yarn global add react-native-cli, not yarn add global react-native-cli.
You should be fine with running the following:
npm install -g yarn
yarn global add react-native-cli
react-native init sample
A:
NEW SEP 2019,
now it's more simple, use node10 and expo: (easy way)
npm install -g expo-cli
*to create project:
expo init AwesomeProject
cd AwesomeProject
npm start
*install the app 'expo' on your phone, and scan the qr code for the project and you can start to view your app
more info:
https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started.html
UPDATE OCT 2018 Create React Native App (now discontinued) has been merged with Expo CLI
You can now use expo init to create your project. See Quick Start in
the Expo documentation for instructions on getting started using Expo
CLI.
Unfortunately, react-native-cli is outdated. Starting 13 March 2017, use create-react-native-app instead. Moreover, you shouldn't install Yarn with NPM. Instead, use one of the methods on the yarn installation page.
1. Install yarn
Via NPM. According to its installation docs, you shouldn't install yarn via npm, but if necessary, you can still install it with a pre-v5 version of npm.
UPDATE 2018 - OCTOBER
Node 8.12.0 and NPM 6.4.1 is already compatible with create-react-native-app. Really some minors previous versions too. You don't need more downgrade your npm.
On Ubuntu.
curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
On macOS, use Homebrew or MacPorts.
brew install yarn
sudo port install yarn
2. Install the Create React Native App
yarn global add create-react-native-app
3. Update your shell environment
source ~/.bashrc
4. Create a React native project
create-react-native-app myreactproj
A:
You got the order wrong. You should be
yarn add global react-native-cli
yarn add react-native
react-native init sample
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
## Praise for _Late Victorian Holocausts_
"Generations of historians largely ignored the implications [of the great famines of the- late nineteenth century] and until recently dismissed them as 'climatic accidents'... _Late Victorian Holocausts_ proves them wrong." _LA Times_ Best Books of 2001
"Wide ranging and compelling... a remarkable achievement." _Times Literary Supplement_
"A masterly account of climatic, economic and colonial history." _New Scientist_
"A hero of the Left, Davis is part polemicist, part historian, and all Marxist." Dale Peck, _Village Voice_
"Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance as well as great historical interest... this highly informative book goes well beyond its immediate focus." _New York Times_
"Davis, a brilliant maverick scholar, sets the triumph of the late-nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El NiΓ±o weather patterns at that time... This is groundbreaking, mind-stretching stuff." _Independent_
"The catalogue of cruelty Davis has unearthed is jaw-dropping... _Late Victorian Holocausts_ is as ugly as it is compelling." _Guardian_
"Controversial, comprehensive, and compelling, this book is megahistory at its most fascinatingβa monument to times past, but hopefully not a predictor of future disasters." _Foreign Affairs_
"Devastating." _San Francisco Chronicle_
# **Late Victorian Holocausts**
## **El NiΓ±o Famines and the Making
of the Third World**
**MIKE DAVIS**
This paperback edition first published by Verso 2017
First published by Verso 2001
Β© Mike Davis 2001, 2002, 2017
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
**Verso**
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-662-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-061-2 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-360-6 (UK EBK)
**British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data**
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
**Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data**
Names: Davis, Mike, 1946β author.
Title: Late Victorian holocausts : El NiΓ±o famines and the making of the
Third World / Mike Davis.
Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026162 | ISBN 9781784786625 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Human ecologyβDeveloping countriesβHistoryβ19th century. |
Political ecologyβDeveloping countriesβHistoryβ19th century. | El NiΓ±o
CurrentβSocial aspectsβDeveloping countriesβHistoryβ19th century. |
FaminesβDeveloping countriesβHistoryβ19th century. |
DroughtsβDeveloping countriesβHistoryβ19th century. | Developing
countriesβEnvironmental conditionsβHistoryβ19th century. |
IndiaβEnvironmental conditionsβHistoryβ19th century. |
ChinaβEnvironmental conditionsβHistoryβ19th century. |
BrazilβEnvironmental conditionsβHistoryβ19th century. |
ImperialismβEnvironmental aspectsβHistoryβ19th century. | BISAC: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Agriculture & Food. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Economic Conditions.
Classification: LCC GF900 .D38 2017 | DDC 363.809172/409034βdc23
LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026162>
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Steven Hiatt/Hiatt & Dragon, San Francisco
Printed in the USA by Maple Press
**Offended Lands**
... It is so much, so many
tombs, so much martyrdom, so much
galloping of beasts in the star!
Nothing, not even victory
will erase the terrible hollow of the blood:
nothing, neither the sea, nor the passage
of sand and time, nor the geranium flaming
upon the grave.
Pablo Neruda (1937)
## **Contents**
_Acknowledgements_
Preface
A Note on Definitions
PART IThe Great Drought, 1876β1878
1Victoria's Ghosts
2'The Poor Eat Their Homes'
3Gunboats and Messiahs
PART II El NiΓ±o and the New Imperialism, 1888β1902
4The Government of Hell
5Skeletons at the Feast
6Millenarian Revolutions
PART III Deciphering ENSO
7The Mystery of the Monsoons
8Climates of Hunger
PART IV The Political Ecology of Famine
9The Origins of the Third World
10India: The Modernization of Poverty
11China: Mandates Revoked
12Brazil: Race and Capital in the Nordeste
_Glossary_
_Notes_
_Index_
## **Acknowledgements**
An ancient interest in climate history was rekindled during the week I spent as a fly on the wall at the June 1998 Chapman Conference, "Mechanisms of Millennial-Scale Global Climate Change," in Snowbird, Utah. Listening to the folks who mine environmental history from the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Bermuda Rise discuss state-of-the-art research on climate oscillations was a truly exhilarating experience, and I thank the organizers for allowing a mere historian to kibitz what was intended to be a family conversation.
The outline for this book was subsequently presented as a paper in September 1998 at the conference "Environmental Violence" organized at UC Berkeley by Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts. Vinayak Chaturvedi, Tom Brass and Gopal Balakrishnan generously offered expert and luminous criticisms of this project in its early stages. Kurt Cuffey spruced up some of the physics in chapter 7. Dan Monk and Sara Lipton, Michelle Huang and Chi-She Li, and Steve and Cheryl Murakami provided the essential _aloha_. The truly hard work was done by Steve Hiatt, Colin Robinson, Jane Hindle and my other colleagues at Verso Books, while David Deis created the excellent maps and graphics and Tom Hassett proofread the galleys with care. A MacArthur Fellowship provided unencumbered opportunities for research and writing.
The real windfalls in my life, however, have been the sturdy love and patience of my _compaΓ±era_ , Alessandra Moctezuma; the unceasing delight of my children, Jack and RoisΓn; and the friendship of two incomparable rogue-intellectuals and _raconteurs_ , David Reid and Mike Sprinker. David took precious time off from 1940s New York to help weed my final draft. Mike introduced me to the impressive work of South Asian Marxist historians and provided a decisively important critique of the book's original conception. His death from a heart attack in August 1999, after a long and apparently successful fight against cancer, was simply an obscenity. He was one of the genuinely great souls of the American Left. As JosΓ© MartΓ once said of Wendell Phillips: "He was implacable and fiery, as are all tender men who love justice." I dedicate this book to his beloved wife and co-thinker, Modhumita Roy, and thank her for the courage she has shared with all of us.
## **Preface**
> The failure of the monsoons through the years from 1876 to 1879 resulted in an unusually severe drought over much of Asia. The impact of the drought on the agricultural society of the time was immense. So far as is known, the famine that ravished the region is the worst ever to afflict the human species.
>
> βJohn Hidore, _Global Environmental Change_
It was the most famous and perhaps longest family vacation in American history. "Under a crescendo of criticism for the corruption of his administration," the newly retired president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, his wife Julia, and son Jesse left Philadelphia in spring 1877 for Europe. The ostensible purpose of the trip was to spend some time with daughter Nellie in England, who was married (after the fashion that Henry James would celebrate) to a "dissolute English gentleman." Poor Nellie, in fact, saw little of her publicity-hungry parents, who preferred red carpets, cheering throngs and state banquets. As one of Grant's biographers has put it, "much has been said about how Grant, the simple fellow, manfully endured adulation because it was his duty to do so. This is nonsense." Folks back home were thrilled by _New York Herald_ journalist John Russell Young's accounts of the "stupendous dinners, with food and wine in enormous quantity and richness, followed by brandy which the general countered with countless cigars." Even more than her husband, Mrs. Grantβbut for Fort Sumter, a drunken tanner's wife in Galena, Illinoisβ"could not get too many princely attentions." As a result, "the trip went on and on and on"βas did Young's columns in the _Herald_.
Wherever they supped, the Grants left a legendary trail of gaucheries. In Venice, the General told the descendants of the Doges that "it would be a fine city if they drained it," while at a banquet in Buckingham Palace, when the visibly uncomfortable Queen Victoria (horrified at a "tantrum" by son Jesse) invoked her "fatiguing duties" as an excuse to escape the Grants, Julia responded: "Yes, I can imagine them: I too have been the wife of a great ruler." In Berlin, the Grants hovered around the fringes of the great Congress of Powers as it grappled with the "Eastern Question" as a prelude to the final European assault on the uncolonized peoples of Africa, Asia and Oceania. Perhaps it was the intoxication of so much imperialist hyperbole or the vision of even more magnificent receptions in oriental palaces that prompted the Grants to transform their vacation into a world tour. With James Gordon Bennett Jr. of the _New York Herald_ paying the bar tab and the US Navy providing much of the transportation, the exβFirst Family plotted an itinerary that would have humbled Alexander the Great: up the Nile to Thebes in Upper Egypt, back to Palestine, then on to Italy and Spain, back to the Suez Canal, outward to Aden, India, Burma, Vietnam, China and Japan, and, finally, across the Pacific to California.
**Vacationing in Famine Land**
Americans were particularly enthralled by the idea of their Ulysses in the land of the pharaohs. Steaming up the Nile, with a well-thumbed copy of Mark Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ on his lap, Grant was bemused to be welcomed in village after village as the "King of America." He spent quiet afternoons on the river reminiscing to Young (and thousands of his readers) about the bloody road from Vicksburg to Appomattox. Once he chastised the younger officers in his party for taking unsporting potshots at stray cranes and pelicans. (He sarcastically suggested they might as well go ashore and shoot some "poor, patient drudging camel, who pulls his heavy-laden hump along the bank.") On another occasion, when their little steamer had to pull up for the night while the crew fixed the engine, Grant's son Jesse struck up a conversation with some of the bedouin standing guard around the campfire. They complained that "times are hard," forcing them far from their homes. "The Nile has been bad, and when the Nile is bad, calamity comes and the people go away to other villages."
**Figure P1 The Grants in Upper Egypt**
Indeed the Grants' idyll was soon broken by the increasingly grim conditions along the river banks. "Our journey," reported Young, "was through a country that in a better time must have been a garden; but the Nile not having risen this year all is parched and barren." Although so far the Grants had only basked in the warmth of peasant hospitality, there had been widespread rioting in the area south of Siout (capital of Upper Egypt) and some of the _fellahin_ had reportedly armed themselves and headed into the sand hills. At the insistence of the governor, the Americans were assigned an armed guard for the remainder of their journey to Thebes and the First Cataract. Here the crop failure had been nearly total and thousands were dying from famine. Young tried to paint a picture of the "biblical disaster" for _Herald_ readers: "Today the fields are parched and brown, and cracked. The irrigating ditches are dry. You see stumps of the last season's crop. But with the exception of a few clusters of the castor bean and some weary, drooping date palms, the earth gives forth no fruit. A gust of sand blows over the plain and adds to the somberness of the scene."
Young, who had become as enchanted with Egypt's common people as with its ancient monuments, was appalled by the new British suzerains' contemptuous attitude towards both. "The Englishman," he observed, "looks upon these people as his hewers of wood and drawers of water, whose duty is to work and to thank the Lord when they are not flogged. They only regard these monuments [meanwhile] as reservoirs from which they can supply their own museums and for that purpose they have plundered Egypt, just as Lord Elgin plundered Greece." Young noted the crushing burden that the country's enormous foreign debt, now policed by the British, placed upon its poorest and now famished people. The ex-President, for his part, was annoyed by the insouciant attitude of the local bureaucrats confronted with a disaster of such magnitude.
A year later in Bombay, Young found more evidence for his thesis that "English influence in the East is only another name for English tyranny." While the Grants were marveling over the seeming infinity of servants at the disposal of the sahibs, Young was weighing the costs of empire borne by the Indians. "There is no despotism," he concluded, "more absolute than the government of India. Mighty, irresponsible, cruel..." Conscious that more than 5 million Indians by official count had died of famine in the preceding three years, Young emphasized that the "money which England takes out of India every year is a serious drain upon the country, and is among the causes of its poverty."
Leaving Bombay, the Grant party passed through a Deccan countrysideβ"hard, baked and brown"βthat still bore the scars of the worst drought in human memory. "The ride was a dusty one, for rain had not fallen since September, and the few occasional showers which usually attend the blossoming of the mango, which had not appeared, were now the dread of the people, who feared their coming to ruin the ripening crops." After obligatory sightseeing trips to the Taj Mahal and Benares, the Grants had a brief rendezvous with the viceroy, Lord Lytton, in Calcutta and then left, far ahead of schedule, for Burma. Lytton would later accuse a drunken Grant of groping English ladies at dinner, while on the American side there was resentment of Lytton's seeming diffidence towards the ex-president. Grant's confidant, the diplomat Adam Badeau, thought that Lytton had received "instructions from home not to pay too much deference to the ex-President. He believed that the British Government was unwilling to admit to the half-civilized populations of the East that any Western Power was important, or that any authority deserved recognition except their own." (Grant, accordingly, refused Badeau's request to ask the US ambassador in London to thank the British.)
A magnificent reception in China compensated for Lytton's arrogance. Li Hongzhang, China's senior statesman and victor over the Nian rebellion (which Young confused with the Taiping), was eager to obtain American help in difficult negotiations with Japan over the Ryukus. Accordingly, 100,000 people were turned out in Shanghai to cheer the Grants while a local band gamely attempted "John Brown's Body." (Chinese enthusiasm, however, was mainly official. This was not Egypt. Young earlier noted the young mandarins who from the windows of their homes in Canton "looked upon the barbarian with a supercilious air, contempt in their expression, very much as our young men in New York would regard Sitting Bull or Red Cloud from a club window as the Indian chiefs went in procession along Fifth Avenue.")
En route from Tianjin to Beijing, the Americans were wearied by the "fierce, unrelenting heat" compounded by depressing scenery of hunger and desolation. Three years of drought and famine in northern Chinaβofficially the "most terrible disaster in twenty-one dynasties of Chinese history"βhad recently killed somewhere between 8 million and 20 million people. Indeed nervous American consular officials noted in their dispatches that "were it not for the possession of improved weapons mobs of starving people might have caused a severe political disturbance." In his conversations with Li Hongzhang, Grant lectured with some insolence that railroads might have prevented such a catastrophe: "In the matter of famines, of which he had heard so many distressing stories since he came to China, it would be a blessing to the people to have railway communications. In America, there could be no famine such as had recently been seen in China, unless, as was hardly possible in so vast a territory, the famine became general. If the crops failed in one State, supplies could be brought from others at a little extra expense in money and time. We could send wheat, for instance, from one end of the country to another in a few days." Li Hongzhang responded that he was personally in favor of railways and telegraphs but unfortunately "his opinions on this were not shared by some of his colleagues." The great Qing leader, of course, was engaging in heroic understatement.
**The Secret History of the Nineteenth Century**
After Beijing, Grant continued to Yokohama and Edo, then home across the Pacific to a rapturous reception in San Francisco that demonstrated the dramatic revival of his popularity in light of so much romantic and highly publicized globetrotting. Throat cancer eventually precluded another assault on the White House and forced the ex-president into a desperate race to finish his famous _Personal Memoirs_. But none of that is pertinent to this preface. What is germane is a coincidence in his travels that Grant himself never acknowledged, but which almost certainly must have puzzled readers of Young's narrative: the successive encounters with epic drought and famine in Egypt, India and China. It was almost as if the Americans were inadvertently following in the footprints of a monster whose colossal trail of destruction extended from the Nile to the Yellow Sea.
As contemporary readers of _Nature_ and other scientific journals were aware, it was a disaster of truly planetary magnitude, with drought and famine reported as well in Java, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Korea, Brazil, southern Africa and the Maghreb. No one had hitherto suspected that synchronous extreme weather was possible on the scale of the entire tropical monsoon belt plus northern China and North Africa. Nor was there any historical record of famine afflicting so many far-flung lands simultaneously. Although only the roughest estimates of mortality could be made, it was horrifyingly clear that the million Irish dead of 1845β47 had been multiplied by tens. The total toll of conventional warfare from Austerlitz to Antietam and Sedan, according to calculations by one British journalist, was probably less than the mortality in southern India alone. Only China's Taiping Revolution (1851β64), the bloodiest civil war in world history with an estimated 20 million to 30 million dead, could boast as many victims.
But the great drought of 1876β79 was only the first of three global subsistence crises in the second half of Victoria's reign. In 1889β91 dry years again brought famine to India, Korea, Brazil and Russia, although the worst suffering was in Ethiopia and the Sudan, where perhaps one-third of the population died. Then in 1896β1902, the monsoons again repeatedly failed across the tropics and in northern China. Hugely destructive epidemics of malaria, bubonic plague, dysentery, smallpox and cholera culled millions of victims from the ranks of the famine-weakened. The European empires, together with Japan and the United States, rapaciously exploited the opportunity to wrest new colonies, expropriate communal lands, and tap novel sources of plantation and mine labor. What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century's final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre.
The total human toll of these three waves of drought, famine and disease could not have been less than 30 million victims. Fifty million dead might not be unrealistic. (Table P1 displays an array of estimates for famine mortality for 1876β79 and 1896β1902 in India, China and Brazil only.) Although the famished nations themselves were the chief mourners, there were also contemporary Europeans who understood the moral magnitude of such carnage and how fundamentally it annulled the apologies of empire. Thus the Radical journalist William Digby, principal chronicler of the 1876 Madras famine, prophesized on the eve of Queen Victoria's death that when "the part played by the British Empire in the nineteenth century is regarded by the historian fifty years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." A most eminent Victorian, the famed naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, passionately agreed. Like Digby, he viewed mass starvation as avoidable political tragedy, not "natural" disaster. In a famous balance-sheet of the Victorian era, published in 1898, he characterized the famines in India and China, together with the slum poverty of the industrial cities, as "the most terrible failures of the century."
**Table P1**
**Estimated Famine Mortality**
India | 1876β1879 | 10.3 million | Digby
---|---|---|---
| | 8.2 million | Maharatna
| | 6.1 million | Seavoy
| 1896β1902 | 19.0 million | _The Lancet_
| | 8.4 million | Maharatna/Seavoy
| | 6.1 million | Cambridge
India Total | | 12.2β29.3 million |
China | 1876β1879 | 20 million | Broomhall
| | 9.5β13 million | Bohr
| 1896β1900 | 10 million | Cohen
China Total | | 19.5β30 million |
Brazil | 1876β1879 | 0.5β1.0 million | Cunniff
| 1896β1900 | n.d. |
Brazil Total | | 2 million | Smith
Total | | 31.7β61.3 million |
Source: Cf. William Digby, _"Prosperous" British India,_ London 1901; Arap Maharatna, _The Demography of Famine,_ Delhi 1996; Roland Seavoy, _Famine in Peasant Societies,_ New York 1986; _The Lancet,_ 16 May 1901; _Cambridge Economic History of India,_ Cambridge 1983; A. J. Broomhall, _Hudson Taylor and China's Open Century,_ Book 6, _Assault on the Nine,_ London 1988; Paul Bohr, _Famine in China,_ Cambridge, Mass. 1972; Paul Cohen, _History in Three Keys,_ New York 1997; Roger Cunniff, "The Great Drought: Northeast Brazil, 1877β1880," Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1970; and T. Lynn Smith, _Brazil: People and Institutions,_ Baton Rouge, La. 1954. Chapters 3 and have detailed discussions of these estimates.
But while the Dickensian slum remains in the world history curriculum, the famine children of 1876 and 1899 have disappeared. Almost without exception, modern historians writing about nineteenth-century world history from a metropolitan vantage-point have ignored the late Victorian mega-droughts and famines that engulfed what we now call the "third world." Eric Hobsbawm, for example, makes no allusion in his famous trilogy on nineteenth-century history to the worst famines in perhaps 500 years in India and China, although he does mention the Great Hunger in Ireland as well as the Russian famine of 1891β92. Likewise, the sole reference to famine in David Landes's _The Wealth and Povertyof Nations_βa magnum opus meant to solve the mystery of inequality between nationsβis the erroneous claim that British railroads eased hunger in India. Numerous other examples could be cited of contemporary historians' curious neglect of such portentous events. It is like writing the history of the late twentieth century without mentioning the Great Leap Forward famine or Cambodia's killing fields. The great famines are the missing pagesβthe absent defining moments, if you preferβin virtually every overview of the Victorian era. Yet there are compelling, even urgent, reasons for revisiting this secret history.
At issue is not simply that tens of millions of poor rural people died appallingly, but that they died in a manner, and for reasons, that contradict much of the conventional understanding of the economic history of the nineteenth century. For example, how do we explain the fact that in the very half-century when peacetime famine permanently disappeared from Western Europe, it increased so devastatingly throughout much of the colonial world? Equally how do we weigh smug claims about the life-saving benefits of steam transportation and modern grain markets when so many millions, especially in British India, died alongside railroad tracks or on the steps of grain depots? And how do we account in the case of China for the drastic decline in state capacity and popular welfare, especially famine relief, that seemed to follow in lockstep with the empire's forced "opening" to modernity by Britain and the other Powers?
We not are dealing, in other words, with "lands of famine" becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment (1870β1914) when its labor and products were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centered world economy. Millions died, not outside the "modern world system," but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered, as we shall see, by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill. Yet the only twentieth-century economic historian who seems to have clearly understood that the great Victorian famines (at least, in the Indian case) were integral chapters in the history of capitalist modernity was Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book _The Great Transformation_. "The actual source of famines in the last fifty years," he wrote, "was the free marketing of grain combined with local failure of incomes":
Failure of crops, of course, was part of the picture, but despatch of grain by rail made it possible to send relief to the threatened areas; the trouble was that the people were unable to buy the corn at rocketing prices, which on a free but incompletely organized market were bound to be a reaction to a shortage. In former times small local stores had been held against harvest failure, but these had been now discontinued or swept away into the big market... Under the monopolists the situation had been fairly kept in hand with the help of the archaic organization of the countryside, including free distribution of corn, while under free and equal exchange Indians perished by the millions.
Polanyi, however, believed that the emphasis that Marxists put on the exploitative aspects of late-nineteenth-century imperialism tended "to hide from our view the even greater issue of cultural degeneration":
The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether relevant). These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society... Indian masses in the second half of the nineteenth century did not die of hunger because they were exploited by Lancashire; they perished in large numbers because the Indian village community had been demolished.
Polanyi's famous essay has the estimable virtue of knocking down one Smithian fetish after another to show that the route to a Victorian "new world order" was paved with bodies of the poor. But he simultaneously reified the "Market" as automata in a way that has made it easier for some epigones to visualize famine as an inadvertent "birth pang" or no-fault "friction of transition" in the evolution towards market-based world subsistence. Commodification of agriculture eliminates village-level reciprocities that traditionally provided welfare to the poor during crises. (Almost as if to say: "Oops, systems error: fifty million corpses. Sorry. We'll invent a famine code next time." )
But markets, to play with words, are always "made." Despite the pervasive ideology that markets function spontaneously (and, as a result, "in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms"), they in fact have inextricable political histories. And forceβ _contra_ Polanyiβis "altogether relevant." As Rosa Luxemburg argued in her classic (1913) analysis of the incorporation of Asian and African peasantries into the late-nineteenth-century world market:
Each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and labour power. Any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital exclusively to "peaceful competition," i.e. to regular commodity exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer-countries, rests on the pious belief that capital... can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating natural economy. Accumulation, with its spasmodic expansion, can no more wait for, and be content with, a natural internal disintegration of non-capitalist formations and their transition to commodity economy, than it can wait for, and be content with, the natural increase of the working population. Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon...
The famines that Polanyi abstractly describes as rooted in commodity cycles and trade circuits were part of this permanent violence. "Millions die" was ultimately a policy choice: to accomplish such decimations required (in Brecht's sardonic phrase) "a brilliant way of organising famine." The victims had to be comprehensively defeated well in advance of their slow withering into dust. Although equations may be more fashionable, it is necessary to pin names and faces to the human agents of such catastrophes, as well as to understand the configuration of social and natural conditions that constrained their decisions. Equally, it is imperative to consider the resistances, large and small, by which starving laborers and poor peasants attempted to foil the death sentences passed by grain speculators and colonial proconsuls.
**'Prisoners of Starvation'**
Parts I and II of this book, accordingly, take up the challenge of traditional narrative history. Synchronous and devastating drought provided an environmental stage for complex social conflicts that ranged from the intra-village level to Whitehall and the Congress of Berlin. Although crop failures and water shortages were of epic proportionβoften the worst in centuriesβthere were almost always grain surpluses elsewhere in the nation or empire that could have potentially rescued drought victims. Absolute scarcity, except perhaps in Ethiopia in 1889, was never the issue. Standing between life and death instead were new-fangled commodity markets and price speculation, on one side, and the will of the state (as inflected by popular protest), on the other. As we shall see, the capacities of states to relieve crop failure, and the way in which famine policy was discounted against available resources, differed dramatically. At one extreme, there was British India under viceroys like Lytton, the second Elgin and Curzon, where Smithian dogma and cold imperial self-interest allowed huge grain exports to England in the midst of horrendous starvation. At the other extreme was the tragic example of Ethiopia's Menelik II, who struggled heroically but with too few resources to rescue his people from a truly biblical conjugation of natural and manmade plagues.
Seen from a slightly different perspective, the subjects of this book were ground to bits between the teeth of three massive and implacable cogwheels of modern history. In the first instance, there was the fatal meshing of extreme events between the world climate system and the late Victorian world economy. This was one of the major novelties of the age. Until the 1870s and the creation of a rudimentary international weather reporting network there was little scientific apprehension that drought on a planetary scale was even possible; likewise, until the same decade, rural Asia was not yet sufficiently integrated into the global economy to send or receive economic shock waves from the other side of the world.
The 1870s, however, provided numerous examples of a new vicious circle (which Stanley Jevons was the first economist to recognize) linking weather and price perturbations through the medium of an international grain market. Suddenly the price of wheat in Liverpool and the rainfall in Madras were variables in the same vast equation of human survival.
The first six chapters provide dozens of examples of malign interaction between climatic and economic processes. Most of the Indian, Brazilian and Moroccan cultivators, for example, who starved in 1877 and 1878 had already been immiserated and made vulnerable to hunger by the world economic crisis (the nineteenth century's "Great Depression") that began in 1873. The soaring trade deficits of Qing Chinaβartificially engineered in the first place by British _narcotraficantes_ βlikewise accelerated the decline of the "ever-normal" granaries that were the empire's first-line defense against drought and flood. Conversely, drought in Brazil's Nordeste in 1889 and 1891 prostrated the population of the backlands in advance of the economic and political crises of the new Republic and accordingly magnified their impact.
But Kondratieff (the theorist of economic "long waves") and Bjerknes (the theorist of El NiΓ±o oscillations) need to be supplemented by Hobson, Luxemburg and Lenin. The New Imperialism was the third gear of this catastrophic history. As Jill Dias has so brilliantly shown in the case of the Portuguese in nineteenth-century Angola, colonial expansion uncannily syncopated the rhythms of natural disaster and epidemic disease. Each global drought was the green light for an imperialist landrush. If the southern African drought of 1877, for example, was Carnarvon's opportunity to strike against Zulu independence, then the Ethiopian famine of 1889β91 was Crispi's mandate to build a new Roman Empire in the Horn of Africa. Likewise Wilhelmine Germany exploited the floods and drought that devastated Shandong in the late 1890s to aggressively expand its sphere of influence in North China, while the United States was simultaneously using drought-famine and disease as weapons to crush Aguinaldo's Philippine Republic.
But the agricultural populations of Asia, Africa and South America did not go gently into the New Imperial order. Famines are wars over the right to existence. If resistance to famine in the 1870s (apart from southern Africa) was overwhelmingly local and riotous, with few instances of more ambitious insurrectionary organization, it undoubtedly had much to do with the recent memories of state terror from the suppression of the Indian Mutiny and the Taiping Revolution. The 1890s were an entirely different story, and modern historians have clearly established the contributory role played by drought-famine in the Boxer Rebellion, the Korean Tonghak movement, the rise of Indian Extremism and the Brazilian War of Canudos, as well as innumerable revolts in eastern and southern Africa. The millenarian movements that swept the future "third world" at the end of the nineteenth century derived much of their eschatological ferocity from the acuity of these subsistence and environmental crises.
But what of Nature's role in this bloody history? What turns the great wheel of drought and does it have an intrinsic periodicity? As we shall see in Part III, synchronous droughtβresulting from massive shifts in the seasonal location of the principal tropical weather systemsβwas one of the great scientific mysteries of the nineteenth century. The key theoretical breakthrough did not come until the late 1960s, when Jacob Bjerknes at UCLA showed for the first time how the equatorial Pacific Ocean, acting as a planetary heat engine coupled to the trade winds, was able to affect rainfall patterns throughout the tropics and even in the temperate latitudes. Rapid warmings of the eastern tropical Pacific (called El NiΓ±o events), for example, are associated with weak monsoons and synchronous drought throughout vast parts of Asia, Africa and northeastern South America. When the eastern Pacific is unusually cool, on the other hand, the pattern reverses (called a La NiΓ±a event), and abnormal precipitation and flooding occur in the same "teleconnected" regions. The entire vast see-saw of air mass and ocean temperature, which extends into the Indian Ocean as well, is formally known as "El NiΓ±o-Southern Oscillation" (or ENSO, for short).
The first reliable chronologies of El NiΓ±o events, painstakingly reconstructed from meteorological data and a variety of anecdotal records (including even the diaries of the conquistadors), were assembled in the 1970s. The extremely powerful 1982 El NiΓ±o stimulated new interest in the history of the impacts of earlier events. In 1986 two researchers working out of a national weather research laboratory in Colorado published a detailed comparison of meteorological data from the 1876 and 1982 anomalies that identified the first as a paradigmatic ENSO event: perhaps the most powerful in 500 years (see Figure P2). Similarly, the extraordinary succession of tropical droughts and monsoon failures in 1896β97 1899β1900, and 1902 were firmly correlated to El NiΓ±o warmings of the eastern Pacific. (The 1898 Yellow River flood, in addition, was probably a La NiΓ±a event.) Indeed, the last third of the nineteenth century, like the last third of the twentieth, represents an exceptional intensification of El NiΓ±o activity relative to the centuries-long mean.
**Figure P2 Comparison of the 1877β78 and 1982β83 El NiΓ±o Events**
If, in the eyes of science, ENSO's messy fingerprints are all over the climate disasters of the Victorian period, historians have yet to make much of this discovery. In the last generation, however, they have generated a wealth of case-studies and monographs that immeasurably deepen our understanding of the impact of world market forces on non-European agriculturalists in the late nineteenth century. We now have a far better understanding of how sharecroppers in CearΓ‘, cotton producers in Berar and poor peasants in western Shandong were linked to the world economy and why that made them more vulnerable to drought and flood. We also have magnificent analyses of larger pieces of the puzzle: the decline of the Qing granary and flood-control systems, the internal structure of India's cotton and wheat export sectors, the role of racism in regional development in nineteenth-century Brazil, and so on.
Part IV is an ambitious attempt to mine this vast literature for insights into the background forces that shaped vulnerability to famine and determined who, in the last instance, died. If the early narrative sections of Parts I and II introduced abrupt conjunctural economic factors (like the end of the cotton boom or world trade recession), these penultimate chapters are concerned with slower structural processes: the perverse logic of marketized subsistence, the consequences of colonial revenue settlements, the impact of the new Gold Standard, the decline of indigenous irrigation, informal colonialism in Brazil, and so on. Beginning with a chapter-length overview of the late Victorian economic order as a wholeβand the strategic contributions of the Indian and Chinese peasantries, in particular, to maintaining British commercial hegemonyβI offer critical summaries of recent work on late-nineteenth-century India, China and Brazil.
This is a "political ecology of famine" because it takes the viewpoint both of environmental history and Marxist political economy: an approach to the history of subsistence crisis pioneered by Michael Watts in his 1983 book _Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria_. Although other umbrella terms and affiliations are possible, the fact that Watts and his co-thinkers label their ongoing work as "political ecology" persuades me to do the same, if only to express my indebtedness and solidarity. (Those familiar with Watts's book will easily recognize its influence in this work.)
Finally, I have tried to take on board David Arnold's indispensable emphasis on famines as "engines of historical transformation." The great Victorian famines were forcing houses and accelerators of the very socio-economic forces that ensured their occurrence in the first place. A key thesis of this book is that what we today call the "third world" (a Cold War term) is the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalitiesβthe famous "development gap"βthat were shaped most decisively in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the great non-European peasantries were initially integrated into the world economy. As other historians have recently pointed out, when the Bastille was being stormed, the vertical class divisions inside the world's major societies were _not_ recapitulated as dramatic income differences _between_ societies. The differences in living standards, say, between a French _sans-culotte_ and Deccan farmer were relatively insignificant compared to the gulf that separated both from their ruling classes. By the end of Victoria's reign, however, the inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes. Humanity had been irrevocably divided. And the famed "prisoners of starvation," whom "The Internationale" urges to arise, were as much modern inventions of the late Victorian world as electric lights, Maxim guns and "scientific" racism.
## **A Note on Definitions**
The very words that rivet this book to the boilerplate of familiar ideology are, of course, the most dangerous. _Drought, famine_ and other terms are like so many semantic time bombs waiting to go off. Better then to walk this minefield at the outset, detonating some of the more obvious booby traps, in the hope that it clears a path for the narrative that follows.
**El NiΓ±o**
This is the least controversial but most confusing term. In scientific literature its usage slides back and forth, often without warning, between a series of sublated meanings nestled inside of each other like Russian dolls: (1) the weak counter-current that slightly raises sea temperatures off the coast of Ecuador and Peru every year near Christmas (hence El NiΓ±o, the Christ child); (2) the unusually large warmings that occur every three to seven years with sometimes catastrophic impacts on marine productivity (suppressed) and the Peruvian coastal desert (epic flooding); (3) the active ocean component of a vast, Pacific Basinβwide oscillation in air mass and ocean temperature known as the El NiΓ±o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO); (4) the warm phase of ENSO (the cold phase is known as La NiΓ±a); and (5) a metonym for ENSO itself. In this book, El NiΓ±o will usuallyβbut, alas, not alwaysβrefer to (4), the ENSO warm extreme, which is associated with drought in much of the monsoon tropics and northern China. ENSO, a clunky acronym, is the name of the Great White Whale, the "secret of the monsoons" itself. Part III tells its story.
**Drought**
Drought is the recurrent duel between natural rainfall variability and agriculture's hydraulic defenses. It always has a manmade dimension and is never simply a natural disaster. Any drought with a significant agricultural impact is the product of two processes, operating at different temporalities. Meteorological drought is usually defined by the percentage shortfall in annual mean precipitation for a given locality or region. The definitions vary from country to country, and in relationship to socially defined "normal conditions." The present-day India Meteorological Department, for example, defines a 60 percent or greater deficiency in local mean rainfall as "severe drought," roughly equivalent to "monsoon failure."
Yet what is critical from an agricultural standpoint is less the total amount of rainfall than its distribution relative to annual cycles. A well-distributed but subnormal rainfall may do little damage to crop yield, particularly in areas like the Indian Deccan or north China, where peasants cultivate millet and other drought-resistant crops, while a "normal" rainfall concentrated in the wrong months can lead to considerable crop loss. Historically, agricultural societies in areas of high rainfall variability were usually well-adapted to cope with severe single-year rain deficits; most, however, required massive inter-regional aid to survive two monsoon failures in a row.
The impact of deficient rainfall on food production, moreover, depends on how much stored water is available, whether it can be distributed to plots in a timely fashion, and, where water is a commodity, whether cultivators can afford to purchase it. _Hydrological drought_ occurs when both natural (streams, lakes and aquifers) and artificial (reservoirs, wells, and canals) water-storage systems lack accessible supplies to save crops. It should be remembered, of course, that local water supply is often independent of local climate. The most advantageous situation occurs in regions like the Indo-Gangetic plain of northern India, where snow-fed rivers whose watersheds largely lie outside the drought zone can be tapped for irrigation.
Hydrological drought always has a social history. Artificial irrigation systems obviously depend upon sustained levels of social investment and labor upkeep, but even natural water-storage capacity can be dramatically affected by human practices that lead to deforestation and soil erosion. As we shall see, the most devastating nineteenth-century droughts were decisively preconditioned by landscape degradation, the neglect of traditional irrigation systems, the demobilization of communal labor, and/or the failure of the state to invest in water storage. This is why I agree with Rolando Garcia's assertion in _Nature Pleads Not Guilty_ (a landmark study of the early 1970s Sahelian crisis) that "climatic facts are not facts in themselves; they assume importance only in relation to the restructuring of the environment within different systems of production." Garcia, after quoting Marx on the historical specificity of the "natural" conditions of production, poses a question that will be fundamental to discussion in this book: "to what degree did the colonial transformation of the system of production change the way in which climatic factors could exert their influence?"
**Famine (Causality)**
Whether or not crop failure leads to starvation, and who, in the event of famine, starves, depends on a host of nonlinear social factors. Simple FAD (food availability decline), as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen calls it, may directly lead to famine in isolated hunter-gatherer ecologies, but it is unlikely do so in any large-scale society. Although distant observers of the famines described in this book, including government ministers and great metropolitan papers, regularly described millions killed off by drought or crop failure, those on the scene always knew differently. From the 1860s, or even earlier, it was generally recognized in India, both by British administrators and Indian nationalists, that the famines were not food shortages per se, but complex economic crises induced by the market impacts of drought and crop failure.
The celebrated famine commissions were particularly emphatic in rejecting FAD as an explanation of mass mortality. Thus in the aftermath of the 1899β1902 catastrophe, the official _Report on the Famine in the Bombay Presidency_ underlined that "supplies of food were at all times sufficient, and it cannot be too frequently repeated that severe privation was chiefly due to the dearth of employment in agriculture [arising from the drought]." Commissioners in neighboring Berar likewise concluded that "the famine was one of high prices rather than of scarcity of food." Chinese official discourse also treated famine as primarily a market perturbation, although giving considerable attention as well to the corruption of local granary officials and the dilapidation of the transport infrastructure.
In recent years, Amartya Sen and Meghnad Desai have meticulously formalized this Victorian common sense in the language of welfare economics. Famine in their view is a crisis of "exchange entitlements" (defined as "legal, economically operative rights of access to resources that give control of food") that may or may not have anything to do with crop yields. "Famine," emphasizes Sen, "is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat." In theoretical jargon, the "endowments" of different groups (ownership of land, labor, power and so on) "map" to alternative "entitlement sets" of goods and services. People starve in a Senyan world when their endowments, for whatever reason, cannot command or be exchanged for minimal calories to subsist, or, alternately, when their entitlement mappings shift disastrously against them. Famine is thus a catastrophic social relation between unequally endowed groups that may be activated by war, depression or even something called "Development" as well as by extreme climate events. Most likely, of course, it is a conjuncture of different factors.
Critics have considerably sharpened the teeth of this model. David Arnold, for instance, has usefully warned against excessive demotion of environmental factors, especially the impacts of the nineteenth-century mega-droughts. He has also taxed Sen for ignoring mass extra-legal actionsβriots, protests, rebellionsβthat constitute populist appropriations of entitlement. Amarita Rangasami similarly has reminded us that famine "cannot be defined with reference to the victims of starvation alone" In her view (and mine), the great hungers have always been redistributive class struggles: "a process in which benefits accrue to one section of the community while losses flow to the other."
Perhaps most incisively, Michael Watts, discounting any "generic theory" of such an "enormously complex social and biological phenomena," sees the exchange-entitlement model as merely a logical first step in building a fully historical account of famine in different social formations:
If famine is about the command over food, it is about power and politics broadly understood, which are embedded in a multiplicity of arenas from the domestic (patriarchal politics) to the nation/state (how ruling classes and subaltern groups acquire and defend certain rights). In social systems dominated by capitalism, ownership through private property determines exchange entitlements, which is to say that class and class struggle shape the genesis and the outcomes of the propertyβhunger equation. At the same time capitalism has develped unevenly on a world scale, with the result that there are national capitalisms (colored by differing configurations of class and international geopolitics) which provide the building blocks for distinguishing different species, and consequences, of subsistence crises. Actually existing socialisms have class and other interests, too, and perhaps other property rights consequent on political action and "socialistic" regimes of accumulation. The same can be said for pre-capitalisms for which the moral economy of the poor may be constitutive of some important entitlement claims. In all such cases, however, one needs to know how enforceable and legitimate are the legal and property relations which mediate entitlements and to recognize that all such rights are negotiated and fought over. Such struggles are not peripheral to famine but strike to its core.
**Famine (Mortality)**
"Who defines an event as a 'famine,'" writes Alexander de Waal, "is a question of power relations within and between societies." He rejects the "Malthusian" idea that mass starvation unto death is "a prerequisite for the definition of famine" in favor of the broader spectrum of meanings, including hunger, destitution and social breakdown, encompassed within traditional African understandings of famine. Local people, like his Darfurian friends in the western Sudan, do not build definitional firewalls between malnutrition and famine, poverty and starvation. Nor do they fathom the moral calculus of wealthy countries who rush aid to certified famines but cooly ignore the chronic malnutrition responsible for half of the infant mortality on the planet. And they are rightly suspicious of a semantics of famine that all too often renders "ordinary" rural poverty invisible.
Thus, even while focusing on "famines that killed" (and killed on a gigantic scale), we must acknowledge that famine is part of a continuum with the silent violence of malnutrition that precedes and conditions it, and with the mortality shadow of debilitation and disease that follows it. Each famine is a unique, historically specific epidemiological event, and despite the heroic efforts of demographers, famine and epidemic mortality are not epistemologically distinguishable. This was recognized by British medical authorities as far back as the 1866 famine in Orissa. "We think it quite impossible to distinguish between the mortality directly caused by starvation, and that due to disease... In truth want and disease run so much into one another than no statistics and no observations would suffice to draw an accurate line." "During the great famines," adds Klein, "the overwhelming majority of deaths resulted from the synergistic effect of extreme undernourishment on infection."
But famine synergizes with disease in two different if mutually reinforcing modes. The "increase in mortality during the famine can occur either though an increase in susceptibility to potentially fatal diseases or through an increase in exposure to them or a combination of the two." Malnutrition and immune-system suppression increase susceptibility while congested, unsanitary environments like refugee camps and poorhouses increase exposure and transmission. As we shall see, "famine camps were notorious centres of disease and may have killed with microbes as many lives as they saved with food." Moreover, when basic sanitation and public health were so woefully neglected, modern infrastructures of commerce could become deadly vectors in their own right. India's "peculiar amalgam of modernization and underdevelopment"βa "modern transport system, huge grain trade, high human mobility (typical of advanced countries)" combined with "poverty, undernourishment, low immunities, insanitation and high exposure to infection (typical of some "underdeveloped' countries)"βpromoted higher mortality than probably would have otherwise existed.
**Holocaust (Picturing)**
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 appropriate for 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 from 18,000 feet. The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations not illustrations.
## PART I
## **The Great Drought, 1876β1878**
##
## **Victoria's Ghosts**
> The more one hears about this famine, the more one feels that such a hideous record of human suffering and destruction the world has never seen before.
>
> β Florence Nightingale (1877)
"Here's the northeast monsoon at last," said Hon. Robert Ellis, C.B., junior member of the Governor's Council, Madras, as a heavy shower of rain fell at Coonoor, on a day towards the end of October 1876, when the members of the Madras Government were returning from their summer sojourn on the hills.
"I am afraid that is not the monsoon," said the gentleman to whom the remark was made.
"Not the monsoon?" rejoined Mr. Ellis. "Good God! It must be the monsoon. If it is not, and if the monsoon does not come, there will be an awful famine."
The British rulers of Madras had every reason to be apprehensive. The life-giving southwest monsoon had already failed much of southern and central India the previous summer. The Madras Observatory would record only 6.3 inches of precipitation for all of 1876 in contrast to the annual average of 27.6 inches during the previous decade. The fate of millions now hung on the timely arrival of generous winter rains. Despite Ellis's warning, the governor of Madras, Richard Grenville, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, who was a greenhorn to India and its discontents, sailed away on a leisurely tour of the Andaman Islands, Burma and Ceylon. When he finally reached Colombo, he found urgent cables detailing the grain riots that were sweeping the so-called Ceded Districts of Kurnool, Cuddapah and Bellary in the wake of another monsoon failure. Popular outbursts against impossibly high prices were likewise occurring in the Deccan districts of neighboring Bombay Presidency, especially in Ahmednagar and Sholapur. Having tried to survive on roots while awaiting the rains, multitudes of poor peasants and laborers were now on the move, fleeing a slowly dying countryside.
As the old-hands at Fort St. George undoubtedly realized, the semi-arid interior of India was primed for disaster. The worsening depression in world trade had been spreading misery and igniting discontent throughout cotton-exporting districts of the Deccan, where in any case forest enclosures and the displacement of _gram_ by cotton had greatly reduced local food security. The traditional system of household and village grain reserves regulated by complex networks of patrimonial obligation had been largely supplanted since the Mutiny by merchant inventories and the cash nexus. Although rice and wheat production in the rest of India (which now included bonanzas of coarse rice from the recently conquered Irawaddy Delta) had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England. Londoners were in effect eating India's bread. "It seems an anomaly," wrote a troubled observer, "that, with her famines on hand, India is able to supply food for other parts of the world."
**Table 1.1**
**Indian Wheat Exports to the UK, 1875β78**
(1,000s of Quarters)
1875 | 308 |
---|---|---
1876 | 757 |
1877 | 1,409 |
1878 | 420 |
Source: Cornelius Walford, _The Famines of the World_ , London 1879, p. 127.
There were other "anomalies." The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation. "Besides regular traders," a British official reported from Meerut in late 1876, "men of all sorts embarked in it who had or could raise any capital; jewelers and cloth dealers pledging their stocks, even their wives' jewels, to engage in business and import grain." Buckingham, not a free-trade fundamentalist, was appalled by the speed with which modern markets accelerated rather than relieved the famine:
The rise [of prices] was so extraordinary, and the available supply, as compared with well-known requirements, so scanty that merchants and dealers, hopeful of enormous future gains, appeared determined to hold their stocks for some indefinite time and not to part with the article which was becoming of such unwonted value. It was apparent to the Government that facilities for moving grain by the rail were rapidly raising prices everywhere, and that the activity of apparent importation and railway transit, did not indicate any addition to the food stocks of the Presidency... retail trade up-country was almost at standstill. Either prices were asked which were beyond the means of the multitude to pay, or shops remained entirely closed.
As a result, food prices soared out of the reach of outcaste laborers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and poor peasants. "The dearth," as _The Nineteenth Century_ pointed out a few months later, "was one of money and of labour rather than of food." The earlier optimism of mid-Victorian observersβKarl Marx as well as Lord Salisburyβabout the velocity of economic transformation in India, especially the railroad revolution, had failed to adequately discount for the fiscal impact of such "modernization." The taxes that financed the railroads had also crushed the ryots. Their inability to purchase subsistence was further compounded by the depreciation of the rupee due to the new international gold standard (which India had not adopted), which steeply raised the cost of imports. Thanks to the price explosion, the poor began starve to death even in well-watered districts like Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, "reputed to be immune to food shortages." Sepoys meanwhile encountered increasing difficulty in enforcing order in the panic-stricken bazaars and villages as famine engulfed the vast Deccan plateau. Roadblocks were hastily established to stem the flood of stick-thin country people into Bombay and Poona, while in Madras the police forcibly expelled some 25,000 famine refugees.
**Figure 1.1 India: The Famine of 1876β78**
**India's Nero**
The central government under the leadership of Queen Victoria's favorite poet, Lord Lytton, vehemently opposed efforts by Buckingham and some of his district officers to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the vital _kharif_ crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind). As _The Times_ 's special correspondent described it, "The Viceroy seemed to have made the tales of Arabian fiction true... nothing was too rich, nothing too costly." "Lytton put on a spectacle," adds a biographer of Lord Salisbury (the secretary of state for India), "which achieved the two criteria Salisbury had set him six months earlier, of being 'gaudy enough to impress the orientals'... and furthermore a pageant which hid 'the nakedness of the sword on which we really rely.'" Its "climacteric ceremonial" included a week-long feast for 68,000 officials, satraps and maharajas: the most colossal and expensive meal in world history. An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen-Empress's subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton's spectacular _durbar_. Indians in future generations justifiably would remember him as their Nero.
**Figure 1.2 The Poet as Viceroy: Lytton in Calcutta, 1877**
Following this triumph, the viceroy seemed to regard the growing famine as a tiresome distraction from the Great Game of preempting Russia in Central Asia by fomenting war with the blameless Sher Ali, the Emir of Afghanistan. Lytton, according to Salisbury, was "burning with anxiety to distinguish himself in a great war." Serendipitously for him, the Czar was on a collision course with Turkey in the Balkans, and Disraeli and Salisbury were eager to show the Union Jack on the Khyber Pass. Lytton's warrant, as he was constantly reminded by his chief budgetary adviser, Sir John Strachey, was to ensure that Indian, not English, taxpayers paid the costs of what radical critics later denounced as "a war of deliberately planned aggression." The depreciation of the rupee made strict parsimony in the nonmilitary budget even more urgent.
The 44-year-old Lytton, the former minister to Lisbon, had replaced the Earl of Northbrook after the latter had honorably refused to acquiesce in Disraeli's machiavellian "forward" policy on the northwest frontier. He was a strange and troubling choice (actually, only fourth on Salisbury's short list) to exercise paramount authority over a starving subcontinent of 250 million people. A writer, seemingly admired only by Victoria, who wrote "vast, stale poems" and ponderous novels under the _nom de plume_ of Owen Meredith, he had been accused of plagiarism by both Swinburne and his own father, Bulwer-Lytton (author of _The Last Days of Pompeii_ ). Moreover, it was widely suspected that the new viceroy's judgement was addled by opium and incipient insanity. Since a nervous breakdown in 1868, Lytton had repeatedly exhibited wild swings between megalomania and self-lacerating despair.
Although his possible psychosis ("Lytton's mind tends violently to exaggeration" complained Salisbury to Disraeli) was allowed free reign over famine policy, it became a cabinet scandal after he denounced his own government in October 1877 for "allegedly attempting to create an Anglo-Franco-Russian coalition against Germany." As one of Salisbury's biographers has emphasized, this was "about as absurd a contention as it was possible to make at the time, even from the distance of Simla," and it produced an explosion inside Whitehall. "Salisbury explained the Viceroy's ravings by admitting that he was 'a little mad'. It was known that both Lytton and his father had used opium, and when Derby read the 'inconceivable' memorandum, he concluded that Lytton was dangerous and should resign: 'When a man inherits insanity from one parent, and limitless conceit from the other, he has a 'ready-made excuse for almost any extravagance which he may commit.'"
But in adopting a strict laissez-faire approach to famine, Lytton, demented or not, could claim to be extravagance's greatest enemy. He clearly conceived himself to be standing on the shoulders of giants, or, at least, the sacerdotal authority of Adam Smith, who a century earlier in the _The Wealth of Nations_ had asserted (vis-Γ -vis the terrible Bengal drought-famine of 1770) that "famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth."
Smith's injunction against state attempts to regulate the price of grain during famine had been taught for years in the East India Company's famous college at Haileybury. Thus the viceroy was only repeating orthodox curriculum when he lectured Buckingham that high prices, by stimulating imports and limiting consumption, were the "natural saviours of the situation." He issued strict, "semi-theological" orders that "there is be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food," and "in his letters home to the India Office and to politicians of both parties, he denounced 'humanitarian hysterics'." "Let the British public foot the bill for its 'cheap sentiment,' if it wished to save life at a cost that would bankrupt India." By official dictate, India like Ireland before it had become a Utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were wagered against dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets overcoming the "inconvenience of dearth." Grain merchants, in fact, preferred to export a record 6.4 million cwt. of wheat to Europe in 1877β78 rather than relieve starvation in India.
Lytton, to be fair, probably believed that he was in any case balancing budgets against lives that were already doomed or devalued of any civilized human quality. The grim doctrines of Thomas Malthus, former Chair of Political Economy at Haileybury, still held great sway over the white rajas. Although it was bad manners to openly air such opinions in front of the natives in Calcutta, Malthusian principles, updated by Social Darwinism, were regularly invoked to legitimize Indian famine policy at home in England. Lytton, who justified his stringencies to the Legislative Council in 1877 by arguing that the Indian population "has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil," most likely subscribed to the melancholy viewpoint expressed by Sir Evelyn Baring (afterwards Lord Cromer), the finance minister, in a later debate on the government's conduct during the 1876β79 catastrophe. "[E]very benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from over-population."
In the same vein, an 1881 report "concluded that 80% of the famine mortality were drawn from the poorest 20% of the population, and if such deaths were prevented this stratum of the population would still be unable to adopt prudential restraint. Thus, if the government spent more of its revenue on famine relief, an even larger proportion of the population would become penurious." As in Ireland thirty years before, those with the power to relieve famine convinced themselves that overly heroic exertions against implacable natural laws, whether of market prices or population growth, were worse than no effort at all.
His recent biographers claim that Salisbury, the gray eminence of Indian policy, was privately tormented by these Malthusian calculations. A decade earlier, during his first stint as secretary of state for India, he had followed the advice of the Council in Calcutta and refused to intervene in the early stages of a deadly famine in Orissa. "I did nothing for two months," he later confessed. "Before that time the monsoon had closed the ports of Orissaβhelp was impossibleβandβit is saidβa million people died. The Governments of India and Bengal had taken in effect no precautions whatever... I never could feel that I was free from all blame for the result."
As a result, he harbored a lifelong distrust of officials who "worshipped political economy as a sort of 'fetish'" as well as Englishmen in India who accepted "famine as a salutary cure for over-population." Yet, whatever his private misgivings, it was Salisbury who had urged the appointment of the laissez-faire fanatic Lytton, and publically congratulated Disraeli for repudiating "the growing idea that England ought to pay tribute to India for having conquered her." Indeed, when his own advisers later protested the repeal of cotton duties in the face of the fiscal emergency of the famine, Salisbury denounced as a "species of International Communism" the idea "that a rich Britain should consent to penalize her trade for the sake of a poor India."
Like other architects of the Victorian Raj, Salisbury was terrified of setting any precedent for the permanent maintenance of the India poor. As the _Calcutta Review_ pointed out in 1877, "In India there is no legal provision made for the poor, either in British territory, or in the native states; [although] the need for it is said by medical men and others, to be exceedingly great." Both Calcutta and London feared that "enthusiastic prodigality" like Buckingham's could become a trojan horse for an Indian Poor Law.
In its final report, the Famine Commission of 1878β80 approvingly underscored Lord Lytton's skinflint reasoning: "The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief... would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid of a system of general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension..." None of the principal players on either side of the House of Commons disagreed with the supreme principle that India was to be governed as a revenue plantation, not a almshouse.
**The 'Temple Wage'**
Over the next year, the gathering horror of the drought-famine spread from the Madras Presidency through Mysore, the Bombay Deccan and eventually into the North Western Provinces. The crop losses in many districts of the Deccan plateau and Tamilnad plains (see Table 1.2) were nothing short of catastrophic. Ryots in district after district sold their "bullocks, field implements, the thatch of the roofs, the frames of their doors and windows" to survive the terrible first year of the drought. Without essential means of production, however, they were unable to take advantage of the little rain that fell in AprilβMay 1877 to sow emergency crops of rape and _cumboo_. As a result they died in their myriads in August and September.
**Table 1.2**
**Madras Presidency: Chief Famine Districts, 1877**
**District** | **Population**
(Millions) | **Percentage of
Crop Saved**
---|---|---
Bellary | 1.68 | 6
Kurnool | .98 | 6
Cuddapah | 1.35 | 18
Chingleput | 1.34 | 18
Nellore | 1.38 | 25
North Arcot | 2.02 | 25
Coimbatore | 1.76 | 25
Madura | 2.27 | 25
Salem | 1.97 | 33
Tinnevelly | 1.64 | 37
Source: From report by Sir Richard Temple in _Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1878,_ Part I, _Famine Relief,_ London 1880, p. 71.
Millions more had reached the stage of acute malnutrition, characterized by hunger edema and anemia, that modern health workers frequently call "skeletonization." Village officers wrote to their superiors from Nellore and other ravaged districts of the Madras Deccan that the only well-fed part of the local population were the pariah dogs, "fat as sheep," that feasted on the bodies of dead children:
After a couple of minutes' search, I came upon two dogs worrying over the body of a girl about eight years old. They had newly attacked it, and had only torn one of the legs a little, but the corpse was so enormously bloated that it was only from the total length of the figure one could tell it was a child's. The sight and smell of the locality were so revolting, and the dogs so dangerous, that I did not stay to look for a second body; but I saw two skulls and a backbone which had been freshly picked.
Officials, however, were not eager to share such horrors with the English or educated Indian publics, and the vernacular press charged that starvation deaths were being deliberated misreported as cholera or dysentery mortality in order to disguise the true magnitude of the famine.
**Figure 1.3 A Family in the Deccan, 1877**
Conditions were equally desperate across the linguistic and administrative boundary in the Bombay Deccan. Almost two-thirds of the harvest was lost in nine Maharashtran districts affecting 8 million people, with virtually no crop at all in Sholapur and Kaladgi. The disaster befell a peasantry already ground down by exorbitant taxation and extortionate debt. In the Ahmednagar region officials reported that no less than three-fifths of the peasantry was "hopelessly indebted," while in Sholapur the district officer warned his superiors in May 1875: "I see no reason to doubt the fact stated to me by many apparently trustworthy witnesses and which my own personal observation confirms, that in many cases the assessments are only paid by selling ornaments or cattle." (As Jairus Banaji comments, "A household without cattle was a household on the verge of extinction.") Ahmednagar with Poona had been the center of the famous Deccan Riots in MayβJune 1875, when ryots beat up moneylenders and destroyed debt records.
While British procrastination was sacrificing charity to their savage god, the Invisible Hand, tens of thousands of these destitute villagers were voting with their feet and fleeing to Hyderabad, where the Nazim was providing assistance to famine victims. A large part of Sholapur was depopulated before British officials managed to organize relief works. Then, as a horrified British journalist discovered, they turned away anyone who was too starved to undertake hard coolie labor. But even "the labour test imposed upon the able-bodied," the correspondent notes, "is found to be too heavy for their famished frames; the wages paid are inadequately low; in many districts all who are willing work do not find employment... No arrangements have been made to preserve the cattle by providing fodder or pasture lands. No grain stores have been collected or charity houses opened for the infirm and the aged." The only recourse for the young, the infirm and the aged was therefore to attempt the long trek to Hyderabadβan ordeal that reportedly killed most of them.
Widespread unemployment and the high price of grain, meanwhile, brought the spectre of hunger even into districts where rainfall had been adequate. As a result, several million emaciated laborers and poor peasants overwhelmed the relief works belatedly authorized by the Bombay and Madras governments. At the beginning of February, the lieutenant-governor of Bengal, Sir Richard Temple, was sent south as plenipotentiary Famine Delegate by Lytton to clamp down on the "out of control" expenditures that threatened the financing of the planned invasion of Afghanistan. Although the viceroy had also skirmished bitterly with Sir Philip Wodehouse, the governor of Bombay, over Calcutta's refusal to subsidize large-scale relief works during the fall of 1876, his greatest indignation was directed at Buckingham for making "public charity indiscriminate" in Bellary, Cuddapah and Kurnool, where one-quarter of the population was employed breaking stone or digging canals.
Temple was a shrewd choice as Lytton's enforcer. Earlier, in 1873β74, he had followed Salisbury's urgings and dealt aggressively with a drought that severely damaged the harvest throughout most of Bengal and Bihar. Importing half a million tons of rice from Burma, he provided life-saving subsistence, both through relief works and a "gratuitous dole," which forestalled mass mortality. Indeed, the official record claimed only twenty-three starvation deaths. It was the only truly successful British relief effort in the nineteenth century and might have been celebrated as a template for dealing with future emergencies. Instead, Temple came under withering fire from London for the "extravagance" of allowing "the scale of wages paid at relief works had to be determined by the daily food needs of the labourer and the prevailing food prices in the market rather than by the amount that the Government afford to spend for the purpose." In public, he was lambasted by the _Economist_ for encouraging indolent Indians to believe that "it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive." Senior civil servants, convinced (according to Lord Salisbury) that it was "a mistake to spend to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows," denounced the relief campaign as "pure Fourierism." Temple's career was almost ruined.
In 1877 the thoroughly chastened lieutenant-governor, "burning to retrieve his reputation for extravagance in the last famine," had become the implacable instrument of Lytton's frugality. The viceroy boasted to the India Office that he could not have found "a man more likely, or better able to help us save money in famine management." Indeed, _The Times_ was soon marveling at the "pliability" of his character: "Sir Richard Temple, whether rightly or wrongly, has the reputation of having a mind so plastic and principles so facile that he can in a moment change front and adopt most contradictory lines of policy. His course in the famine districts certainly seems to bear this out, for he is even more strict than the Supreme Government in enforcing a policy which differs in every respect from that which he himself practised in Behar three years ago."
Although Victoria in her message to the Imperial Assemblage had reassured Indians that their "happiness, prosperity and welfare" were the "present aims and objects of Our Empire," Temple's brief from the Council of India left no ambiguity about the government's true priorities: "The task of saving life irrespective of cost, is one which it is beyond our power to undertake. The embarrassment of debt and weight of taxation consequent on the expense thereby involved would soon become more fatal than the famine itself." Likewise, the viceroy insisted that Temple everywhere in Madras "tighten the reins." The famine campaign in Lytton's conception was a semi-military demonstration of Britain's necessary guardianship over a people unable to help themselves, not an opportunity for Indian initiative or self-organization. If, as a modern authority on famine emphasizes, "emergency relief, like development aid, is only truly effective if the recipients have the power to determine what it is and how it used," Temple's perverse task was to make relief as repugnant and ineffective as possible. In zealously following his instructions to the letter, he became to Indian history what Charles Edward Trevelyanβpermanent secretary to the Treasury during the Great Hunger (and, later, governor of Madras)βhad become to Irish history: the personification of free market economics as a mask for colonial genocide.
In a lightning tour of the famished countryside of the eastern Deccan, Temple purged a half million people from relief work and forced Madras to follow Bombay's precedent of requiring starving applicants to travel to dormitory camps outside their locality for coolie labor on railroad and canal projects. The deliberately cruel "distance test" refused work to able-bodied adults and older children within a ten-mile radius of their homes. Famished laborers were also prohibited from seeking relief until "it was certified that they had become indigent, destitute and capable of only a modicum of labour." Digby later observed that Temple "went to Madras with the preconceived idea that the calamity had been exaggerated, that it was being inadequately met, and that, therefore, facts were, unconsciously may be, squared with this theory... He expected to see a certain state of things, and he saw thatβthat and none other."
In a self-proclaimed Benthamite "experiment" that eerily prefigured later Nazi research on minimal human subsistence diets in concentration camps, Temple cut rations for male coolies, whom he compared to "a school full of refractory children," down to one pound of rice per diem despite medical testimony that the ryotsβonce "strapping fine fellows"β were now "little more than animated skeletons... utterly unfit for any work." (Noting that felons traditionally received two pounds of rice per day, one district official suggested that "it would be better to shoot down the wretches than to prolong their misery in the way proposed.") The same reduced ration had been introduced previously by General Kennedy (another acerbic personality, "not personally popular even in his own department") in the Bombay Deccan, and Madras's sanitary commissioner, Dr. Cornish, was "of the opinion that 'experiment' in that case [meant] only slow, but certain starvation."
**Table 1.3**
**The "Temple Wage" in Perspective**
| **Caloric Value** | **Activity Level**
---|---|---
Basal metabolism (adult) | 1500 | No activity
"Temple ration" in Madras (1877) | 1627 | Heavy labor
Buchenwald ration (1944) | 1750 | Heavy labor
7-year-old child, approved diet (1981) | 2050 | Normal activity
Minimum war ration, Japan (1945) | 2165 | Moderate activity
Indian adult, subsistence (1985) | 2400 | Moderate activity
Temple ration in Bengal (1874) | 2500 | Heavy labor
Survey of Bengali laborers (1862) | 2790 | Heavy labor
Indian male, approved diet (1981) | 3900 | Heavy labor
Voit-Atwater standard (1895) | 4200 | Heavy labor
Source: Caloric value of Temple ration from Sumit Guha, _The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, 1818β1941,_ Delhi 1985, p. 186 fn35; Buchenwald ration from C. Richet, "Medicales sur le camp de Buchenwald en 1944β45," _Bulletin Academie Medicine_ 129 (1945), pp. 377β88; recommended Indian adult subsistence diet from Asok Mitra, "The Nutrition Situation in India," in Margaret Biswas and Per Pinstrup-Andersen, eds., _Nutrition and Development,_ Oxford 1985, p. 149; basal metabolism from Philip Payne, "The Nature of Malnutrition," ibid., p. 7; child diet and recommended calories for Indian males performing heavy labor from C. Gapalan, "Undernutrition: Measurement," in S. Osmani, ed., _Nutrition and Poverty,_ Oxford 1992, p. 2; Rev. James Long's 1862 study of Bengali diets in Greenough, _Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal,_ p. 80 fn94; Voit-Atwater tables discussed in Elmer McCollom, _A History of Nutrition,_ Boston 1957, pp. 191β2; and the Temple ration during the 1874 Bengal famine calculated on the basis of 1.5 pounds of rice per day with condiments and _dal_ (see _Edinburgh Review,_ July 1877).
Apart from its sheer deficiency in energy, Cornish pointed out that the exclusive rice ration without the daily addition of protein-rich pulses ( _dal_ ), fish or meat would lead to rapid degeneration. Indeed, as the lieutenant-governor was undoubtedly aware, the Indian government had previously fixed the minimum shipboard diet of emigrant coolies "living in a state of quietude" at twenty ounces of rice plus one pound of dal, mutton, vegetables and condiment. In the event, the "Temple wage," as it became known, provided less sustenance for hard labor than the diet inside the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp and less than half of the modern caloric standard recommended for adult males by the Indian government.
Temple, who three years earlier had fixed the minimum ration during the Bengal famine at one-and-half pounds of rice plus _dal_ , now publically disdained the protests of Cornish and other medical officers. They erroneously, and "irresponsibly" in his view, elevated public health above public finance. "Everything," he lectured, "must be subordinated... to the financial consideration of disbursing the smallest sum of money consistent with the preservation of human life." He completed his cost-saving expedition to Madras by imposing the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877, which prohibited at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market-fixing of grain prices. He also stopped Buckingham from remitting onerous land taxes in the famine districts. In May, after Temple had reported back, the viceroy censured Madras officials for their "exaggerated impressions" of misery and "un-called for relief." Temple meanwhile proclaimed that he had put "the famine under control." (Digby sourly responded that "a famine can scarcely be said to be adequately controlled which leaves one-fourth of the people dead.")
The militarization of relief, followed by the failure of the southwest monsoon and another doubling of grain prices in the six months from the middle of 1877, punctually produced lethal results. Exactly as medical officials had warned, the "Temple wage" combined with heavy physical labor and dreadful sanitation turned the work camps into extermination camps. By the end of May horrified relief officials in Madras were reporting that more than half of the inmates were too weakened to carry out any physical labor whatsoever. Most of them were dead by the beginning of the terrible summer of 1877. As Temple's most dogged critic, Dr. Cornish, pointed out, monthly mortality was now equivalent to an annual death rate of 94 percent. Post-mortem examinations, moreover, showed that the chief cause of deathβ"extreme wasting of tissue and destruction of the lining membrane of the lower bowel"βwas textbook starvation, with full-grown men reduced to under sixty pounds in weight. Mortality was similar in camps throughout the Bombay Deccan, where cholera, spread by polluted water and filth, accelerated the decimation. One official wrote that one relief road project "bore the appearance of a battlefield, its sides being strewn with the dead, the dying and those recently attacked."
Jails ironically were the only exception to this institutional mortality pattern, and they were generally preferred by the poor to the disease-ridden relief camps. An American missionary described how a group of weavers begged him to have them arrested for nonfulfillment of a contract. "We are very sorry, sir, but we have eaten up all the money you gave us, and we have made no clothes. We are in a starving condition, and if you will only send us to jail we shall get something to eat." It was an eminently sensible request. "Prisoners were the best fed poor people in the country," and, accordingly, "the jails were filled to overflowing."
During the Irish famine, Trevelyan had protested that the country's "greatest evil" was not hunger, but "the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people." Similarly, Temple's ferocious response to reports of mass mortality in the camps was to blame the victims: "The infatuation of these poor people in respect to eating the bread of idleness; their dread of marching on command to any distance from home; their preference often for extreme privation rather than submission to even simple and reasonable orders, can be fully believed only by those who have seen or personally known these things." Moreover, he claimed that the majority of the famine dead were not the cultivating yeomanry, "the bone and sinew of the country," but parasitic mendicants who essentially had committed suicide: "Nor will many be inclined to grieve much for the fate which they brought upon themselves, and which terminated lives of idleness and too often of crime."
**The Relief Strike**
These calumnies, of course, inflamed Indians of all classes. To the consternation of Temple and Lytton, the famished peasants in relief camps throughout the Bombay Deccan (where the sixteen-ounce ration had first been introduced) organized massive, Gandhi-like protests against the rice reduction and distance test. Temple added more than he realized to the imperial lexicon by calling it "passive resistance." The movement had begun in January 1877, when families on village relief refused orders to march to the new, militarized work camps where men were separated from their wives and children. They were subsequently joined by thousands more who left the camps in protest of the starvation wage and mistreatment by overseers. According to Digby:
Temple estimated that between January 12 and March 12, 102,000 people discharged themselves from Government employ. He thought he traced in their proceedings a sign of "some method and system." They imagined, by suddenly throwing themselves out of employ they virtually offered a passive resistance to the orders of Government. They counted on exciting the compassion of the authorities and still more on arousing fears lest some accidents to human life should occur. They wandered about in bands and crowds seeking for sympathy.
**Figure 1.4 "Forsaken!": An Illustration from Digby's _History_**
The "relief strike," as it was called, was sympathetically embraced by the Sarvajanik Sabha (Civic Association) in Poona, a moderate nationalist group composed of prominent local merchants, absentee landlords and professionals led by Ganesh Joshi and Mahdev Govinda Ranade. (Temple cautioned Calcutta that the articulate Ranade might bid to become the "Deccan's Parnell") In widely publicized memorials to Governor Wodehouse and General Kennedy, the Sabha warned of the human catastrophe that British churlishness was ensuring. In addition to pointing out that the new ration was only half of the traditional penal standard and thus sure to doom "thousands by the slow torture of starvation," they focused attention on the group most ignored by district officers: the children of famine villages.
"It should be remembered," the Sabha wrote to Bombay, "that the same harsh policy which reduced the wages drove away the smaller children from the works, who, till then, had been receiving their small dole in return for their nominal labour. These children, though cast out by Government, will have a prior claim upon the affections of their parents, and many hundreds of poor fathers and mothers will stint themselves out of the pound allowed to support their children." (An American missionary later pointed out that although a child could be fed for a pittance, "just for want of these two cents a day, hundreds and thousands of children wasted away and are no more.")
With the support of the Sabha, the strike kindled the broadest demonstration of Indian anger since the Mutiny. "Meetings, immense as regards numbers, were held, speeches were made, resolutions were passed, and the telegraph wire called into requisition." Temple, in response, ordered Kennedy to "stand firm" against any concession to "combinations of workpeople formed with sinister or self-interested objects." The local relief officers, however, were unnerved, according to Digby, by the "obstinacy with which persons almost in a dying condition would go away anywhere rather than to a relief camp. They seem to have felt the repugnance to relief camps which respectable poor in England have to the Union Workhouses." Official morale seemed to be sapped by the dignity and courage of the protest. The viceroy, at any event, was convinced that a firmer hand was needed in Bombay, and at the end of April Wodehouse resigned and was replaced by Temple.
In his original response to Disraeli's proposal to appoint him viceroy two years earlier, Lytton had protested his "absolute ignorance of every fact and question concerning India." Now, after chastising both Buckingham and Wodehouse, he asserted virtual omniscience over life and death judgements affecting millions of Indians. The Indian press, however, was not as easily bridled or humiliated as the two Tory governors. Little newspapers that usually wasted newsprint with tedious social gossip and regimental sporting news were now conduits to the English public of shocking accounts of rebellion and starvation within the relief camps. Dissident journalists like William Digby in Madras (who later published a two-volume critical history of the government's response to the famine) and the Bombay _Statesman_ 's representative in the Deccan stirred troubling memories of the Irish famine as well as the Sepoy Mutiny. In England, moreover, a group of old Indian hands and Radical reformers, including William Wedderburn, Sir Arthur Cotton, John Bright, Henry Hyndman and Florence Nightingale, kept _The Times_ 's letters column full of complaints about Calcutta's callous policies.
Although Lytton urged the India Office to hold fast against these "hysterics," the government was embarrassed by the uproar. Writing to Disraeli, the secretary of state for India, Lord Salisbury, expressed his own fear that the viceroy was "bearing too hard on the people." With the prime minister's approval, Salisbury pulled on Lytton's reins in early May, advising him "not to place too much restriction on the discretion of the local government." In effect, while Disraeli defended Lytton against the Liberals in Parliament, the viceroy was ordered to give local officials the loopholes they needed to reduce mass mortality with higher rations and reduced workloads. This concession more or less tamed the Poona Sabha, whose own conservatives were wary of the explosive potential of the masses, but it was too little and too late to brake the slide into a terminal phase of starvation and epidemic disease. If rice harvests in Burma and Bengal in 1877 were normal, and overall grain inventories sufficed to service the export demand, it was no solace to the 36 million rural Indians whom Calcutta admitted in August 1877 were directly stalked by starvation. The weather remained relentless. After a brief flirtation with the monsoon in April, the skies cleared and temperatures sharply rose. In one of his economizing decrees the year before, Lytton had drastically cut back the budget for maintenance and repair of local water storage. The result, as Digby emphasized in his history of the famine, was that precious rainwater was simply "run to waste" in a needless "sacrifice of human lives." The furnace hot winds that swept the Deccan added to the misery by evaporating what little moisture remained in the soil. The fields were baked to brick.
As water supplies dried up or became polluted with human waste, cholera became the scythe that cut down hundreds of thousands of weakened, skeletal villagers. The same El NiΓ±o weather system that had brought the drought the previous year also warmed waters in the Bay of Bengal, promoting the phytoplankton blooms that are the nurseries of the cholera bacterium. A terrible cyclone, which drowned perhaps 150,000 Bengalis, brought the pandemic ashore, "modern transport provided the invasion route for disease", and the fetid relief camps became crucibles for "cholera's great synergism with malnutrition."
Obdurate Bombay officials meanwhile continued to outrage Indians and incite charges of a cover-up in the press by refusing to publish any estimate of rural mortality. (Even Florence Nightingale was snubbed when she requested figures in early 1878.) The Sabha accordingly decided to carry out its own census of people and cattle in the fifty-four villages comprising three taluks of Sholapur district in August 1877. "It perfected a network of school teachers, retired civil servants and other throughout the dry districts, which gave it in some areas better data faster than the government could produce." It was a trailblazing example of using survey techniques and statistics against the empire.
**Table 1.4**
**Sabha Estimates of Famine Mortality**
_Taluks_ | **Prefamine
Population** | **Present
Population** | **Decline**
---|---|---|---
Madhee and Mohol | 24,581 | 15,778 | 36%
Indi | 39,950 | 20,905 | 48%
| **Cattle before
Famine** | **Cattle Now** | **Decline**
Madhee and Mohol | 16,561 | 5,470 | 67%
Indi | 35,747 | 5,644 | 84%
**Figure 1.5 Grain Stores in Madras, February 1877**
Buckingham, on the other hand, complied with public opinion and ordered a rough census of famine deaths. Reports from the Madras districts indicated that at least 1.5 million had already died in Presidency. In the driest Deccan districts like Bellary, one-quarter of the population perished, and in some _taluks_ with high percentages of landless laborers, more than one-third. In Madras city, overwhelmed by 100,000 drought refugees, famished peasants dropped dead in front of the troops guarding pyramids of imported rice, while "on any day and every day mothers might be seen in the streets... offering children for sale." (The Madras Chamber of Commerce helpfully suggested that flogging posts be erected along the beach so that police could deter potential grain thieves.) In the North Western Provinces, as we shall see, only desultory and punitive relief was organized, "with the result that in spite of the abundant winter crops and the restricted area affected, in nine months the mortality amounted to over a million."
However, "the Malthusian overtones of famine policies and their disastrous consequences," Ira Klein argues, "were experienced most woefully in Mysore," where the British Commission of Regency later conceded that fully one quarter of the population perished. Frugality became criminal negligence as the chief commissioner, from "dread of spending the Mysore surplus," refused life-saving expenditure; then, after his inaction had become a scandal, turned relief work into sadistic regime of punishing the starving. "On the command of the Viceroy to develop a famine policy, he drew up a series of irrigation and other projects, most so far from the famine stricken tracts that emaciated victims had to walk a hundred miles or more to them." Those who actually reached the camps found them fetid, disease-wracked boneyards where a majority of refugees quickly died. One official later recalled scenes out of Dante's _Inferno_.
The dead and dying were lying about on all sides, cholera patients rolling about in the midst of persons free of the disease; for shelter some had crawled to the graves of an adjoining cemetery and had lain themselves down between two graves as support for their wearied limbs; the crows were hovering over bodies that still had a spark of life in them... The place seemed tenanted by none but the dead and the dying. In a few minutes I picked up five bodies; one being that of an infant which its dying mother had firmly clasped, ignorant of the child being no more; the cholera patients were lying about unheeded by those around; some poor children were crying piteously for water within the hearing of the cooks, who never stirred to wet the lips of the poor things that were _in extremis_...
By the summer of 1877, as the famine in Mysore approached its terrible apogee, social order was preserved only by terror. When desperate women and their hungry children, for example, attempted to steal from gardens or glean grain from fields, they were "branded, tortured, had their noses cut off, and were sometimes killed." Rural mobs, in turn, assaulted landowners and patels, pillaging their grain stores, even burning their families alive. In other instances, extremely rare in Indian history, hunger-crazed individuals resorted to cannibalism. "One madman dug up and devoured part of a cholera victim, while another killed his son and ate part of the boy."
**Down from Olympus**
Lytton was kept well-informed of such grisly details. From his hard-minded perspective, however, the most serious escalation in the famine was the increasing burden on the Indian Treasury. The failure of the 1877 monsoon threatened to divert another Β£10 million for the salvation of what he viewed through his Malthusian spectacles as a largely redundant stratum of the population. Having bent his rules in May to accommodate London's anxieties, the viceroy felt confident enough in the summer to resume his campaign against profligate relief. In August 1877, shortly after the Great White Queen reassured the public that "no exertion will be wanting on the part of my Indian Government to mitigate this terrible calamity," Lytton finally came down from his seasonal headquarters in the Himalayas to spend a few days inspecting conditions in Madras.
This was his first personal exposure to the terrible reality of the famine. A local English-language newspaper editorialized that after domiciling himself for so long in the distant comforts of Simla, "the Indian Olympus," where he displayed "merely the faintest idea of the extent of the calamity," Lytton would now have to confront inescapable truths. "There are, in the relief camps of Palaveram and Monegar Choultry, sights to be witnessed, which even we, who have become callous and hardened, cannot but look upon without a shudder; sights which we dare not describe, and which an artist could not paint. What the effect of these sights must have been on the sensitive and poetical mind of Lord Lytton, we pause to imagine."
In addition to the hugely unpopular Temple wage, the British community in Madras was outraged by Lytton's public denunciation of their recent efforts to raise relief funds in England. With both grain prices and famine deaths (157,588 in August) soaring, but with his hands tied by the viceroy's various strictures and economies, the Duke of Buckingham had embraced the philanthropic appeal as a last-ditch hope. It remained to be seen whether Lytton and his "Supreme Government" (as it was called in those days) would yield to the overwhelming urgency of the crisis. "The Viceroy," editorialized the same paper, "has now the opportunity, literally speaking, of saving thousands of lives. Let him telegraph to England candidly, boldly, and fearlessly, the real facts of the case; he may, by this means, perhaps, remove the doubt now certainly engendered in the minds of people at home, as to the need of their charitable aid."
In the event, the viceroy's "sensitive and poetical mind" was stubbornly unmoved by anything he experienced during his lightning tour of southern India. On the contrary, Lytton was convinced that Buckingham, like a fat squire in a Fielding novel, was allowing the lower orders to run riot in the relief camps. After briefly visiting one of the camps, Lytton sent a letter to his wife that bristled with patrician contempt both for Buckingham and the famished people of Madras. "You never saw such 'popular picnics' as they are. The people in them do no work of any kind, are bursting with fat, and naturally enjoy themselves thoroughly. The Duke visits these camps like a Buckingham squire would visit his model farm, taking the deepest interest in the growing fatness of his prize oxen and pigs... But the terrible question is how the Madras Government is ever to get these demoralized masses on to really useful work."
In a bitter conference in Madras, Lytton forced Buckingham to reaffirm his complete allegiance to the cardinal principles of famine policyβ"the sufficiency of private trade" and "the necessity of non-interference with private trade"βand imposed his own man, Major-General Kennedy from Bombay, as Buckingham's "Personal Assistant." In practice, it was a coup d'Γ©tat that deposed Buckingham's Council and installed Kennedy as supremo for famine administration with orders to adhere to the strict letter of the Temple reforms. Meanwhile, from the remote corners of the Deccan, missionaries reported more unspeakable scenes. "Recently, the corpse of a woman was carried along the road slung to a pole like an animal, with the face partly devoured by dogs. The other day, a famished crazy woman took a dead dog and ate it, near our bungalow." "This is not sensational writing," emphasized the Anglican correspondent. "The half of the horrors of this famine have not, cannot, be told. Men do not care to reproduce in writing scenes which have made their blood run cold."
The Deccan's villages were also now rent by desperate internal struggles over the last hoarded supplies of grain. A social chain reaction set in as each class or caste attempted to save themselves at the expense of the groups below them. As David Arnold as shown, collectively structured, "moral-economic" _dacoities_ (expropriations) against moneylenders and grain merchants tended to degenerate in the later stages of famine into inter-caste violence or even a Hobbesian war of _ryot_ against _ryot_. "The longer famine persisted the less crime and acts of violence bore the mark of collective protest and appropriation, and the more they assumed the bitterness of personal anguish, desolation and despair." Sharma agrees that the transition from communitarian action to intra-village violence followed a predictable pattern: "The change in the agricultural cycle had significant implications for forms of popular action and solidarities. The temporary class solidarities and collective popular action which had been witnessed during the failure of the _kharif_ [crop] showed a declining tendency in the winter seasons. Standing _rabi_ crops soon became the objects of plunder, more than granaries and storage pits of hoarders and banias. The zamindars had to guard their crops by employing _lathi_ -wielding musclemen."
Heavy rains in September and October finally eased the drought in southern India, but only at the price of a malaria epidemic that killed further hundreds of thousands of enfeebled peasants in the United Provinces as well as the Deccan. Modern research has shown that extreme drought, by decimating their chief predators, ensures an explosion in mosquito populations upon the first return of the monsoon. The ensuing spike in malaria cases, in turn, delays the resumption of normal agricultural practices. But in 1878 there were other obstacles as well to planting a life-saving crop. The fodder famine had been so extreme that plough animals were virtually extinct in many localities. As _The Times_ 's correspondent reported from the Madras Deccan in July, "To show how scarce the bullocks have become, I may mention, that in the Bellary district merchants send out their grain supplies to distant villages on carts drawn by men. The value of the labour of the human animal is so low that it is cheaper to employ half-a-dozen men to move a load of rice than a couple of bullocks. The men, at any rate, can be fed, whereas fodder for cattle employed on the roads is not to be had at any price."
With their bullocks dead and their farm implements pawned, _ryots_ had to scratch at the heavy Deccan soil with tree branches or yoke themselves or their wives to the remaining ploughs. Much of the seed grain distributed by relief committees was bad, while that which sprouted and pushed its way above the ground was instantly devoured by great plagues of locusts that, as in the Bible, were the camp followers of drought. "The solid earth," according to an American missionary, "seemed in motion, so great were the numbers of these insects; compounds and fields appeared as if they had been scorched with devastating fires after the pests had passed." By early 1878 famine accompanied by cholera had returned to many districts, but relief grain stocks, in anticipation of a good harvest, were depleted and prices as high as ever. Digby tells a grim story about the distress that lingered through the spring: "Three women (sisters) had married three brothers, and they and their families all lived in one large house, in Hindu and patriarchal fashion. The whole household, on 1 January 1878, numbered forty-eight persons. Their crops failed, their money was gone, their credit was _nil_. They tried to live on seeds, leaves, etc. and, as a consequence, cholera attacked them, and thirty died from this disease. Fifteen others expired from what a relative called 'cold fever', and in April only three persons remained."
The final blow against the Deccan peasantry was a militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought. The government ruthlessly picked the pockets of paupers. In the Kurnool district of Madras, for example, "in 1879β80, coercive policies had to be employed for the recovery of as much as 78% of total collections." As D. Rajasekhar points out, the resulting auction of lands in arrears may have been a windfall for rich peasants and moneylenders, who had already profited from famine-induced sacrifice sales of cattle and land mortgages, but it crippled the recovery of an agrarian economy that traditionally upon the energy of (now ruined) smallholders to bring cultivable wastes under plough.
**'Multidunious Murders'**
The year 1878 also saw terrible, wanton mortality in northwestern India following the failure of the monsoon in the summer of 1877 and a retrenchment of dry weather in early 1878. Even more than in the south, however, drought was consciously made into famine by the decisions taken in palaces of rajas and viceroys. Thus in the remote and beautiful valleys of Kashmir, British officials blamed "the criminal apathy of the Maharaja and the greed of his officials, who bought up the stores of grain to sell at extravagant prices" for the starvation of a full third of the population. "Unless Sir Robert Egerton, then Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, had insisted on taking the transport and supply service out of the hands of the corrupt and incompetent Kashmir Government, the valley would have been depopulated."
**Figure 1.6 Famine Victims, 1877**
The original caption of this missionary photograph reads, "Those who have got to this stage rarely recover."
But with equal justice the same criminal charges could be (and were) lodged against the British administration in the North-West Provinces and Oud, as well as adjoining districts of the Punjab, where famine killed at least 1.25 million people in 1878β79. As Indian historians have emphasized, this staggering death toll was the foreseeable and avoidable result of deliberate policy choices. In contrast to the south, the northern 1874β76 harvests were abundant and ordinarily would have provided ample reserves to deal with the _kharif_ deficit in 1878. But subsistence farming in many parts of the North Western Provinces had been recently converted into an captive export sector to stabilize British grain prices. Poor harvests and high prices in England during 1876β77 generated a demand that absorbed most of the region's wheat surplus. Likewise, most of the provinces' cruder grain stocks like millet were commercially exported to the famine districts in Bombay and Madras presidencies, leaving local peasants with no hedge against drought. The profits from the grain exports, meanwhile, were pocketed by richer zamindars, moneylenders and grain merchantsβnot the direct producers.
Still, early and energetic organization of relief and, above all, the deferment of collection of the land tax might have held mortality to a minimum. Indeed the province's executive, Sir George Couper, implored Lytton to remit that year's revenues. "The Lieutenant-Governor is well aware of the straits to which the Government of India is put at the present time for money, and it is with the utmost reluctance that he makes a report which must temporarily add to their burdens. _But he sees no other course to adopt_. If the village communities which form the great mass of our revenue payers be pressed now, they will _simply be ruined_."
Lytton, however, was still bogged down in the logistics of his Afghanistan adventure and was again unswayed by images of destitute villages. He rejected Couper's appeal out of hand. The lieutenant-governor had none of Buckingham's stubborn, paternalist pity for the people, and, to the disgust of some of his own district officers ("a more suicidal policy I cannot conceive," complained one), immediately and obsequiously vowed "to put the screw" upon the hard-hit zamindars and their famished tenants. ("His Honour trusts that the realizations will equal the expectations of the Governments of India, but if they are disappointed, his Excellency the Viceroy... may rest assured _that it will not be for want of effort or inclination to put the necessary pressure on those who are liable for the demand._ ") He promptly ordered his district officers and engineers to "discourage relief works in every possible way... Mere distress is not a sufficient reason for opening a relief work." The point was to force the peasants to give money to the government, not the other way around. When starving peasants fought back (there were 150 grain riots in August and September of 1877 alone), Couper filled the jails and prisons.
As one dissident civil servant, Lt.-Col. Ronald Osborn, would later explain to readers of _The Contemporary Review_ , a murderous official deception was employed to justify the collections and disguise the huge consequent casualties:
But the Government of India having decreed the collection of the land revenue, were now compelled to justify their rapacity, by pretending there was no famine calling for a remission. The dearth and the frightful mortality throughout the North-West Provinces were to be preserved as a State secret like the negotiations with Shere Ali [the emir of Afghanistan]...
During all that dreary winter famine was busy devouring its victims by thousands... [I]n the desperate endeavor to keep their cattle alive, the wretched peasantry fed them on the straw which thatched their huts, and which provided them with bedding. The winter was abnormally severe, and without a roof above them or bedding beneath them, scantily clad and poorly fed, multitudes perished of cold. The dying and the dead were strewn along the cross-country roads. Scores of corpses were tumbled into old wells, because the deaths were too numerous for the miserable relatives to perform the usual funeral rites. Mothers sold their children for a single scanty meal. Husbands flung their wives into ponds, to escape the torment of seeing them perish by the lingering agonies of hunger. Amid these scenes of death the Government of India kept its serenity and cheerfulness unimpared. The journals of the North-West were persuaded into silence. Strict orders were given to civilians under no circumstances to countenance the pretence of the natives that they were dying of hunger. One civilian, a Mr. MacMinn, unable to endure the misery around him, opened a relief work at his own expense. He was severely reprimanded, threatened with degradation, and ordered to close the work immediately.
"Not a whisper" of this manmade disaster reached the public until a notable government critic, Robert Knight, publisher of the _Indian Economist and Statesman_ , visited Agra in February 1878. "He was astonished to find all around the indications of appalling misery." His public revelations prompted a long, self-laudatory minute from Couper that was fulsomely endorsed by the viceroy. In his comment, Lytton blamed the horrendous mortality in the North-West more on "the unwillingness of the people to leave their homes than by any want of forethought on the part of the local government in providing works where they might be relieved." Knight replied, in turn, in an editorial that for the first time bluntly used the term "murder" to characterize official famine policy:
Do not accuse the _Statesman_ of exaggerating matters. Accuse yourself. For long weary years have we demanded the suspension of these kists [land tax] when famine comes and in vain. With no poor law in the land, and the old policy once more set up of letting the people pull through or die, as they can, and with the vernacular press which alone witnesses the sufferings of the people silenced by a cruel necessity, we and our contemporaries must speak without reserve or be partakers in the guilt of multitudinous murders committed by men blinded to the real nature of what we are doing in the country.
Indeed, "blind men" like Lytton and Temple were fortunate that they had to face only the wrath of newspaper editorials. The India of "supine sufferers" which they governed in 1877 was still traumatized by the savage terror that had followed the Mutiny twenty years earlier. Violent protest was everywhere deterred by memories of sepoys blown apart at the mouth of canons and whole forests of peasants writhing at the noose. The exception was in Poona where Basudeo Balwant Phadke and his followers, inspired by still robust Maratha martial traditions, broke with the Sabha's moderation. "The destruction caused by the famine," Dublish explains, led Basudeo to "vow to destroy British power in India by means of an armed rebellion." Betrayed by a companion while organizing a raid on the treasury to buy arms, the "Maratha Robin Hood" was deported and died in prisonβ"the father of militant nationalism in India"βin 1883. His abortive 1879 conspiracy stood in a similar relationship to the holocaust of 1876β77 as did the Young Ireland uprising of 1848 to the Great Hunger of 1846β47: which is to say, it was both postscript and prologue.
**Famine and Nationalism**
No Englishmen understood this point more clearly than Lytton's secretary of agriculture, Allan Octavian Hume. Odd man out in a Tory government that scorned Indian aspirations to self-government, Hume (whose father was a well-known Scottish Radical MP) was deeply sympathetic to the grievances of the Hindu and Muslim elites. Even more unusual, he had sensitive antennae tuned to the rumblings of revolutionary discontent among the poor. In the aftermath of Basudeo's plot, he "became convinced," according to William Wedderburn, a leader of the parliamentary opposition on India, "that some definite action was called to counteract the growing unrest among the masses who suffered during the famine." The first step was to resist the viceroy's punitive and incendiary scheme to foist the costs of future famine relief entirely on the shoulders of the poor.
Originally advocated by Lord Northbrook, the idea of a "famine insurance fund" was revived in 1877 by Hamilton and Salisbury to pre-empt the Liberals from making the terrible mortality in India an issue in the next election. Lytton, aware that radical members of the House of Commons favored financing the fund through a combination of wealth taxes and reductions in military expenditure, embraced the plan with the proviso that funding be entirely regressive, without harm to ruling classes or the army. He vehemently opposed a proposal from Hume, whom he forced to resign, that would have imposed a modest income tax "on the ground that it would affect the higher income groups, both European and Indian." His own preference was for a famine tax on potential famine victims (that is, a new land cess on the peasantry): a measure that would have inflamed the entire country and which, therefore, was rejected by Salisbury and the Council of India. As an alternative, Lytton and John Strachey drafted a scheme that was almost as regressive, reviving a hated license tax on petty traders (professionals were exempt) in tandem with brutal hikes in salt duties in Madras and Bombay (where the cost of salt was raised from 2 to 40 annas per maund).
After the purge, Hume joined the small but influential chorus of opposition to Lytton that was led by Wedderburn, Cotton and Nightingale (whose campaign for Indian sanitary reform had been snubbed by Lytton). Digby, the famine's chief chronicler, would also return to England in 1880 to champion Indian grievances in Liberal politics. In dozens of town meetings, as well as in the London press and the House of Commons, they argued that selfish and disastrous British policies like the salt tax, not nature, had paved the way for the Madras famine, and advocated a new policy based on reductions in ground rent and military expenditure, new spending on irrigation and public health, cheap credit through a system of rural banks, and a progressive famine fund. Nightingale was a particularly fiery campaigner against the salt tax, whose enforcement, she reminded audiences, had required the construction of a literal police state: "a tower commands the salt works, occupied by a policeman all day. Moats surround the works, patrolled by policemen all night; workmen are search to prevent them from carrying off salt in their pockets..."
The India opposition's emphasis on a "civilizing" (as Nightingale called it) rather than "imperial" strategy in India corresponded closely with a parallel shift in the thinking of such Liberal pundits as John Stuart Mill, and converged with the platform of moderate nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chandra Dutt, who thought that Indian home rule within the Empire could best be achieved through collaboration with humanitarian English Liberals. Steeped in Millsian political economy, Naoroji and Dutt laid indigenous foundations for what a hundred years later would be called the "theory of underdevelopment" with their sophisticated critiques of Britain's "drain of wealth" from India. Although their most famous essays, Naoroji's _Poverty and Un-British Rule in India_ (1901) and Dutt's _Famines in India_ (1900) and his two-volume _Economic History of British India_ (1902 and 1904), would be produced in the aftermath of the 1896β1900 holocaust, their basic polemical strategyβmowing down the British with their own statisticsβwas already discomforting Lytton and his council. Indeed on the eve of the famine in 1876, Naoroji had read his landmark paper, "The Poverty of India" (later reprinted as a pamphlet), to a crowded meeting of the Bombay Branch of the East India Association. The Parsi mathematician and former professor of Gujarati at University College London demolished the self-serving rhetoric about "free trade" that the government used to mask India's tributary relation to England. "With a pressure of taxation nearly double in proportion to that of England, from an income of one-fifteenth, and an exhaustive drain besides, we are asked to compete with England in free trade?" It was, he said, "a race between a starving, exhausted invalid, and a strongman with a horse to ride on."
Such intellectually formidable critics were a major annoyance to Calcutta. Although the government was able to steamroll the passage of the license and salt taxes, Lytton was forced to reassure the Indian and English publics in his usual longwinded fashion of their benevolent purpose. "The _sole justification_ for the increase which has just been imposed upon the people of India, for the purpose of insuring this Empire against the worst calamities of a future famine... is the pledge we have given that a sum not less than a million and half sterling... shall be annually applied to it... [T]he pledges which my financial colleague was authorized to give, on behalf of the Government, were explicit and full as regards these points. For these reasons, it is all the more binding on the honour of the Government to redeem to the uttermost, without evasion or delay, those pledges, for the adequate redemption of which the people of India have, and can have, no other guarantee than the good faith of their rulers."
But the Viceroy was lying through his elegant whiskers. Famine insurance was a cynical facade for raising taxes to redeem cotton duties and finance the invasion of Afghanistan. The truth can be found in Lytton's correspondence: "Lord Salisbury thinks that we are trying by our present measure to get more revenue than we absolutely need. And writing to you confidentially, I cannot deny that, in a certain sense and to a certain extent, this is quite true. But if we do not take advantage of the present situation... for screwing up the revenue, we shall never be able to reform our tariff which grievously needs reform."
Indeed, from 1877 to 1881, the "whole accumulated fund was used either to reduce cotton goods tariff or for the Afghan war." It did not take the Liberals long to expose such an egregious deceit and during his famous Midlothian campaign in 1880 Gladstone repeatedly stirred the crowds against Tory perfidy. "Has the pledge been kept?", he thundered. "The taxation was levied. The pledge was given. The pledge has utterly been broken. The money has been used. It is gone. It has been spent upon the ruinous, unjust, destructive war in Afghanistan."
The intrigues over the famine fund were paralleled by the government's manipulation of the royal commission to investigate the disaster. Although the "manoeuvres surrounding the creation of the Famine Commission were mainly controlled by the Strachey brothers," its impetus seems to have come directly from Salisbury, whose worries, in the face of a Liberal resurgence, were strictly partisan. "Strachey will also explain to you," he wrote Lytton in November 1877, "what I have talked a good deal to him aboutβthe necessity of some commission on Famine measures in the future, in order to save ourselves from the Irrigation quacks. They will undoubtedly make a strong fight: for I observe that under the Presidency of Cotton, they have been beginning some sort of League... for the Parliamentary campaign." It was suggested that the viceroy could steal his opponents' clothes through a harmless endorsement ("provided it could pay its way") of irrigation as a famine safeguard. The presidency of the commission was safely entrusted to Lt. General Sir Richard Strachey, who as member of the India Council and brother to Lytton's finance chief was unlikely to find fault with himself or his sibling. Convened in early 1878, the commission did not submit a report until June 1880.
"The establishment of the Famine Commission," writes one historian, "was carried out as a political exercise to produce a favourable report, rather than as a measured response to one of the most significant problems of the Government of India. General Strachey protected his brother's policies..." The whitewash, however, was not unanimous. Two of the commissionersβthe old India hand James Caird and Madras civil servant H. Sullivanβdissented along lines similar to Buckingham's policies in 1876β77. They urged the government to buy and store grain in the most famine-prone districts, and in the future to relieve the weak and infirm in their home villages. Both of these commonsense recommendations were subjected to scalding criticism by the majority who, instead, reaffirmed Lytton's policy of dormitory work camps and distance, task and wage tests, supplemented as need be by poorhouses. Although the Commission recognized that the "essential problem was shortage of work rather than food," the majority clung to the Benthamite principle that relief should be bitterly punitive in order to discourage dependence upon the government.
The report, as intended, categorically absolved the government of any responsibility for the horrific mortality. As Carol Henderson emphasizes, "The 1878 Famine Commission set the tone for the [future] government response by asserting that the main cause of famine was drought 'leading to the failure of the food crops on which the subsistence of which the population depends.'" In his 1886 critique of the commission, Hyndman caustically observed that famines "are looked upon as due to 'natural laws,' over which human beings have no control whatever. We attribute all suffering under native governments to native misrule; our own errors we father on 'Nature'." Naoroji likewise thought "how strange it is that the British rulers do not see that after all they themselves are the main cause of the destruction that ensues from droughts; that it is the drain of India's wealth by them that lays at their own door the dreadful results of misery, starvation, and deaths of millions... Why blame poor Nature when the fault lies at your own door?"
The report convinced a majority of Parliament (and some gullible modern historians) that energetic measures were being taken to prevent future catastrophes. Just as misleading promises cloaked the misappropriation of the famine fund, deliberate confusion seems to have been sown about the accomplishments of the commission Contrary to the popular belief that the commission had legislated an obligatory "famine code," the report was surprisingly toothless and only adumbrated "general principles" conforming to utilitarian orthodoxy. "By the mid-1880s, some four or five years after the Famine Report was published, most of the provinces had famine codes but, apart from a reliance on public works for famine relief and injunctions about interfering with the grain trade, they were not uniform." Just as Calcutta had reserved in fine print the right to loot the famine fund ("there was no legal contract," Temple argued in 1890, "between the Government of India and the Indian people to the effect that the Fund should be exclusively devoted to famine purposes"), so too it refused to bind itself by code to "ill-directed and excessive distribution of charitable relief."
Convinced, however, that such famines were not only inevitable but would bring revolution on the tide, Hume again took up agitation for a political safety-valve for Indian discontent. Fearing the rise of Maratha or Bengali counterparts to Ireland's violent republican brotherhoods, he proposed the pre-emptive organization of a moderate home-rule movement that could act as a unified interlocutor to a British Liberal government. The issue became urgent with the return of the Tories to rule in 1885, and Hume (with considerable sympathy from the departing Liberal Viceroy Lord Ripon) engineered the foundation of the Indian National Congress in December with himself as general secretary. The mood of the delegates, writes McLane, "was somber and restrained. They gathered in the aftermath of a series of failures to obtain reforms. In the recent controversies over military expenditure, volunteering, impartial justice, and Indian admission to the civil services, nationalists had made few gains."
Naoroji meanwhile went to England to run for Parliament in LondonβWedderman called it a "flanking movement"βwith the aid of radical-Liberals and Michael Davitt's Irish National Land League. Although their friend H. M. Hyndman was already warning that "the time has gone for imploring, if ever existed," Hume, Naoroji and the distinguished membership of the Congress were wagering India's future precisely on a principled appeal to English conscience. As the violent reaction to Irish home rule over the next few years should have warned them, however, the age of Gladstone and J. S. Mill was giving way to jingoism and the New Imperialism. New famines, terrible beyond all apprehension, were already incubating in the loam of India's growing poverty.
##
## **'The Poor Eat Their Homes'**
> History contains no record of so terrible and distressing a state of things, and if prompt measures of relief be not instituted the whole region must become depopulated.
>
> β Governor of Shanxi, 1877
India was not alone in its distress. Although their fate attracted surprisingly scant attention in England, tens of thousands died from hunger and cholera in the North-West Province of Ceylon, especially in Jafnapatam and Kadavely. Comparable horrors, meanwhile, were reported from north China, Korea, southern Java and Borneo, the Visayas, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Angola, South Africa and northeast Brazil. Across the vast Indo-Pacific region, barometer readings were "characterized by the most extreme departures from normal pressure... since records began." ENSO's atmospheric half, the huge atmospheric see-saw of the Southern Oscillation whose fulcrum was near the International Date Line in the central Pacific, played havoc with meteorological records everywhere. In Santiago, Chile, standardized station pressure plummeted from near normal in August 1876 to the lowest ever recorded in September, while, conversely, in Djakarta barometers began to soar in September, reaching an all-time height in August 1877 (3.7 standard deviations above the mean). "The spatial extent of the pressure anomalies was vast, with records occurring in Lebanon, Australia and New Zealand." Likewise sea surface and nighttime marine air temperatures from October 1877 to March 1878 were the highest in history. The notoriously fickle East Asian Monsoon and the usually reliable Arabian Monsoon (whose rainfall over the watershed of the Blue Nile in the Ethiopian highlands becomes the annual Nile flood) disastrously failed to reach their normal latitudes. The apparent return to more normal conditions in late 1877 abruptly yielded to a secondary surge of El NiΓ±o conditions in early 1878 as pressure again plunged in Santiago and rose in Djakarta. In Brazil's Nordeste drought persisted well through the fall of 1879.
**Figure 2.1 The Global Drought, 1876β78**
The impact of El NiΓ±o drought was amplified by the worst global recession of the nineteenth century. "The intoxicating economic expansion of the Age of Capital," writes Eric Foner, "came to a wrenching halt in 1873." The puncture of a speculative bubble in American railroad stocks (symbolized by the collapse of New York's Jay Cooke & Company) rapidly became a worldwide crisis that "ushered in an entirely new business environment, one of cutthroat competition and a relentless downward price spiral." The massacre of fictitious capital on Wall Street was punctually followed by the fall of real prices on Manchester's Cotton Exchange and soaring unemployment in the industrial centers of Pennsylvania, South Wales, Saxony and Piedmont. Deflation was soon a wolf at the door of tropical agriculturalists as well. The abrupt decline in metropolitan demand for key tropical and colonial products coincided with a vast increase in agricultural exports as railroads opened the American and Russian prairies and the Suez Canal shortened the distances between Europe, Asia and the Antipodes. The result everywhere was intensified competition and the plummeting of agricultural incomes. World market prices of cotton, rice, tobacco and sugar fell to their cost of production in many regions, or even below it.
Millions of cultivators only recently incorporated into market networks or webs of world trade were thus whiplashed by long-distance economic perturbations whose origins were as mysterious as those of the weather. In western India, Algeria, Egypt (which plunged into bankruptcy in 1876), and northeast Brazil, as well as in Angola, Queensland, Fiji and Samoa, where Lancashire interests had orchestrated the conversion of vast acreages of subsistence agriculture to cotton production during the American Civil War, the boom had collapsed with the return of Southern cotton exports, stranding hundreds of thousands of small cultivators in poverty and debt (see Table 2.1).
**Table 2.1**
**The "Cotton Famine" and After**
(Percentage of Raw Cotton Imports by the UK)
| **USA** | **Egypt** | **Brazil** | **India**
---|---|---|---|---
1860 | 80 | 3 | 1 | 15
1865 | 19 | 21 | 6 | 50
1870 | 54 | 12 | 5 | 25
Source: Adapted from David Surdam, "King Cotton: Monarch or Pretender?", _Economic History Review_ 61:1 (Feb. 1998), p. 123.
Tropical sugar producers in Brazil, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies were likewise hammered by falling prices and the rising competition of European beet sugar, while Morocco's traditional exports of grain, wool and leather declined in the face of new competition from Australia and India following the opening of the Suez Canal. In the Cape, wheat farmers and wine growers, together with stockraisers, faced "the cold winds of free trade and indebtedness" as well as "the unbending orthodoxy of imperial finance in the shape of the Standard Bank." Chinese tea producers likewise had to deal with the sudden rivalry of Assam and Ceylon, while Japan chipped away at China's monopoly on Asian silk exports. By 1875 agrarian unrest and rioting, on the largest scale since the great crisis of 1846β49, were spreading across the globe.
**I. China**
The failure of the rains, two years in a row, throughout the basin of the Yellow River produced a drought-famine of extraordinary magnitude, overshadowing even the disaster in the Indian Deccan. Yet it took months for accurate reports to make their way to Beijing, and further long months for a sclerotic bureaucracy to organize relief campaigns for the five hardest hit provinces. Even then, rescue grain moved slowly, if at all, through a series of deadly transport bottlenecks. The Qing had refused to build railroads or telegraphs out of the rational fear that they would inevitably become weapons of foreign economic and ideological penetration. As a result, a year or more elapsed before the first meager shipments of silver or grain arrived in many famine counties. Millions died in the meantime and large tracts of countryside were depopulated. Such immobility was construed by resident Westerners as the very essence of a stagnant civilization; in reality, it was a rupture with China's efficient famine relief campaigns of the eighteenth century or even the previous decade.
Drought was a grim finale to a quarter-century of extraordinary natural and social violence. Massive flooding in the 1850s had driven millions of peasants from their homes, many of them into the arms of the rebel armiesβTaiping, Triad, Red Turban and Nianβthat came within a hairsbreadth of destroying the Qing dynasty in the 1860s. The last insurgents (Muslim fundamentalists in Shaanxi and Gansu) were defeated only in 1872, and the accumulated economic damage since the founding of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace in 1851 was colossal. During the brief interlude of Confucian reformβthe so-called Tongzhi Restorationβthat followed the defeat of the Taiping, there were several attempts to return to eighteenth-century state paternalism, most notably during the 1867β68 drought-famine in the Beijing region, which was energetically relieved with official soup kitchens and rice surpluses from the south. But the Restoration's domestic phase was short-lived. Continuing and costly civil wars against Nian rebels in the north and Moslem insurrectionists in the northwest, followed by a major intervention in Central Asia, further drained the imperial budget and forced the Qing to slash nonmilitary expenditures. Beijing was also forced to resume the rampant sale of offices, a major source of the corruption that the Taiping had tried to extirpate.
The scale and intensity of the 1876β78 drought would have sorely tested the most scrupulous "Golden Age" administrations of the previous century. Now, thanks to epic grain fraud by hundreds of corrupt magistrates and their merchant conspirators, as well as the seasonally unnavigable condition of the Grand Canal, it quickly became a cataclysm. The small cultivator of north China has been famously described as "a man standing permanently up to his neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him." But the drought that began in 1876 was a tsunami, not a ripple.
'TEN THOUSAND MEN HOLES'
The monsoon stalled over Guangdong and Fujian in the spring and summer of 1876, drowning those provinces in rain and flood, while all of northern China as far as the Korean border was parched by drought. Most of the summer and autumn harvests were totally lost. At the British Legation, Chinese Secretary W. Mayers carefully monitored the _Imperial Gazette_ and reported back to the Foreign Office on the development of the ensuing famine. The first evidence of official concern with the failed summer monsoon was on 22 June 1876 when the five-year-old emperor, his father and uncle oversaw sacrifices and prayers for rain. The next day 100,000 taels were allocated for drought relief in Hebei, Shandong and Henan.
Little else was noted until early October, when the governor of Shandong borrowed 30,000 taels for soup kitchens from his customs revenue, and then, shortly before Christmas, when Beijing suddenly diverted a large quantity of tribute grain. Any doubts about the gravity of the famine were removed at the beginning of winter, when tens of thousands of threadbare refugees suddenly appeared in the streets of Tianjin (Tientsin), Yantai (Chefoo), Zhengzhou (Chengchow) and even Shanghai. The stories they toldβwhich missionaries confirmedβwere chilling.
**Figure 2.2 Famine in China, 1876β78**
In eastern Shandong, where three dry years had preceded the full-fledged drought of fall 1876, the desperate peasantry were reported to be eating their own homes:
In the summer the great cry of the mass of the people was for rain, rain. Now it is for very life. Having finished their corn, they eat grain-husks, potato stalks, and elm bark, buckwheat stalks, turnip leaves and grass seeds, which they gather in the fields and sieve the dust off. When these are exhausted, they pull down their houses, sell their timber, and it is reported everywhere that many eat the rotten kaoliang reeds (sorghum stalks) from the roof, and the dried leaves of which they usually burn for fuel... [then] they sell their clothes and children.
With the onset of winter, "the caloric deficit was aggravated by the cold, since the price curve of fuels followed that of grain." Peasants had no choice but to burn what was left of their homes for warmth. The famed American missionary Samuel Wells Williams was haunted for the rest of his life by the image of "people like spectres hovering over the ashes of their burnt houses, and making pyres for themselves out of the ruins of their temples."
When there was nothing left to fuel a fire, those peasants who chose not to flee southward to the cities of Jiangsu resorted to the extraordinary stratagem of crowding together in giant underground pits. "In the eastern suburb of Ch'ing-chou," reported the Welsh missionary Timothy Richard, "four such pits were dug. In each pit as many as 240 people huddled for warmth. One-third of these succumbed within six weeks, leaving eagerly sought-after vacancies." The British consul at Yantai wrote at the end of the winter about the collapse of relief efforts in the drought-stricken counties of Shandong. "The Government soup kitchens in I-tu Hsien still continue to deal out a scanty relief, but it is sad that their money is now exhausted and they will soon close... [T]he Magistrate of that district has put out a Proclamation exhorting the wealthy to subscribe once more, but I fear with no effect. One can readily understand how powerless a district Magistrate is to cope with a gigantic evil like this."
There is considerable debate among historians about the extent to which an explicit "moral economy," with ritualized traditions of protest and redistribution, operated during food scarcities in societies outside of Western Europe. Some of the strongest evidence comes from missionary accounts of the famine in Shandong, where peasant women organized highly theatricalized demonstrations, suggestive of customary precedents, against greedy gentry and dishonest magistrates. In one _hsien_ (county), "a band of women marched to a rich man's house... took possession of it, cooked a meal there, and then marched to the next house for the next meal" and so on. In another locality, angry peasant women confronted a venal magistrate who had been pocketing relief funds from Beijing:
One hundred women one day, each carrying her kitchen cleaver and board, went to the Yamen and sat down in the courtyard. The underlings asked them their business. They said they wished to speak to the magistrate... As soon as he appeared, one of the women chosen as spokesman cried out, "The magistrate who steals the money of the poor instead of giving it when they are dying of starvation deserves to be chopped into pieces like this!" Then the hundred choppers beat a refrain on the boards, and all the women chanted in chorus: "He who steals the money of the poor deserves to be chopped into pieces like this!"
Such militant self-organization, however, was generally only possible in the early phase of famine, before starvation began to dissolve the social fabric of the village and, eventually, of the extended family itself. By spring 1877 the drought-stricken hsien of Shandong were already partially depopulated by death and emigration. "At Chikien, a village of 200 families," wrote a missionary to the _Shanghai Courier_ , "I found that thirty families had pulled down their houses to sell the timber and thatch for food; thirty families had gone away, and twenty individuals were dead from starvation. At Kiang-kia-low, with a population of thirty to forty families, forty-seven individuals had died of starvation. At Li-kai-chwang, out of 100 families, formerly well off, thirty persons were already dead of starvation. At Po-wang, out of sixty families forty persons were dead, and sixty gone away. At Masoong, out of forty families forty individuals had perished." In a single hsien it was reported that more than 100,000 dependents were sold into servitude to contractors from the south, although the government later nullified all forced sales of women and children during the famine. The Italian missionary Father di Marchi described the heartbreaking calculus of desperation that pitted family honor against survival in the stricken villages of Shandong. "In a village, entirely Pagan, where I went to distribute relief, all the women, except two very old ones, and all the children of both sexes had been sold." On the other hand, in another village that he visited, many of the families had committed suicide to "avoid the ignominy of begging."
**Figure 2.3 A Mother Selling Her Children to Buy Food, Chin-Kiang, 1877**
The provincial authorities seemed hopeless. They were far more efficient in executing famine-driven bandits by the thousands, usually by "slow, agonizing starvation in the 'sorrow cages,' " than in distributing relief in the countryside. "According to Richard," reported _The Times_ 's correspondent, "they have allotted only 43,000 taels (about Β£14,000) for the whole of these eight districtsβa mere pittance for such a calamity." Missionaries estimated that official relief efforts reached only 20 to 40 percent of the afflicted population in five provinces. As Mayers in Beijing observed, the Empire was broke. The revenue surplus accumulated since the end of the Taiping civil war had been expended on imperialist expansion in Central Asia or in building coastal forts and arsenals. The empire increasingly had to borrow from foreign powers at extortionate interest rates. The crucial customs revenue for 1877 and 1878, for example, was collateral for a 21 million tael loan, raised through the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, that was used to pay off costs of the conquest of Xinjiang. Left to fend for themselves, most of the provincial governments were already bankrupt by the beginning of the drought. As the imperial censors pointed out in an angry note in August 1877, what financial reserves remained were promptly looted by corrupt relief officials. Nor were there any hidden resources in the countryside to compensate for official penury. On a local level when government assistance was desultory, peasants had traditionally relied on blood-oath fraternities ( _baihui_ ) and mutual loan societies. During the terrible Shandong winter of 1876β77, however, village mutualism collapsed, bringing permanent discredit to the societies that failed to save their members.
Not surprisingly some farmers preferred to fight for their survival. Far more than in caste-divided India, a proliferation of heterodox religious sects and underground anti-Qing traditions offered Chinese peasants a cultural matrix for organizing and legitimating agrarian insurrection. In southwestern Shandong, towards the end of the drought, "a certain Zhu Ahen-Guo, who made a living as a healer, claimed to be a descendant of the Ming ruling house and rose in rebellion... Poor folks from the region rallied to his banner, and held out for almost a month before drenching rains came and his followers dispersed to return to their now cultivable fields."
More commonly, entire villages fled towards the wealthy towns of the south. This organized system of village migration and collective begging was known as t'ao-fang, and was clearly distinguished in law and popular tolerance from ordinary (criminal) vagabondage. Faced with the "threat of an aimlessly wandering peasantry, with all the consequences that this entailed," the government tried to channel and regiment migration with the help of the urban elites. Although Beijing was surrounded by checkpoints during the famine, the wealthy gentry in the cities of Kiangsu were ordered to keep their gates open to honest refugees from the north. The people from Shandong were carefully registered at urban shelters and issued coupons for rice gruel, used clothing, even basic medical care. Later, after the drought abated, they were given travel stipends to return to their homes where magistrates often provided loans of seed and oxen to ensure resumption of the agricultural (and fiscal) cycle. But when, at times, the exodus from the north became too overwhelming or uncontrollable, as along the Shandong-Kiangsu border in 1877, the Qing had no qualms about sending in troops to turn back or even massacre the refugees.
While the turmoil in Shandong was diverting official attention, famine was rapidly spreading throughout Shanxi and the greater part of Shaanxi, Hebei and Henan, as well as the northern counties of Hubei, Anhui and Jiangsu. In Hebei and Jiangsu, drought was accompanied, as it is so frequently, by devastating plagues of locusts. In total, more than 90 million people suffered from hunger in an area larger than France. In Henan, where popular anti-Christian sentiment was legendary (missionaries called it "heartless Henan"), there were no permanent missionaries to chronicle the progress of the famine, but the governor told Beijing that more than half the harvest had been lost and that Kaifeng was overrun with 70,000 refugees. Other vernacular accounts described cannibalism, brigandage and the death of more than a third of the population in the most afflicted counties. In Lushan hsien, a renowned hearth of banditry and rebellion, the poor peasants and laborers who maintained the irrigation system (locally known as tangjiang) rose en masse. "In the face of recalcitrant landlords who were unwilling to provide relief, the tangjiang opened local granaries and distributed the grain to the poor. This act propelled other peasants to join the movement, and the numbers of participants reached tens of thousands. Only by calling up a large contingent of government troops could the riot be quelled."
Likewise, it was almost a year before the foreign community had any appreciation of the magnitude of the famine in Shaanxi (Shensi). Provincial officials refused overtures of aid from the British Inland Mission, but allowed two representatives, F. Baller and George King, to make a brief visit. The mortality in the forty counties that lined the great Wei River valley, the crucible of Han civilization, was staggering. "Human skeletons," recounted a later provincial history, "lay along roads. On the average a large county lost between 100,000 and 200,000 lives and even a small one lost some 50,000 or 60,000. The only possible way to dispose of dead bodies, was to dig huge holes, which today are still called, 'ten-thousand-men holes'; dead children were thrown into water wells." Hunger-weakened farmers were often finished off by the packs of wolvesβ"gorged and stupid from the fulness of many ghastly meals"βthat prowled the outskirts of villages and towns.
SHANXI: THE UNSPEAKABLE
But the famine's macabre climax was in neighboring Shanxi (Shansi), an impoverished, landlocked province as big as England and Wales with a population of 15 million. Drought had been entrenched here since 1875, but the province's densely populated southwestern prefectures had been temporarily able to mitigate food shortages with imports from the Wei Valley. The total crop failure in the latter was effectively a death sentence for hundreds of thousands of peasants in neighboring Shanxi. Again the Qing bureaucracy responded with excruciating sluggishness. At the beginning of 1877, a censor complained about corruption in the administration of relief in Shanxi, and later Beijing issued a decree postponing the collection of land taxes. But it was only in March, a full year after the failure of the rains, that a sudden series of urgent appeals in the Imperial Gazette revealed that the granaries of southern Shanxi were empty and the peasants were now living off pellets of dirt or the corpses of their dead neighbors. As Governor Li Hon-nien emphasized in his obituary-like report, entire social strata had been wiped out from the bottom up:
The drought with which the province has been visited for several years in succession has resulted in a famine of an intensity and extent hitherto unheard of. As autumn advanced into the winter the number of those in need of relief increased daily, until at last they could be counted by millions. The lower classes were the first to be affected, and they soon disappeared or dispersed in search of subsistence elsewhere. Now the famine has attacked the well-to-do and the wealthy, who find themselves reduced to greater misery as each day goes by, and they, in their turn, are dying off or following those who have migrated elsewhere. In the earlier period of distress the living fed upon the bodies of the dead; next, the strong devoured the weak; and, now, the general destitution has arrived at such a climax that men devour those of their own flesh and blood.
**Figure 2.4 Guguan Pass: "The way was marked by the carcasses of men and beasts."**
All of Beijing's belated efforts to move grain into the loess highlands had been frustrated by the breakdown of the transportation system. The condition of the Grand Canal, inland north China's all-important lifeline to the rice surpluses of the Yangzi Valley, was especially distressing. "The most extensive and important canal in the world," wrote a correspondent to the _New York Times_ , "it is now for hundreds of miles unnavigable, its old channel grass-grown and incumbered with the rotting hulks of hundreds of the imperial junks which formerly brought their annual tribute of grain to the capital." Rivers that once fed water to the canal had been cut off by the realigned Yellow River or silted-up through government neglect. As a result, water levels in the canal fell drastically with the onset of the drought, and only desultory efforts were made to dredge sections of the canal or, alternately, to send grain in small flotillas up the drought-shallowed and treacherously silted Yellow River.
With tribute rice shipments held up in the south, the government for the first time turned towards the wheat surpluses of Manchuria. Although Manchurian farmers responded with huge shipments of grain, its progress towards the centers of mass starvation in Henan, Shaanxi and Shanxi was fatally impeded by a succession of transport bottlenecks. The first was in the port of Tianjin itself. As R. Forrest, the British consul in Tianjin and chairman of the Famine Relief Committee, complained: "In November 1877, this aspect of affairs was simply terrible... Tientsin was inundated with supplies from every available port. The Bund was piled mountain high with grain, the Government storehouses were full. All possible means of transporting it were commandeered and the water-courses were crowded with boats, the roads were blocked with carts." Other bottlenecks slowed the progress of the relief grain across the North China Plain despite warnings that the population of southern Shanxi "bids fair to become absolutely extinct." The transport crisis reached a nightmarish crescendo in Guguan Pass, the narrow mountain gateway to southern Shanxi. Consul Forrest traveled up the 130-mile-long mountain trail to see the chaos for himself:
Frightful disorder reigns supreme... filled with [an enormous traffic of] officials and traders all intent on getting their convoys over the pass. Fugitives, beggars and thieves absolutely swarmed... camels, oxen, mules and donkeys... were killed by the desperate people for the sake of their flesh (while the grain they were meant to be carrying into Shansi rotted and fed the rats of Tientsin). Night travelling was out of the question. The way was marked by the carcases of men and beasts, and the wolves, dogs and foxes soon put an end to the sufferings of any (sick) wretch who lay down... in those terrible defiles... No idea of employing the starving people in making new or improving the old roads ever presented itself to the authorities... Gangs of desperadoes in the hills terrorised the travellers... In the ruined houses the dead, the dying, and the living were found huddled together... and the domestic dogs, driven by hunger to feast on the corpses everywhere to be found, were eagerly caught and devoured... Women and girls were sold in troops to traffickers, who took the opportunity of making money in this abominable manner, and suicide was so common as hardly to excite attention.
**Figure 2.5 "Suicides in Consequence of the Famine"**
**Figure 2.6 "The Living Strive for the Flesh of the Dead"**
When Richard, dressed as a Chinese, crossed over the 4,000-foot-high escarpment into Shanxi later that season, 1,000 people were starving to death every day, and the representative of the Baptist Missionary Society, "aghast at the magnitude of the catastrophe," thought he was witnessing a scene from the Book of Revelation. It had scarcely rained for three winters. Many county granaries had been empty for years or had been looted by venal magistrates, while the provincial government, crushed by the costs of the recent genocidal civil war between Muslims and Han, had no funds left to finance relief. Locust plagues, meanwhile, had devoured every blade of grass that had escaped the drought, and the once fertile countryside had been transformed into an ochre desert shrouded by howling dust storms. "That people pull down their houses, sell their wives and daughters, eat roots and carrion, clay and refuse is news which nobody wonders at... If this were not enough to move one's pity, the sight of men and women lying helpless on the roadside, or of dead torn by hungry dogs and magpies, should do; and the news which has reached us, within the last few days, of children being boiled and eaten up, is so fearful as to make one shudder at the thought."
Indeed, the correspondence of Qing officials confirms that "children abandoned by their parents... were taken to secret locations, killed and consumed." Richard later discovered human meat being sold openly in the streets and heard stories "of parents exchanging young children because they could not kill and eat their own." Residentsβwho everywhere went armed with spears and swords for self-protectionβalso "dare not go to the coal-pits for coal, so necessary for warmth and cooking, for both mules and owners had disappeared, having been eaten." (Richard, on the other hand, was struck by "the absence of the robbery of the rich" among so much death.) The other European witness to the catastrophe, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shanxi, confirmed Richard's most disturbing observations in a letter to the procurator of the Lazarist Fathers (later quoted in _The Times_ ): "Previously, people had restricted themselves to cannibalizing the dead; now they are killing the living for food. The husband devours his wife, the parents eat their children or the children eat their parents: this is now the everyday news."
Almost two years after the drought-famine had begun, on 10 May 1878, the British ambassador in Beijing reported to the foreign minister, Lord Salisbury, that while recent rains had improved the situation in Hubei, there was little sign of relief in Henan or Shanxi:
The letters of the missionaries who remain there are merely stereotyped accounts of the same painful sights endlessly repeated. Every imaginable horror that famine can give rise to is said to have occurred on a large scale. One would prefer to hope that the extent of the disaster might be overestimated, if the numbers of destitute immigrants who may now be seen dying of want at the gates and in the streets of Peking itself, and the unusual prevalence of malignant fevers in the capital, did not bear witness to its reality. I heard yesterday, upon good authority, that as many as 7,000,000 persons in all are computed to have died in this famine. The Province of Shansi alone is said to have lost 5,000,000 of inhabitants in the last winter. If the drought should continue, it will not improbably become depopulated altogether.
These reports of the horrors in Shanxi were eventually circulated around the world by cable and later published at length in _China's Millions_ , the famous British missionary monthly. "Harrowing eye-witness accounts of famine conditions," its editor Hudson Taylor wrote, "were needed to bring home to people's imaginations what was happening." Shanxi particularly preoccupied Christians because it was believed to be the epicenter of the opium evil, where the masses starved because "eight out of every ten smoked opium" and had abandoned the cultivation of grain. "See that poor wretch with the emaciated frame," editorialized Taylor, "he has parted with his land, his house, his furniture, his children's and his own clothing and bedding, and either sold his wife or hired her out for prostitution, and all for opium... It is the source of poverty, wretchedness, disease, and misery, unparalleled in... any other country."
In London, meanwhile, a China Famine Relief Fund was organized by the Jardines, Mathesons, Reids, and other ancient pillars of the opium trade. Describing the catastrophe as "without parallel in the history of the world," the London committee circulated a booklet by a Chinese artist depicting grisly scenes of Henan peasants committing suicide or eating their dead neighbors. Although relief of the Bulgarian victims of Turkish atrocities, followed by appeals to aid starving Madras, were more popular front-page philanthropies, supporters of the China missions acclaimed "famine relief as a heaven-sent opportunity to spread the gospel." Here was an Archimedean lever, it was believed, to open the "nine whole [northern] provinces where darkness reigns unbroken." Indeed the General Missionary Conference in Shanghai in 1877 issued a famous call for "the Christian Church to evangelize China in the present generation," taking advantage of what Arthur Smith termed the "wonderful opening" of famine. "The distribution of funds by brave and judicious men engaged in the [relief] work," added the British consul the same year, "will do more to open China to us than a dozen wars." Guo Songtao, China's first minister to Britain, although repulsed by British gloating over their famine-generated "openings," found it politic to endorse the relief campaign. (The famine-induced harvest of "rice Christians," as Guo Songtao probably expected, was short-lived, and missionaries were soon complaining about the recidivism of their converts. "The spiritual results of so much philanthropy in Shansi," wrote one around 1890, "have been very disappointing... [A]fter thirteen years of work the Baptist Mission only numbered about thirty converts.")
In the United States, the famous missionary and pioneer sinologist Samuel Wells Williams made a public appeal to Congress to return a portion of the indemnity extorted from China in 1859. Although "it seems to be nearly impossible to rescue those in Shansi," he wrote, "the famishing in and around Tsinan, Schan Chau, The Chau, and Westerly can and ought to be accessible." A bill was accordingly drafted by a sympathetic congressman. But missionary humanitarianism and even American trade interests were overridden by the backlash of the Far West against the supposed "yellow peril" of immigrant labor. Starting in the sandlots of San Francisco in 1876, anti-Chinese violence had spread like a wildfire through the depressed towns and railroad camps of the Western states. In Congress, as a result, "the prejudice against the Chinese was too strong; Senator Hamlin reported the bill unfavorably, alleging that the starving would all be dead before the money could reach them in China."
The other powers were as unrelenting as the United States in their collection of indemnities from starving China. Meanwhile, fragmentary reports began to reveal the famine's terrible toll in Shaanxi, Hebei and Henan, where, as we have seen, fierce anti-foreignism had discouraged missionary contact. It wasn't until early 1879, for example, that Europeans got a first-hand glimpse of conditions in Henan when W. Hillier, another British consul working on behalf of China Famine Relief, passed through the province en route to distribute 2,000 taels of silver in Shanxi. In south Henan the land had already returned to cultivation, and angry crowds, shouting insults and anti-foreign slogans, threatened Hillier in the streets; but in the north, where drought still reigned, living human beings remained an uncommon sight in a silent landscape:
Many towns and villages were almost empty... [We heard] nothing but the echo of our own footsteps as we hurried through... cities of the dead. We had the curiosity to enter into one of these houses, but the sight that awaited us there gave us both so terrible a shock that we went into no more... We gave up talking much about the things we had seen. The misery was too deep to be discussed. Only in some homes were the dead in coffins or bricked in by their familiesβto foil the certain alternative of being exhumed and eaten by starving neighbors.
Recognizing that if relief grain could not get through to them, they must go to it, entire villages continued throughout the winter of 1878β79 to desert their homes in desperate migrations toward provincial capitals and, especially, the great entrepot of Tianjin. Unwittingly they were trading starvation for the deadly epidemics being incubated in fetid relief camps and shanty towns. "A hundred thousand refugees [mainly from Shaanxi] had flocked into Tianjin, finding shelter in 'hovels made of mud and millet stalks,' but typhus broke out and in the cold weather 400β600 died each night." Their plight was all the more pitiful because so many thousands of them were virtually naked, having sold their clothes long before for food. This epidemic phase of the famine had a microbiological momentum that extended mortality far beyond the spatial or social boundaries of starvation per se. Thus the typhus brought by famine refugees killed Europeans and Qing nobles as well as tens of thousands of plebeian city-dwellers in Beijing and Tianjin. Likewise, cholera, incubated in the flood-stricken districts of Fujian in 1876, worked its way north through China's coastal cities until it finally arrived in southern Japan.
Although the monsoon had finally returned to Shanxi in summer 1878, the resumption of normal agriculture, as in the Deccan, was incredibly difficult. Writing to the British ambassador, Timothy Richard explained that "in hundreds, or even thousands, of villages seven-tenths of the population are already dead," and that only 30 percent of the normal amount of grain had been sown. Some peasants were afraid of the violence that might result if they revealed seed corn that they had secretly hidden; while others were simply too sick or weak to work. Those who did manage to sow a crop then faced the challenge of guarding it against their famished neighbors. And when crops were finally harvested again in 1879, "a new horror then claimed more victims. Among those who had survived to enjoy eating again 'a pestilence of dysentery beat out typhus as soon as the harvest was gathered, and the stomachs of the people were inflamed by too great indulgence in unaccustomed foods.' Fields of millet stood unharvested, sagged and decayed." In this way famine and its allied diseases continued to decimate parts of north China until the beginning of 1880 or even later.
**II. Brazil**
Meanwhile, half a globe away, the interior of Brazil's Nordeste baked under a relentless sun and cloudless sky. The _sertΓ£o_ is a high, rolling plain broken by smooth-top tablelands and rocky monadnocks of decomposing granite. Rainfall is dramatically orchestrated by El NiΓ±o and few landscapes change their aspect so radically between seasons or wet and dry years. "Nature here rejoices," wrote Euclydes da Cunha in his epic _Os SertΓ΅es_ , "in a play of antitheses." When, after an arduous ride from the coastal CearΓ‘ capital of Fortaleza, the famed Harvard geologist Louis Agassiz and his wife first glimpsed the rainsoaked _sertΓ£o_ in April 1868, they were flabbergasted by its lushness. Expecting a wasteland, they instead beheld a "verdant prairie... beautifully green." Yet when Herbert Smith, the "special famine correspondent" for _Scribner's Magazine_ , looked down upon the CearΓ‘ interior a decade later, it was all antithesis: "a dry, cheerless desert, scorched with heat." As many as 500,000 _sertanejos_ had just perished from hunger and smallpox. (Da Cunha noted ghoulishly that under such conditions the bodies of dead men and horses were exquisitely mummified by the extreme aridity "without any unseemly decomposition.")
The drought in the Nordeste began six months after the failure of the summer monsoon in India. (Indian droughts, as we shall see, tend to "lead" El NiΓ±o warmings of the tropical eastern Pacific by a season, while Brazilian _secas_ "lag" by one, sometimes two seasons.) "Vague rumors of a drought," according to Smith, had first reached the coast in February 1877. The unease was greatest in CearΓ‘, where the previous year's harvest after scanty winter rains had been meager, but there was also concern about agricultural conditions in the high _sertΓ£o_ of Paraiba, Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Norte. By March, the dreaded "drought winds"βthe steady, desiccating northeasterliesβcontrolled the weather, and worried bishops ordered prayers _ad petendam pluviam_ in all the churches. "Most sertanejos," writes historian Roger Cunniff, "crossed the narrow line between hope for a belated winter and total despair during the first two weeks of April. Having already lost two plantings in the false winters of January and March, they fearfully refrained from casting what remained of their dwindling supplies when light rains appeared, lest they have nothing at all for the long treks which were already beginning, or to sustain themselves for the long months of drought most were now sure were upon them."
**Figure 2.7 Northeast Brazil: The _Grande Seca_ , 1876β78**
Later, some savants would claim that the drought had been "due to the extreme deforestation which had been provoked by the increasing cultivation of cotton." Certainly the collapse of the cotton boom had immiserated much of the backland population, and they now began to wander in search of work or subsistence of any kind. Some huddled around the handful of marginally prosperous market towns in the river valleys that drain the high _sertΓ£o_ , while others, often in extended-family groups, migrated hundreds of kilometers. The _fazendeiros_ (ranchers), for their part, ordered their _vaqueiros_ to take part of the cattle to the more humid serras or across the _sertΓ£o_ to PiauΓ, where the rains hadn't failed, while slaughtering the rest for hides and tallow. In some places, they shared this windfall of beef with the poor; in others, the poor simply took what they needed without permission. Sertanejos, "the most honest men in the world," began to rustle cattle, even pillage _fazendas_. In Quixeramobim, the poor briefly seized power, warning that "they do not have to die of hunger knowing that in the houses of the rich are money and food."
THE SCOURGED ONES
But charity and riot only postponed starvation until mid-summer. Then, according to Smith, "good men turned away and cried in their hearts to God." Even formerly well-off _fazendeiros_ traded their slaves for grain and deserted their dying ranches for the towns. The poor now foraged the skeletonal _caatinga_ (thorn forest) for _xique-xique_ cactus, the heart of the carnauba palm, even the roots of the _pΓ£o de moco_ , ordinarily used by ranchers to poison anthills. ("The refugees, desperate from hunger after their long march, and not knowing the plant's toxic character, cooked and ate it. A few hours later, they were completely blind.") In July and August, corpses began to appear by roadsides and abandoned homesteads; by September and October, dozens were dying daily and beriberi was rampant in the fetid refugee camps on the outskirts of towns like Acaracu, Ico and Telha. If the population of the _sertΓ£o_ , especially in CearΓ‘, were to survive in place until the winter, food had to be imported in massive quantity.
The commercial grain trade was as hopelessly unequal to this task as in India or China. A handful of opportunist merchants gouged spectacular profits without relieving any of the hunger of the interior. "Small supplies of provision came in from other provinces and were sent to the interior towns on the backs of horses; but often the animals died on the way, or the caravans were robbed. In some places, where they had no horses, provisions were brought in on men's shoulders. The few baskets of mandioca-meal, obtained in this way, were retailed by the merchants at fabulous pricesβfrequently eight or ten times above the normalβso that only the rich could buy." Since most local governments, apart from the wealthy port of Recife, were already bankrupt before the onset of drought, responsibility for the emergency passed to the provincial presidents, some of whom, like the recently appointed president of CearΓ‘, Caetano Estelita, were utterly unfamiliar with conditions in the backlands. Although the constitution of 1824 guaranteed subsistence as a right to every Brazilian citizen, the _sertanejos_ had few advocates. British utilitarianism and social Darwinism (above all, Herbert Spencer) had made rampant inroads in Liberal thinking, while the Conservatives followed a church hierarchy that preached that the drought "was God's punishment to Brazil for accepting the materialistic ways of the nineteenth century." ("Against God," thundered a Conservative leader during a legislative debate on famine relief, "there is no virtuous insurrection.")
Precious months, as a result, were lost in abstract philosophical debates before the Conservative Estelitaβshocked by the horde of indisputably famished _sertanejos_ suddenly descending on Fortalezaβbegan to send aid into the interior. By this point, there was virtually no pasturage or water left for cargo horses so it had become impractical to ship food directly from the coast. (The Cearense reported cases of all the animals in relief pack trains dying in futile attempts to deliver food to Taua and other interior municipios.) The president instead sent money, much of it raised by CearΓ‘n migrants in the rest of Brazil, to the besieged _sertΓ£o_ municipalities. It made depressingly little impact on the massive subsistence crisis.
The last hope of preventing a fatal stampede toward the coast was truly heroic action by the minister for imperial affairs, Antonio da Costa Pinto. Since the imperial government was also laboring under a heavy deficit, Costa Pinto instead chose to play the role of Sir Richard Temple, turning mere disaster into catastrophe. He authorized limited food shipments to the Nordeste but otherwise took control of relief expenditure away from the formerly autonomous provincial presidents. Meanwhile, as legislators in Rio wasted June and early July debating farfetched schemes for developing the _sertΓ£o_ , drought refugees were spilling out of the desertified interiors of CearΓ‘ and Pernambuco towards oases like the CarirΓ Valley in southeastern CearΓ‘, Triunfo in Pernambuco and Acu in Rio Grande do Norte. Far from mitigating the crisis, Cunniff points out, this simply generalized the immiseration to areas where the rains had not failed:
The masses of hungry people and cattle carried the destruction of the drought into regions that had escaped the meteorological effects. Triunfo complained that it had been converted into a "cattle ranch for the abuse of the poor by the rich." The roving cattle moved into the _agreste_ regions "... smashing the cane, manioc and other crops, and reducing to the last degree of misery and despair the class that lives exclusively from agricultural labor." Human refugees as well consumed and destroyed crops, quickly rendering the traditional agricultural hills and _brejos_ nearly as desperate for food as the drought regions.
In the Inhamuns _sertΓ£o_ in southwestern CearΓ‘, the leading oligarchs, the Feitosas, had temporarily quieted panic with food imports from unafflicted PiauΓ, while the provincial government provided some relief work for the poor. By June, however, even the well-to-do were ready to flee. "A prominent citizen of Saboeiro, Captain Salustio Ferrer, wrote on 12 June that migration was about the only course left open to most of the inhabitants of that _municipio_ , since it was becoming increasingly difficult to find water. Many leaders of the community, he added, were forming a caravan to depart for Piaui in the following month. 'Grave must have been our sins,' Captain Ferrer wrote of the _seca_ , 'to have deserved such horrible punishment.'" By mid-summer the region was almost deserted: only an estimated 10 percent of the populationβsome of them now _cangacerios_ βgrimly attempted to wait out the drought on their ruined farms and _fazendas_. "A large number," writes Billy Jaynes Chandler, "went to PiauΓ, particularly those who had some resources, while others sought refuge in Ipu, the Cariri and Fortaleza."
As the population of the _sertΓ£o_ now drew closer to the humid _zona de mata_ , the sugar planters and urban merchants were forced to weigh difficult alternatives. The frightened elites vacillated over whether to divert the _retirantes_ ("more wild beasts than rational human beings") to the labor-hungry Amazon, and thereby risk losing part of their surplus workforce, or allow them into the cities where, mixing with slaves and poor artisans, they might pose an insurrectionary threat. In Fortaleza, the pharmacist Rodolfo Theofilo kept a famous diary that chronicled the growing presence of desperate backlanders. "The sad procession," he wrote, "paraded along the streets of the capital at all hours... Real animated skeletons, with skin blackened by the dust from the roads and stuck to their bones, held out their hands begging from everyone they met." A wave of looting and theft by the refugees was countered by bourgeois vigilantism and lynching that "went unpunished because the retirante was considered a leprous dog who was going to stain the land."
**Figure 2.8 Exodus from the _SertΓ£o_**
Frightened by the strange army of ghostlike _sertanejos_ , the Liberal opposition in CearΓ‘ reluctantly agreed to support a Conservative plan to ship the _retirantes_ at imperial expense to the provinces of Amazonas and Para. Others were sent off to Recife, where they were loaded together with slaves on packets for transshipment to Rio and the labor-hungry southeast. Large landowners, however, expressed misgivings about such a massive exodus of workers, and Costa Pinto in Rio dragged his feet in remitting the promised subsidies. Grasping at an alternative policy to control an invasion that would eventually swell Fortaleza's population from 25,000 to 130,000, President Estelita "ordered rough shelters constructed for the hordes investing [the city] and a dole of both money and food allotted to those unable to work." Costa Pinto and his Conservative allies in Fortaleza, however, denounced this as a waste of money. Estelita, as a result, was replaced by a new, more conservative appointee, JoΓ£o Aguiar, who promptly discontinued the dole and public works. With Costa Pinto's support, he returned instead to the strategy of deporting the _sertanejos_ to the rainforests. Although thousands were debarked, usually in overcrowded and squalid conditions, there was not enough coastal shipping to keep up with the influx of refugees into Fortaleza and Recife. Meanwhile, on the rim of the _sertΓ£o_ , a human dam was about to burst.
THE EXODUS TO THE COAST
By New Year's Day 1878 perhaps 50,000 had died in CearΓ‘, several tens of thousands more in other provinces of the Northeast. For a long, terrible year, the majority of the _sertΓ£o_ 's people had clung to the land, waiting for the winter rains to work magic. In January it rained for a few days, raising spirits as well as a few blades of grass. Farmers scattered some of the seeds they had carefully guarded through months of hunger. But the skies cleared and the first planting shriveled. Scribner's correspondent Smith, who arrived at the end of the year, interviewed scores of survivors about what happened next.
First of March, and no rains. Government aid almost withdrawn. No food left in the villages; no hope for the starving peasants. Then, as by one impulse, a wild panic caught them. Four hundred thousand, they deserted the sertΓ£o and rushed down to the coast. Oh! it was terrible, that mad flight. Over all the roads there came streams of fugitives, men and women and little children, naked, lean, famine-weak, dragging wearily across the plains, staining the rocky mountain-paths with their bleeding feet, begging, praying at every house for a morsel of food. They were famished when they started. Two, three, four days at times, they held their way; then the children lagged behind in weakness, calling vainly to their panic-wild fathers; then men and women sank and died on the stones. I have talked with men who came from the interior with the great exodus; they tell stories of suffering to wring one's heart; they tell of skeleton corpses unburied by the road-side, for a hundred thousand dead (some say a hundred and fifty thousand) were left by the way.
The _retirada_ to the coast overwhelmed provincial resources. In the drought-famine's epicenter, the state of CearΓ‘, almost total social collapse had occurred by the spring of 1878. "The treasury was empty, commerce nonexistent, and over a hundred thousand refugees clogged the towns on and near the coast... Outlaw bands roamed the backlands, threatening to displace completely the fragmented civil authority." "It is horrible to see," wrote the future "saint of JoΓ£seiro," the priest CΓcero RomΓ£o Batista, "that the despair of hunger has led the indigent population to eat cows that have died of carbuncle, knowing, and saying, that they will soon die from eating them, and eating horses, dogs, cane already chewed by others, pieces of leather, and anything else they can find. It is horror upon horror!" A trader told Smith "that a refugee asked permission to kill rats in his store, that he might eat them." Horrifying rumors of cannibalism were relayed as far as Rio by _retirantes_.
After a starving mob looted the municipal market in Fortaleza, the middle classes locked themselves in their big houses. President Aguiar, who had compounded the chaos by cutting off relief, had fled the province in early February, and power finally passed from the defeated and bitterly divided Conservatives to the Liberal Party. Equally opposed to Estelita's dole, the Liberals extolled the example of the Lytton administration in India and proposed to restore order in CearΓ‘ with strictly "scientific British methods." Their approach, as Cunniff points out, had been eloquently outlined by the famous engineer and Liberal ideologue Andre Reboucas the previous October during a three-day debate at the Polytechnic Institute in Rio:
Although he insisted that the government had a constitutional obligation to render relief to every citizen, he agreed with the rising sentiment that it should not be in the form of a dole. There was, he said, a lamentable Latin tendency to confuse relief with charity. Citing the "immortal" Richard Cobden... he urged salaried employment on public works as the most efficient and morally appropriate remedy. He was guided by the example of the British government's handling of the severe drought in India, which had begun in 1876 and was still in progress, an account of which he had just read in the _Journal des Economistes_.
"Motivated primarily by fears of revolution and epidemic," the new Liberal president of CearΓ‘, JosΓ© de Albuquerque, stepped up the shipments of labor-power to Amazonas and Para, in some cases allowing local elites to forcibly deport _retirantes_. "Consciously following the example of the British government in India, he ordered local relief committees to begin projects suitable to unskilled labor and to give relief only in exchange for labor." In Fortaleza, tens of thousands of _retirantes_ were relocated to makeshift work camps outside the city, where they toiled in construction gangs of one hundred. Elsewhere, in Pernambuco as well as CearΓ‘, the _sertanejos_ provided labor armies for the railroads (most of them never completed) that the Liberals hoped to build with imperial support. Although the ration in the campsβ"one-half kilogram of meat, one liter of manioc flour and one liter of a vegetable daily"βwas a banquet compared to the Temple wage, the living conditions were fully as deplorable as in the Deccan. "The refugees," reported Smith, "were huddled together about Fortaleza and Aracaty, barely sheltered from the sun in huts of boughs or palm leaves. The camps were filthy to the last degree; no attempt was made to enforce sanitary rules."
**Figure 2.9 _Retirantes_ : CearΓ‘, 1877**
Before the famine, smallpox outbreaks had been confined to small scattered pockets of the _sertΓ£o_ , and most of the population had lost the community resistance that comes from surviving regular exposure. Equally, for reasons that remain unclear, vaccination was uncommon in the rural Nordeste. As a result, the squalid work camps provided "virgin soil" for smallpox in the same way that the Indian camps had given full scope to murderous cholera outbreaks. "The greatest horror of the drought," smallpox, reached CearΓ‘ in the middle of 1878 after having ravaged the Paraiban capital of JoΓ£o Pessoa. Smith estimated that one-third of the population of Fortaleza died in the months of November and December 1878 alone; while Albuquerque testified that 100,000 had perished in CearΓ‘ by the end of 1879, including his own wife. "The Imperial government's only response to the emergency," says Cunniff, "was to send limited quantities of weak vaccine." Cearense refugees subsequently carried the epidemic as far afield as BelΓ©m and Rio de Janeiro. A popular poet wrote of the despair of the retirantes trapped between starvation and disease:
Let us march on and face
Thirty thousand epidemics
Cold, Dropsy,
Which no one can escape.
Those who go to the lowlands
Die of the epidemic,
Those who stay in the _sertΓ£o_
Go hungry every day.
Although the government ordered a cessation of all relief in June 1879 and thousands of _retirantes_ were forcibly expelled from Recife, the great drought did not actually end until the beginning of March 1880, when the rains turned the _sertΓ£o_ green for the first time in more than three years. With 80 percent of the herds destroyed, even _fazendeiros_ were temporarily forced to scratch at the earth for their subsistence. Much of the _sertΓ£o_ never completely recovered. Surveys by Cearense officials over the next decade revealed the profundity of the _seca_ 's impact. In Arneiros, the _vereadores_ in 1881 "estimated that 90 per cent of the inhabitants left the municipio during the drought and that 50 per cent of those had not returned by August 1881, two winter seasons after it ended. In regard to the recovery of the cattle industry, the provincial president reported in 1887 that in a few areas herds were beginning to near their 1876 size. Within the Inhumans, there are many who believe that area never fully recovered from the drought of 1877β79, a result of the havoc wrought on fortunes and herds and the general feeling of demoralization which ensued. The Great Drought, it is said, cast a long shadow."
Indeed, Gilberto Freire explains, the "apocalyptic double sevens [1877]" became the "dramatic synthesis" in Brazilian memory of the conjoined tragedies of drought and underdevelopment. Yet some sectors of the Nordeste's ruling class discovered that the "drought industry" was more profitable than the declining regional staples of sugar and cotton. This was certainly true for Singlehurst, Brocklehurst and Company, the British merchant house in Fortaleza, which supplied vast quantities of provisions to the government and transported thousands of _retirantes_ to the Amazon on their coastal steamers. Likewise, big sugar planters profiteered from lucrative imperial grants for temporarily putting drought refugees to work. A precedent was thus set for allowing the _coroneis_ (the landowners who dominated provincial and local politics in the Nordeste) to plunder disaster aid. "Development" became simply a euphemism for subsidizing a reactionary social order, and over the next century vast sums of "drought relief" disappeared into the _sertΓ£o_ without leaving behind a single irrigation ditch or usable reservoir for its long-suffering population.
The "double sevens," however, did spell the beginning of the end to slavery in Brazil. Land, cattle and free labor in the _sertΓ£o_ became almost valueless commodities during the drought, leaving slaves, in keen demand by Paulista coffee planters, as the major fungible asset of the _fazendeiros_. Selling slaves to the south, like exporting free labor to the Amazon, generated obscene prosperity amid general catastrophe. "The Baron Ibiapaba, Joaquim da Cunha Freire, for example, profited greatly, being the principal exporter of human cargo from both Fortaleza and Mossoro. From Fortaleza alone, he was reputed to have sold at least fifteen thousand slaves south." This sudden revival on a grand scale of the slave trade, with all the brutal public spectacles that accompanied it, provoked enormous public resentment, particularly in CearΓ‘ where emancipation societies formed in virtually every town. Within six years, popular agitation had not only ended slavery in CearΓ‘, the first province to do so, but sparked similar crusades across the Northeast. Four years later, in the final twilight of the old Empire, slavery was abolished throughout Brazil.
##
## **Gunboats and Messiahs**
> Previously one laughed at the state of one's heart; now nothing at all elicits joy or laughter. It is said that people live on hope. I have no hope even of living.
>
> β Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
India, China and Brazil accounted for the most massive mortality, but the world drought of the 1870s had profound and deadly impacts in at least a dozen other lands. Peasant producers, as we have seen, were already reeling from the impact of the trade depression, which deepened abruptly in 1877. Drought and famine gave foreign creditors, allied with indigenous moneylenders and compradores, new opportunities to tighten control over local rural economies through debt or outright expropriation. Pauperized countrysides likewise provided rich harvests of cheap plantation labor as well as missionary converts and orphans to be raised in the faith. And where native states retained their independence, the widespread subsistence crises in Asia and Africa invited a new wave of colonial expansion that was resisted in many cases by indigenous millenarianism. El NiΓ±o was thus followed by gunboats and messiahs as well as by famine and disease.
**Resisting Famine in Colonial Asia**
In the Korean case, the opportunist power was Japan. In a familiar pattern, the drought in north China extended latitudinally across the Yellow Sea into Korea's breadbasket Cholla region. The ensuing famine and peasant unrest coincided with the implementation of the "open door" treaty that Meiji Japan had extorted from Korea in 1876 and offered the Japanese a pretext for further prying open the Hermit Kingdom for economic exploitation. Thus Japanese envoy Hanabusa, meeting with wary Korean officials aboard a warship in November 1877, relentlessly lobbied them to accept a debt of relief. "After exchanging gifts they talked about the past year's drought. 'The Koreans said it was terrible and is equally bad this year.' Hanabusa asked if they would like to get some Japanese rice." The Koreans made a deliberately uninterpretable reply, but Hanabusa renewed his solicitations at a meeting in Seoul several weeks later. "Please send this message to your government... Since coming into your country we have been entertained with many dishes by your government officials, and I thank you very much. But when I think of hungry people even this sweet food will not go into my stomach." When his hosts replied that Korea was "too small" to undertake the reciprocal obligation of supplying Japan with rice during a famine there, Hanabusa reassured them that such a situation would never arise. Within a decade, however, the commercial export of rice from southern Korea to Japan during a drought would become a revolutionary grievance among hungry peasants in the Cholla provinces.
In Vietnam the coincidence of drought-famine and cholera was a bellows that fanned the embers of peasant anti-colonial resistance into millenarian revolt. With the killing in 1872 of Tran van Thanh, the leader of the populist Dao Lanh sect, the French believed they had pacified their new colony. "Unfortunately," as Reynaldo Ileto points out, "they had not reckoned on the popular belief in reincarnation." As the threat of famine spread panic through the countryside in 1877, another Dao Lanh apostle, Nam Thiep, announced that he was Tran's incarnation and "that the time had come to expel the French" (widely believed to be responsible for this conjugation of disasters). "Nam Thiep was able to unify the Dao Lanh groups and mount a rebellion in 1878. He announced that the Low Era was ending, and that the reign of the Emperor of Light... was being established. Peasants armed with bamboo spears and amulets attacked French garrisons, only to be driven back decisively by rifle fire. But this did not faze Nam Thiep, who in 1879 proclaimed himself a living Buddha and built a new community on Elephant Mountain, in the region of the Seven Mountains."
In the Dutch East Indies, meanwhile, drought ravaged fields and forests across two-thirds of the vast archipelago. Batavia (Jakarta), for example, reported less than one-third of its normal rainfall from May 1877 through February 1878 (a brief respite in the boreal spring was followed by six more dry months until January 1879). Crop failure, exacerbated by coffee blight and other fungoid plant diseases, coincided with a costly rinderpest epidemic that decimated buffalo, pigs, even elephants. And, as in the 1990s, El NiΓ±o was synonymous with vast, mysterious forest fires. Writing from the normally luxuriant Sundas, the British naturalist Henry Forbes described local foreboding as the landscape seemed to spontaneously ignite.
The parched surface of the ground broke up into ravine-like cracks, which, extending from four to five feet in depth and two to three in breadth, destroyed great numbers of the forest-trees by encircling and snapping off their root. Shrubs and small trees in exposed places were simply burned up in broad patches... Crops of all kinds failed, while devastating fires, whose origin could seldom be traced, were so frequent in the forest and in the great _alang-alang_ fields, that the population lived in constant fear of their villages and even of their lives and stock. It was in vain that the natives, following their superstitious rites, carried their cats in procession, to the sound of gongs and the clattering of rice blocks, to the nearest streams to bathe and sprinkle them; the rain after such a ceremony ought to have come, but it did not.
On Borneo/Kalimantan, according to Han Knapen, the drought was a godsend to the Dutch, long frustrated by their inability to subordinate the ruggedly independent Dayak communities that controlled vast tracts of valuable rainforest. Although the commercially sophisticated Dayaks grew or harvested commodities for the world market like rattan and getah perca (indispensable in undersea telegraph cables), they fiercely resisted sedentarization and plantation labor. At last in 1877, hunger gave the Dutch a means of coercion: "The rice barns were empty and famine was imminent. In order to obtain money to buy rice, only two options were left to the Dayak: either to collect more getah perca (of which the producing tree was already becoming extinct) or to sell one's labour to the Dutch, who had been eagerly looking for 'hands' for at least two centuries. Now... the Dutch finally had the labour to dig a canal linking the Kahayan River with Banjarmasin and thereby to push the trade in forest products up to unprecedented levels. Even the most remote parts of Borneo were now becoming part of the global economy, exposing the local population both to new opportunities and to new risks."
But the drought was most life-threatening in the overcrowded and geographically isolated Residency of Bagelen in south-central Java, where crop disease in 1875 had already depleted local grain reserves. The pressure of the so-called Cultivation System or _cultuurstelsel_ , which compelled villages to cultivate export crops for the benefit of the Netherlands at the expense of their own subsistence, was higher here, as measured by the proportion of acreage committed to exports, than anywhere else in Java. Although in its death throes in 1877βcondemned as "an impediment to private enterprise"βthe _cultuurstelsel_ had been crucial to the Netherlands' great economic revival in the earlier Victorian period. Remittances forcibly extracted from the Javanese peasantry had at one point provided fully one-third of state revenues. Conversely, the system's pressures on local producers during the episodically dry years from 1843 to 1849, vividly described in Multatuli's great anticolonial novel _Max Havelaar_ (1860), had led to massive famine mortality and flight from the land. There was such distress that "in one regency the population fell from 336,000 to 120,000 and in another from 89,500 to 9,000."
Local officials in Bagelen, where _cultuurstelsel_ methods still remained entrenched, feared that a disaster of similar magnitude was again at hand. When they attempted to buy rice to counter speculation, they were severely censured Γ la Lytton by the Council of the Dutch East Indies for abandoning free-market rectitude. Batavia also insisted that the famished peasantry punctually pay its annual land tax. Villagers were thus forced to sell their cattle and other possessions to the same merchants who hoarded the local grain supply. Again, as in south India, tens of thousands of them were cut down by cholera before they could die of starvation. This conveniently allowed the Dutch to claim that epidemic rather than famine was the cause of excessive local mortality.
In the Philippines, the great drought struck hardest at the western Visayas, especially the island of Negros, where the explosive growth of sugar monoculture had displaced traditional food self-sufficiency. Just as the Philippines has been often described as a "Latin American social formation in East Asia," likewise the Occidental province of Negros, whose population skyrocketed from 18,805 in 1855 to 308,272 in 1898, came to replicate most of the exploitative and unsustainable characteristics of distant Caribbean sugar colonies. Former Spanish colonial officials and army officers, as well as wealthy mestizo merchants, used their political connections to wrest "through usury, terror, or purchase" vast tracts of land in Occidental's western plains from pioneering Panayan peasants who had first cleared the tropical forests in the 1850s. They were replaced first by immigrant sharecroppers, then by debt-bonded wage laborers. As Violeta Lopez-Gonzaga has emphasized, sugar inexorably became an ecology of hunger:
The widespread fencing of land and the emergence of the haciendas, landlords, and a landless proletariat, further led to rural indebtedness, widespread poverty, seasonal scarcity of food, and increasingly low level of nutrition and seriously adverse health conditions. Inevitably, such conditions led to high mortality rates which were the final result of a complex of factors ranging from hunger, natural calamities and epidemics, to the absence of health services. Outside sugar, trading was minimal and the prices of food commodities very high. With the limited development of infrastructure, traded food items hardly reached the interior areas which had been cleared of forest and the traditional subsistence patches of the natives or the small migrant farmers. The growing commitment of agriculture to sugarcane production made the emergent labouring class vulnerable to hunger with the onslaught of storm, drought or a plague of locusts. In fact, from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, the scourge of hunger frequently struck the people of Negros.
Locust plagues, particularly devastating to rice crops, were the constant companion to the long drought from 1876 to 1878. In the absence of any organized relief effort by corrupt Spanish authorities, the astronomical rise in rice prices in conjunction with low sugar prices and high unemployment condemned large numbers of hacienda day-laborers and poor townspeople to starvation. Parish records suggest an island-wide excess mortality of at least 10 percent, with the rates rising as high as 50 percent in the town of Hinigaran and 30 percent in the town of Villadolid. As in India and Java, many of those who were weakened but not killed by the famine were subsequently picked off by cholera and malaria.
Negros's neighbor island, Panay, the sacred capital of Visayan shamanism (the _babaylan_ ), also suffered massive mortality during the drought. Again, starvation was conditioned by a recent abrupt deterioration in economic autonomy and well-being. In the 1850s _sinamay_ textiles sustained a rich trade that made Panay's principal port of Iloilo a "dynamic commercial entrepot... second only to Manila in size and importance." Within twenty years, however, local textile production was destroyed and once-prosperous Panay weavers were _indio_ peons on the sugar plantations of Negros. As Michael Billig explains, the process was expedited by an extraordinary representative of free trade imperialism:
In 1855 Iloilo was officially opened to foreign commerce, and the next year the British sent a vice-consul, Nicholas Loney, to the city. Loney was to be the single most potent force in bringing down the Iloilo textile industry and building up the Negros sugar industry. Aside from being vice-consul, he was the commercial agent for British firms and an indefatigable purveyor of British goods. He pursued a local mission of substituting cheaper, machine-made British textiles for the locally made ones and encouraging the production of sugar as a profitable return cargo... The fledgling sugar industry, unlike the older textile business, was thoroughly dependent on foreign capital. Loney lent as much as P75,000 at a time at the low rate of 8 percent (compared to the 30β40 percent of the moneylenders) and he provided state-of-the-art milling equipment at cost, under the condition that the Loney & Ker Company be the sole purchaser of the produce... [He] was... remarkably successful in his mission. Iloilo's textile exports to Manila dwindled from 141,420 _piezas_ in 1863, to 30,673 in 1864, to 12,700 in 1869, to 5,100 in 1873.
Thus the ruined weaving villages of Panay, like their sister towns in Negros, had few resources to resist crop failure and price inflation. The records of the Augustinians, cited by Filomeno Aguilar, note the corpses strewn in the streets of San Joaquin in 1877, while "oral tradition among shamans of Panay recount 'three years' of drought and famine that ravaged this town and left people dying of starvation and thirst, as all the rivers and springs had dried up." As in Korea and Vietnam, famine produced a resurgence of folk messianism, in this case in magical rain-making competition with the Spanish friars.
According to the lore, people sought help from the parish priest, but he failed to induce rain. Desperate in his inability to alleviate the disaster, the curate advised the town [San Joaquin] leaders to call upon a _babaylan_ known as Estrella Bangotbanwa, who ordered that seven black pigs be butchered, shaved, and covered with black cloth. She then took a black pig from the convent to the plaza, where she pressed its mouth to the ground until it gave a loud squeak. Suddenly, the sky turned dark and a heavy downpour followed.
Aguilar explains how the supernatural impotence of the Spanish priests in face of the drought, together with the inability of officials to contain the cholera epidemic that followed in its wake, "inspired the shamans to mount direct challenges to a disintegrating colonial state, converting the whole of the Visayas into a theater of resistance." By the late 1880s, thousands of peasants and aborigines in both Panay and Negros (in a movement strikingly analogous to the millenarian refuges of JoΓ£seiro and Canudos in contemporary northeast Brazil) had withdrawn into autonomous armed communities in the mountains led by prominent _babaylans_ like Panay's Clara Tarrosa, "an eighty-year-old woman... who claimed to be the 'Virgin Mary,' " or Negros's Ponciano Elopre, a transvestite miracle-worker known as Dios Buhawi (the Waterspout God) for his/her skill in rainmaking. Despite brutal retaliations, including massacres and summary executions, Spanish power essentially collapsed in the island interiors, leaving the _babaylans_ and their followers to confront the more ruthless, usurper colonialism of the Americans a decade later.
The Kanaks of New Caledonia, also stirred to rebellion by El NiΓ±o drought and hunger, made a desperate bid in 1878 to liberate the interior of their island from French colons and penal concessionaires. The French invasion of New Caledonia in 1853 had been a singular catastrophe for Kanak society. "In less than two years," writes Myriam Dornoy, "... the local chiefly system was destroyed, and the Melanesians were dispossessed of nine-tenths of their best land and pushed into the mountainous interior. Assuming that the Melanesians would soon disappear, the French employed the policy they had used in Algeriaβrefoulementβwhich meant that Melanesians were regrouped arbitrarily and stationed on limited reserves which in fact were infringed on little by little, or were situated in infertile zones not favoured by the colons." This indigenous land shortage (the "basic factor in the great native insurrection in 1878") aggravated tribal conflict, as did the French practice of replacing village chiefs with their own sycophants. The "New Imperialists" of the Third Republicβintent on exorcising the national humiliation of 1871 through colonial conquestβcontinued the Second Empire's huge thefts of Kanak subsistence space. When the natives protested, the Republicans haughtily decreed that "the native is not the owner of the land, and when the French government appropriates land, it just takes back its own land."
Ultimately, a "disastrous drought at the end of 1877" (New Caledonian agriculture, as we shall see in chapter 8, is highly vulnerable to ENSO) combined with French arrogance generated a crisis that enabled Chief Atai in the La Foa Valley of central Grande Terre to bring together a coalition of previously hostile tribe. (In a meeting with French Governor Olry, Atai had emptied two sacks at his feet: one full of soil, the other of pebbles. "Here is what we used to have," Atai explained, "and here is what you are leaving us!") Kanak patience was pushed beyond all limits, as Martyn Lyons explains, by the drought-exacerbated deprecations of European cattle of precious yam and taro fields.
The livestock problem had been severely aggravated in 1878 by the drought of the previous year. This meant that cattle and other livestock had to search even further afield than usual for adequate fodder, and the native plantations were very tempting targets for hunger-stricken animals. The territory between Noumea and Bouloupari was especially dry, and graziers were allowed to take their herds onto government property near Ourail, for a small fee. The cattle arrived there starving in an area of flourishing native fields, and set about systematically destroying them. _Colons_ did all they could to avoid the capital expenditure involved in constructing effective enclosures. Their attitude was that if the Kanaks wanted proper protection, they should build their own. One Kanak replied to a stockraiser who made such a suggestion: "When my taros go and eat up your cattle, then I'll put up a fence."
Following the arrest of several traditional chiefs in June 1878, accumulated Kanak anger erupted in a succession of ferocious assaults on white homesteads and gendarme posts. Caught by complete surprise, 200 Europeans were killed and panic spread to Noumea where the settler mouthpiece _La Nouvelle Caledonie_ called for a "war of extermination against all Melanesians." With reinforcements from Indochina and the aid of Kanak mercenaries from coastal tribes, French _colonnes mobiles_ under the celebrated Captain Riviere devastated much of the central region: burning "hundreds of villages," confiscating food stores, destroying irrigation systems, killing warriors on sight, and handing over their women as booty to the pro-French tribes. The charismatic Atai was killed in a surprise attack, and his head with its mane of snow-white hair was sent to Paris to be scrutinized by savants.
Although "the colonial regime had experienced a very severe shock, and had only reasserted its dominance with very great difficulty," the cost of defeat to the rebel Kanak tribes was truly staggering. In addition to thousands of casualties and the deportation of their surviving leaders, native New Caledonians were permanently uprooted from the rich west coast of Grande Terre in favor of plantations, ranches and penal colonies. (As Lyons points out, "the division between the mainly French west coast and mainly Kanak east coast persists today.")
Among the eyewitnesses to the Kanak tragedy was a survivor of another defeated insurrection: Louise Michel, "the Red Virgin of Paris." Although some of Communards in penal exile on New Caledonia joined the race war against the Kanaks, Michel passionately supported the Kanak struggle for "liberty and dignity." She translated some of the haunting war chants of the rebel bard Andia (killed with Atai) and gave half of her famous red scarf ("the red scarf of the Commune that I had hidden from every search") to two native friends who joined the insurgents. As she explained in her _Memoirs_ :
The Kanakan Insurrection of 1878 failed. 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. When they sent the head of Atai to Paris, 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."
**Drought and Imperial Design in Africa**
In southern Africa, the great drought became the chief ally of Portuguese and British aggression against still independent African societies. The Angolan coast has famously erratic rainfall, especially in the environmentally unstable region around Luanda, but the drought that began in 1876 was exceptional both in its duration, lasting until the early 1880s, and its scale, affecting populations as far inland as the Huila highlands. "The majority of inhabitants of this land are mummies rather than human beings," complained Luanda's medical officer in 1876. A year later it was noted that "the extreme weakness of African porters hired from the Golungo Alto district resulted in fourteen deaths during a four-day march to Massangano"; while throughout 1878 "five or six people a day were reported dying from starvation in Luanda." As Jill Dias has shown, "the intensification of external trade pressures and colonial intervention in Angola from the 1870s onwards both influenced the growing severity of famine and disease and was influenced by it." Despite the world trade recession, Angola's export economy had found several profitable niches for rapid growth directly at the expense of African grazing and subsistence farming.
A commercial "boom" in rubber and, to a lesser extent, in coffee, produced a fever of gathering and marketing these products among Africans in most parts of Angola. European trade and agriculture expanded within the colonial enclaves centered on Luanda, Benguela and Mossamedes. New pockets of white settlement and farmland sprang up in the Porto Amboim hinterland and the Huila highlands. The slave trade also increased as a result of the rapidly rising demand for labour by SΓ£o TomΓ© planters eager to benefit from the island's cocoa "boom." Finally the initiation of a more vigorous programme of colonial expansion led to the beginnings of military occupation of Kongo, Luanda and the Ovimbundu highlands.
During a previous severe drought in the late 1860s, the Portuguese themselves had been forced to retreat from plantations and forts in frontier regions like the edge of the Huila highlands. Now, with the emergence of drought- and-famine-related epidemics of smallpox, malaria, dysentery and sand jiggers, colonial troops made unprecedented headway against weakened populations in Kongo and to the east and south of Kwanza. Likewise, Dias adds, "The debilitating effects of hunger and disease in the decade of the 1870s may go far towards explaining why the social and political tensions generated by the spread of white plantations did not explode in revolt within the Portuguese enclave." Thereafter, the extension of the plantation system and the consolidation of colonial power in the Angolan interior were carefully synchronized to the sinister rhythm of drought and disease, as in 1886β87, 1890β91, 1898β99, 1911 and 1916.
The drought was an even more important turning point in the highveld and its borderlands, where it sounded the deathknell of Xhosa, Zulu and even, temporarily, Boer independence. South Africa's seeming prosperity in the early 1870s, fueled by the diamond and wool booms, barely concealed the emergent ecological crisis as too many people and cattle competed for reliably watered grazing land. The relief of the veld with its innumerable rain shadows creates an intricate mosaic of rainfall variation as well as a complex schedule of ripening of pasturage: an environmental formula for interminable friction between pastoral communities. The ceaseless encroachment of Europeans upon the range resources of African societies, whose populations were surging, generated, in Donald Morris's words, "an explosive situation which the next drought might spark off." And the drought of 1876β79 was the most ruinous since the infamous arid spell of the early 1820s (probably arising out of back-to-back El NiΓ±o events) that had given the Zulu Mfecaneβthe violent redistribution of grazing territories and homelands under Shakaβits desperate energy.
In the Eastern Cape and Natal, European stockraisers were battered by the simultaneous crash of wool export prices and the dying off of their herds. Nature recounted how in the Cape, "hitherto well-to-do colonists" had to go into "menial service in exchange for the barest necessities of life." The Transvaal Boers, though less dependent upon world markets, were still hard hit by the conjuncture of drought, cattle disease and a growing shortage of land. For Africans, of course, climate shocks were magnified by their economic marginality. "Both Ciskei and Transkei," Morris writes, "were greatly overcrowded with Europeans, natives and cattle, and the land was overgrazed and failing. [The] ruinous drought had brought the frail native economy to the edge of collapse, and complaints of trespass and cattle theft were unending." In Basutoland, "two-thirds of the crop failed and the number of men seeking work doubled in a year," while, further north, "the Pedi kingdom began to suffer from increased pressure on resources, the result of natural increase, the influx of refugees and recurrent drought."
Nor was Zululandβthe greatest surviving redoubt of African powerβimmune. "Despite the absence of European settlers," explains Donald Morris, "this kingdom suffered from the same land shortage as the other territories. Many of the well-watered sections were hilly and stony, other grassy slopes and elevated flats were infected with lung sickness and red-water fever had ravaged the Zulu herds after Cetshwayo's coronation, and the tsetse fly barred broad belts to settlement. Primitive agriculture made inefficient use of what remained, and the population of perhaps a third of a million Zulus was thickly clustered about such centers as the royal Kraal at Ulundi while other sections were deserted. The drought of 1877 and the winter months thus sent a wave of pressure surging against the fertile lands between the headwaters of the Buffalo and the Pongola Rivers, which had been a subject of dispute with the Transvaal since 1861."
The drought crisis, which weakened both African and Afrikaans societies as well as increasing the tensions between them, was an undisguised blessing to imperial planners in London. Since 1875, Disraeli and his colonial secretary, Lord Carnarvon, had been committed to a "Confederation Scheme" that envisioned a single British hegemony over the southern cone of Africa. "Carnarvon's design," according to Cain and Hopkins, "was to turn central Africa and Mozambique into labour reserves for the mines and farms of the south." The discovery of the great Kimberley diamond pipes had overnight made South Africa a major arena for capitalist investment, but the British were stymied by the lack of control over African labor, a problem that was considered insuperable as long as militarily independent African societies continued to exist on the periphery of the diamond fields. Thus from his arrival in South Africa in March 1877, Carnarvon's special high commissioner Sir Bartle Frere (a former governor of Bombay) moved with extraordinary energy to impose British power on the drought-weakened Bantus and Boers alike.
Within a year he had raised the Union Jack over the Transvaal as well as ruthlessly crushed a last-ditch defense of Xhosa independence by Sarhili's Gcaleka in the Transkei: the ninth and last of the CapeβXhosa wars. Cape troops in 1878 also put down a rebellion, "sharpened by drought," among the mixed race Griqua along the lower Orange River. Frere's full attention then focused on a lightning campaign against Cetshwayo's Zulu kingdom. Although loyal allies of the British in their conflict with the Boer republics, the powerful Zulu kept a "spiritual fire" burning among Africansβ"the vision of an armed and defiant black nation"βthat Frere was determined to extinguish.
In final talks before the British invasion, the anguished and betrayed Zulu monarch discerned a sinister connection between the high commissioner's perfidy and the drought that was devastating his herds:
"What have I done or said to the Great House of England?... What have I done to the Great White Chief?"
"I feel the English Chiefs have stopped the rain, and the land is being destroyed."
"The English Chiefs are speaking. They have always told me that a kraal of blood cannot stand, and I wish to sit quietly, according to their orders, and cultivate the land. I do not know anything about war, and want the Great Chiefs to send me the rain."
Carnarvon and Frere sent the British army instead. Arrogantly underestimating the military organization and valor of Cetshwayo's regiments, 1,600 crack British soldiers were annihilated at Isandhlwana in 1879. The Empire struck back, in turn, with a "systematic strategy of the burning of homes, the seizure of cattle in areas which the Zulus had not evacuated and... the destruction of the economic foundations of Zululand." Indeed, Michael Lieven claims, "Genocide came close to being adopted as official policy." Although the Zulu, overwhelmed as much by famine as by firepower, eventually surrendered in July 1879, the example of Isandhlwana, Britain's greatest military disaster since the charge of the Light Brigade, inspired both the Sotho and Pede to protracted resistance, and, even more ominously for Carnarvon's grand design, gave the Afrikaners under the tough leadership of Paul Kruger the military confidence to retrieve their independence at Majuba Hill in 1881 and assert control of the Rand's mineral wealth.
**North Africa's 'Open Tombs'**
Disraeli's New Imperialism was more successful in Egypt, where the full human impact of the poor northeast African rains of autumn 1876 and the low Nile of 1877 was not felt until the beginning of 1878, when famine was receding in south Asia and north China. In one of the most dramatic Nile failures in half a millennium, the flood crest in 1877 had been six feet below average and more than one-third of the crop area could not be irrigated. The drought struck a peasantry already reeling from collapsing export prices, high indebtedness, a rinderpest epidemic and overtaxation. Cotton prices, already depressed by the return of the American South to world trade, slumped further with the world trade depression. After twenty years of being "an interest milk cow for European investors," the khedive was forced to default in 1876, surrendering control over revenues to a Franco-British Dual Control Commission. "Now the claims of European capital," wrote Rosa Luxemburg later, "became the pivot of economic life and the sole consideration of the financial system." A system of Mixed Tribunals was established that allowed European creditors to directly attach the property of peasant smallholders, thus overriding the ancient Egyptian-Islamic tradition that tenancy was guaranteed for life. Under extreme European pressure, regiments of tax collectors, with moneylenders following them "like a vulture after a cow," imposed a reign of terror throughout the Nile Valley. Peasants who hid cattle or resisted the confiscation of their property were brutally flogged in front of their neighbors.
Wilfred Blunt, traveling through Egypt on the eve of the famine, was shocked by the misery that the European creditors were creating in the countryside. "It was rare in those days to see a man in the fields with a turban on his head, or more than a shirt on his back... The principal towns on market days were full of women selling their clothes and their silver ornaments to the Greek usurers, because the tax collectors were in their village, whip in hand." The British consul in Cairo wrote to London that peasants were so desperate to escape the tax collector that they were simply giving their land away. "Many of the poorer classes of native, calculating that they could not obtain from the produce of the land sufficient to pay the increased demands, offered their lands gratis to any person who would relieve them of it and pay the newly imposed tax."
Despite the failure of the Nile and widespread reports of starvation in the summer of 1878, tax collectors continued to mercilessly bastinado the peasantry. In Lower Egypt, where the drought "hurt peasants badly," widespread foreclosures transformed a stratum of smallholders into impoverished day laborers on the latifundia of Ottoman-Egyptian nobles. _The Times_ opined that boasts of triumphant revenue expeditions to the Delta "sound[ed] strangely by the side of the news that people are starving by the roadside, that great tracts of country are uncultivated, because of the physical burdens, and that the farmers have sold their cattle, the women their finery, and that the usurers are filling the mortgage offices with their bonds, and the courts with their suits of foreclosure."
In Upper Egypt, where ecology confined farmers to a single annual crop, the confiscation of cattle, grain reserves, seed corn and agricultural tools in the wake of the drought was literally murderous. In early 1879, a special commissioner investigating famine conditions between Sohag and Girga "reported that the number who had died of starvation and as a result of the want of sufficient food was not less than ten thousand... He added that all this was the direct result of poverty arising from over-taxation." Alexander Baird, a frequent winter tourist who had been conscripted to help organize an impromptu British relief effort, confirmed the acuity of famine in the Girga area. "It is almost incredible the distances travelled by women and children, begging from village to village... The poor were in some instances reduced to such extremities of hunger that they were driven to satisfy their cravings with the refuse and garbage of the street."
Faced with death, or at least immiseration, some peasants revolted. "In late 1877 British sources in Aswan and Luxor underlined the hazards of traveling in Upper Egypt owing to peasant banditry, especially between Sohag and Girga." These were the phantoms that haunted the Grants' trip to Thebes. When Cairo sent 2,000 cavalry to quell the robberies, the outlaw farmers took to the hills where, according to Juan Cole, they unfurled a banner of social revolt. "It is hard to know how to think of the peasant brigandage of 1879 except as social banditry of the sort described by Eric Hobsbawm. The bandit gang operating between Sohag and Girga employed a rhetoric of social justice, vowing to unite those peasants oppressed by the state's overtaxation and brutal treatment of its subjects."
In the Maghreb, meanwhile, Algeria's fields and vineyards simply burned up in the terrible heat of 1877. Half of the grain harvest was lost and famine was reported from Oran in the west to Constantine in the east. The worst scenes were among the Constantinois, where drought and hunger persisted until early 1880, then resumed with the bad harvest of 1881. The Russian traveler Tchihatcheff, who passed through the Mila area, was horrified to find that "the poor population has been trying to survive for more than two months almost exclusively on boiled kerioua [a noxiously bitter wild arum]." Official attempts to minimize the famine were belied by the flood of skeletal refugees into the towns, and the governor-general was forced to acknowledge the gravity of the crisis in fall 1878, when it was reported in _Situations officielles_ that "the tribes of Titteri (in the south of Medea and of Aumale), those of Bordj-Bou-Arreridj, of Hodna and of the region around Batna and Tebessa, were entirely without food." But the disaster in the countryside was a windfall to the Marseille interests who controlled commerce in North African livestock products.
In the most drought-stricken regions, the harvest was utterly lost; elsewhere it was poor at best. The loss of seed ensured a poor yield the following year as well. Meanwhile, the lack of water and grass threatened to decimate the native herds; the interior tribes were forced to sell their animals to livestock dealers at dirt-cheap prices. Exports of sheep doubled while wheat and barley exports fell by half; likewise Algeria, which had exported 17,996 head of beef in the three years from 1874 to 1876, exported 143,198 head between 1877 and 1879. In order to avoid starvation, Algerians liquidated their only real wealth: their livestock.
In his magisterial history of colonial Algeria, Charles-Robert Ageron has shown how the drought of 1877β81 battened upon and, in turn, accelerated the general tendency of indigenous pauperization. After the defeat of the Muqrani uprising of 1871β72, the Third Republic relentlessly extended the scope of colon capitalism through massive expropriations of communal land, enclosures of forests and pastures, persecution of transhumance, and the ratcheting up of land revenues. Indian tax extortion paled next to annual charges that sometimes confiscated more than a third of the market-value of native land. In the Kabylia, angry poets sang that "the taxes rain upon us like repeated blows, the people have sold their fruit trees and even their clothes." Environmental disaster simply shortened the distance to an "Irish solution" of a fully pauperized and conquered countryside. Some architects of French policy, quoted by Ageron, were keenly aware of the potentially revolutionary consequences of such complete dispossession of the native population. "The greatest danger for Algeria," wrote Burdeau during another hungry drought in 1891, "is the emergence of an indigent proletariat, an army of _dΓ©classΓ©s_ without hope or land, eager for brigandage and insurrection."
In the end, Algerians could only be thankful that the drought-famine of 1877β81, unlike its terrible predecessor in 1867β68, failed to unleash massive epidemic mortality. There was no such succor across the Atlas, where both hunger and disease were as proportionately devastating as in the Deccan or the _sertΓ£o_. The ancient kingdom of Morocco was convulsed by its worst economic and environmental crisis in centuries: its countryside was turned into "an open tomb." Once again, drought pummeled a peasantry already brought to its knees by the world market. As Jean-Louis Miege has shown, the European demand for Moroccan grain and wool, which had fueled a sustained export boom beginning in the 1840s, collapsed during the 1870s in the face of lower-cost competition. By the fall of 1877, when drought began its seven-year-long siege of the countryside, the economy was already in steep decline, bled by a growing trade deficit, huge debt borrowed from England to pay war indemnities to Spain, and a depreciating currency that translated into runaway domestic inflation. Between 1875 and 1877 Moroccan real income fell by half while the relative burden of agricultural taxation grew ever more onerous. Farmers and herdsmen thus had to face the dry winter of 1877β78 (there was no rain at all in southern parts of the arable belt), and the great locust plague which followed, with much of their wealth already wiped out.
By spring 1878, desperate _fellahin_ were either eating their starving herds or selling them for a few days' supply of grain (cows for five francs, sheep for one). Miege estimates that 75 percent of the nation's livestock disappeared in this manner. Moreover, as grain prices soared, the poorest villagers were reduced to grubbing for roots; some even tried to subsist upon the poisonous yernee. There were other instances where formerly prosperous southern peasants traded their farms to merchants for a single bag of grain. The makhzan's efforts to prevent foreclosures and alienation of land were successfully opposed by the foreign diplomatic corps, who used their control over credit and relief supplies to demand strict adherence to "the principle of free trade."
During the summer of 1878, as starvation became endemic, vast portions of the interior and south of Morocco were virtually depopulated as "hundreds of thousands of people bolted for the nearest port" and the security of imported grain supplies. As the worried Mogador correspondent of the Jewish World reported to his coreligionists in Britain:
The pauper population of Mogador, always disproportionately large, forming about one-third of its entire inhabitants, is being rapidly increased by numerous famished Jewish and Moorish families from the adjacent districts. It is a fearful sight to see some of themβmere living skeletons... There is no business now doing, except in articles of food, and consequently the working classes have nothing to do. They are selling their clothes and furniture to obtain food... If you could see the terrible scenes of miseryβpoor, starving mothers, breaking and pounding up bones they find in the streets, and giving them to their famished childrenβit would make your heart ache. Raise a few pounds if you can, and if you can do so lay it out in rice at the wholesale brokers, and have it shipped by the steamers leaving England.
Six months later, American and German consuls reported "thousands dead by the roadsides," while the British consul, Sir John Drummond Hay, whose intelligence sources were unconsidered "unexcelled," wrote in April 1879 that "half the population of Sous and of Haha has died of starvation." The flight to the coast, as in India, China and Brazil, produced unsanitary concentrations of enfeebled people ripe for the spread of disease. Cholera, the universal scourge of famine refugees in this period, first appeared in Fez and Marknes at the end of July 1878. By September it was decimating inland cities as well as ports; in Marrakech an estimated 1 percent of the population was reported to be perishing daily. When the cholera epidemic finally subsided in December, its place was promptly taken by typhoid, which killed off the Italian and Portuguese consuls and a number of prominent European and Jewish merchants, as well as tens of thousands of weakened commoners.
The crisis continued until the winter of 1879/80, when nearly normal rainfall allowed the resumption of agriculture after eighteen months of complete dependence on grain imports from Marseille and Gibraltar. Drought returned, however, in 1881 (an El NiΓ±o year) and worsened in 1882 when the south was again rainless while precipitation in the north was barely one-quarter of normal. The British consul, in a dismal repetition of his earlier reports, described "harvests completely lost, livestock dying and the famished population again reduced to eating poisonous roots."
A second emptying-out of the mountains and countryside likewise produced a new epidemic crucible in the cities that was exploited this time by smallpox, which raged through 1883. However, Morocco's long ordeal by famine and disease, as Miege emphasizes, was not without "winners." "The crisis of 1878β1885 hastened the rise of the commercial and landed capitalism that dominated the future of the country... The non-specialization of commerce permitted strong houses to switch from exports to imports of food. In the ports the famine created islands of prosperity." The "tremendous redistribution of property" likewise paved the way for famous comprador fortunes and allowed the foreign community to accumulate massive landholdings under fictive Moroccan ownership. It also inaugurated the era of Great Power rivalry, conducted with both loans and dreadnaughts, to turn Morocco's new economic dependence upon Europe into formal colonialism.
**The Global Death Toll**
Where populations escaped mass famine, drought still brought massive and sometimes irreversible economic distress. "Cape Colony, New Guinea, the Australian Colonies, the South Seas, and, it would appear, almost every known part of the southern hemisphere," observed the editors of _Nature_ in March 1878, "have been suffering from a severe and protracted drought." In New South Wales, a quarter of the animals perished on the world's greatest sheep range.All of Polynesia, meanwhile, experienced environmental turmoil. Hawaiian sugar plantations cobbled together makeshift irrigation to deal with the driest year (1877β78) of the nineteenth century, while drought forced desperate Gilbertese to hire themselves out as coolies on German-owned cotton plantations in Samoa, where missionaries in turn reported famine on outlying islands. Drought in 1877 did huge economic damage throughout central Mexico, especially in Valley of Mexico itself, where the rains did not return until the summer of 1878. In the circum-Mediterranean, finally, drought and famine were reported in Bosnia, as well as locusts, which also plagued farmers in Andalusia.
But in the classic El NiΓ±o pattern, the climate system compensated deficit rainfall in one band of regions with surplus precipitation in another. Thus Tahiti was battered by a rare typhoon, while Northern California experienced its wettest winter in two centuries. While Asia was starving, the United States was harvesting the greatest wheat crop in world history (400 million bushels), and in California's Central Valley worthless surplus wheat was burnt for fuel. Meanwhile the heavy rains that inundated the southeastern United States may have contributed indirectly (through their impact on mosquito populations) to the infamous yellow fever epidemic of 1878, which ravaged cities from Louisville to New Orleans, killing tens of thousands.
British and Irish farmers, already reeling from the impact of American imports and plunging prices for corn and cattle, lost one harvest after another to the cold wet summers of the late 1870s: perhaps the worst sequence since the early fourteenth century. Hundreds of thousands of laborers and marginal farmers were pushed off the land in the final extinction drama of the English yeomanry. In Ireland, the disastrous 1877β82 harvest cycle (coincident if not causally related to the El NiΓ±o droughts in the tropics) precipitated both a new wave of trans-Atlantic emigration and a decade-long agrarian revolt. Advised by the California radical prophet Henry George, Michael Davitt brilliantly channeled Irish rural distress into a "Land War" that shook the foundations of the economic as well as political Ascendancy.
Finally in coastal Peru, unprecedented rains, which continued intermittently for almost a decade, produced such an extraordinary transformation of the landscape that contemporaries believed they were witnessing either a mirage or a miracle. "The Sechura, a notoriously dry and barren desert region, became covered with trees and heavy vegetation, the likes of which were never seen before or afterward." Although none of the contemporary articles or letters to _Nature_ commented on this odd coincidence of epochal aridity and record rainfall in different parts of the Pacific Basin, scientists a century later would suddenly grasp that it was the crucial key to the mystery of the 1870s droughts.
The full measure of this global tragedyβ _Nature_ in 1878 called it "the most destructive drought the world has ever known"βcan only be guessed at. (Writing to a Russian correspondent about the British "bleeding" of India, Marx warned that "the famine years are pressing each other and in dimensions till now not yet suspected in Europe!") In India, where 5.5 million to 12 million died despite modern railroads and millions of tons of grain in commercial circulation, embittered nationalist writers compared the callous policies followed by Calcutta to those emanating from Dublin Castle in 1846. The chief difference, as Indian National Congress leader Romesh Dutt later pointed out in his famous Open Letters to Lord Curzon, was that, instead of the 1 million Irish dead of 1846β49, "a population equal to the [whole] population of Ireland had disappeared under the desolating breath of the famine of 1877."
The official British estimate of 5.5 million deaths was based on projections of "excess mortality" derived from test censuses in the Deccan and Mysore reported by the Famine Commission in 1880. It is undoubtedly too low, since it excluded any estimate of deaths in drought-afflicted native states like Hyderabad and the Central Province rajs. Nor, as Kohei Wakimura has pointed out, does it include the protracted famine mortality due to high food prices or the spike in malaria deaths (more than 3 million in 1878β79) among the immune-suppressed populations of the famine districts. "I think it likely," wrote a contemporary British official quoted by Wakimura, "that some portion of the excessive mortality, recorded during 1879, may have been due to this continuance of high prices. And especially I believe that many very poor people, who lived with difficulty during the last three years, had fallen into a low state of health which... took away their power to recover from the attack of the fever disease prevailing so generally in the later months of the year."
Adding princely India to British statistics but not counting the famine's "mortality shadow" in 1878β79, historical demographer Ira Klein concluded that at least 7.1 million had died. In his important 1984 study, Klein also compared ratios of relief to mortality (see Table 3.1). Despite Lytton's assertion that ryots were the recipients of promiscuous welfare, the vast majority of famine sufferers received no government aid whatsoever. "[A]ll over stricken India, relief reached only about a tenth of those whose lives were threatened seriously. In the parts of northern India where the crop was 'almost entirely lost' there were nearly eight famine-induced deaths for every person who received relief."
**Table 3.1**
**Parameters of the 1876β78 Famine in India**
(Millions)
**Province** | **Affected Population** | **Average Number Receiving Relief** | **Deaths**
---|---|---|---
Madras | 19.4 | .80 | 2.6
Bombay | 10.0 | .30 | 1.2
North Western | 18.4 | .06 | .4
Mysore | 5.1 | .10 | .9
Punjab | 3.5 | β | 1.7
Hyderabad & Central Provinces | 1.9 | .04 | .3
Total | 58.3 | 1.3 | 7.1
Source: Ira Klein, "When the Rains Failed," _IESHR_ 21:2 (1984), pp. 199 and 209β11.
The 1878β80 Famine Commission statistics revealed a surprisingly perverse relationship between modernization and mortality that challenged British belief in "life-saving" railroads and markets. In both the Bombay and Madras Deccan, as Digby pointed out in an acerbic commentary, "the population decreased more rapidly [23%] where the districts were served by railways than where there were no railways [21%]. This is a protection against famine entirely in the wrong direction." In a study of the Kurnool District, E. Rajasekhar came to a similar conclusion: "The population loss [1876β78] in areas well served with transport (such as Pattikonda) was high compared to irrigated areas (such as Sirvel and Nandyal) where though transport was ill-developed, better employment opportunities improved entitlement to food." Likewise, as David Washbrook has shown in his study of Bellary, "The death-toll was heaviest in the most commercially-advanced taluks of the district (Adoni and Alur where nearly a third of the population was lost)." In Madras, the mortality was overwhelmingly borne by the lower castes and the untouchables: the Boyas, Chenchus and Madas. Indeed, Rajasekhar estimates that fully half of the Madigas were wiped out in Kurnool (see Figure 3.2).
In the famine's epicenter in the Deccan districts of Madras Presidency, a fifth of the population perished and the demographic aftershocks, including a contraction in cultivated acreage, were felt for a generation. Rajasekhar argues that the higher mortality among men and boysβlargely due to the Temple wage and epidemic conditions in the relief campsβleft the next generation of peasants saddled with a higher, productivity-throttling ratio of dependents to producers.
**Table 3.2**
**Demographic Change in Madras Famine Districts**
(Percent)
| **Bellary** | **Kurnool** | **Cuddapah**
---|---|---|---
1872β1881 | β20.34 | β25.80 | β17.03
1872β1901 | 3.89 | β4.63 | β4.41
Source: G. Rao and D. Rajasekhar, "Land Use Patterns and Agrarian Expansion in a Semi-Arid Region: Case of Rayalaseema in Andhra, 1886β1939," _Economic and Political Weekly_ (25 June 1994, Table 3, p. A-83.
In Kurnool, for example, "the slow agrarian expansion in the district during the post-famine period is to be attributed not to the decline in the population per se but to changes in the age and sex composition of families of poor and small peasants, the disruption of their family life and the consequent general decline in the quality of their labour." Few of the famine survivors as a result were in any position to take advantage of the temporary recovery of agricultural prices. Even as late as 1905, one settlement officer wrote, "The survivors among the ryots were impoverished, many doubtless had deteriorated physically. A new generation has grown up, but the memory of the Great Famine still lives and has increased the dull fatalism of the ryots."
In addition to their hecatombs of dead, south Indians were also embittered by the exploitation of starvation to recruit huge armies of indentured cooliesβover 480,000 from Madras alone between 1876 and 1879βfor semi-slave labor under brutal conditions on British plantations in Ceylon, Mauritius, Guyana and Natal. When Indian nationalists and English humanitarians pressed Lytton to oppose the export of coolies, he haughtily replied that the government was "purely neutral." (During the next great drought-famine, in 1896β97, there would be similar forced migration from the Central Provinces to Assam tea plantations, and from Ganjam to Burma.)
The year 1877 was China's driest year in two centuries, and official Chinese estimates of the death toll ranged as high as 20 million, nearly a fifth of the estimated population of north China. As we have seen, the British legation in Beijing believed that 7 million had died through the winter of 1877. "The destruction as a whole," according to the 1879 _Report of the China Famine Relief Fund_ , "is stated to be from nine and a half to thirteen millions," the estimate accepted by Lillian Li in her review of modern Chinese-language scholarship. Hang-Wei He at Hong Kong University meanwhile has contrasted different contemporary estimates (see Table 3.3) of Taiping and famine deaths. Since overwhelmed officials were unable to keep accurate records or conduct sample censuses, it is hard to evaluate the discrepant figures in historical literature. If anything, there may be a bias toward underestimation, since the highest monthly death tolls, from a late-starting smallpox epidemic on top of malnutrition, dysentery and typhus, reportedly occurred in April and May 1879 after the famine was widely declared to have ended.
**Table 3.3**
**China: Mortality Estimates**
| **W. W. Rockhill** | **A. P. Harper (1880)**
---|---|---
1854β64 Taiping Rebellion | 20.0 million | 40 million
1861β78 Muslim Rebellion | 1.0 million | 8 million
1877β78 Famine | 9.5 million | 13 million
1888 Yellow River floods | 2.0 million |
1892β94 Famine | 1.0 million |
1894β95 Muslim Rebellion | .25 million |
Total | 33.7 million | 61 million
Source: Hang-Wei He, _Drought in North China in the Early Guang Xu (1876β1879)_ [in Chinese], Hong Kong 1980, p. 149.
**Table 3.4**
**Excess Mortality in Shanxi, 1877β79**
---
**County** | **Prefamine
Population** | **Famine
Deaths** | **Percent
Mortality**
Tai Yuen | 1,000,000 | 950,000 | 95
Huong Dong | 250,000 | 150,000 | 60
Ping Lu | 145,000 | 110,000 | 76
The few local statistics available are extraordinary. The most reliable foreign estimates came from missionaries working in the famine epicenter of Shanxi, where Timothy Richards, who circulated questionnaires to local officials and Catholic priests, reported that one-third of the population in the north had died by 1879, and David Hill and Jasper McIlvaine estimated that a chilling three-quarters had perished in the southern counties. Indeed, the famine in Taiyuan prefecture was almost an extinction event with only 5 percent of the population reported still alive in 1879. Despite heavy immigration from nearby provinces during the 1880s, Shanxiβdecimated as if by modern nuclear warβdid not regain its 1875 population until 1953.
Similarly, as Edmund Burke emphasizes, "The demographic consequences of the crisis of 1878β84 make it one of the capital events in the social history of modern Morocco." Miege thinks that mortality in the ports was around 15 percent, but in much of the countryside it easily exceeded a quarter of the population. "In June 1879 the Italian consul at Tangiers estimated that a quarter of the Moroccan population had perished. This is the same percentage that Mathews presented in his report for 1878. Theodore de Cuevas, who through his many relatives in the north of the country had exceptional knowledge of local conditions, believed that one-third of the population of the Gharb was killed by the epidemic of 1878β79.
Modern Brazilians still refer to the events of 1876β79 as simply the Grande Seca: "the greatest drama of human suffering in the nation's history." Fully half of CearΓ‘ state perished and "the only transferable capital left by 1880 was in slaves." "Of the dead in 1877β1879," says the Brazilian historian Edmar Morel, "it has been calculated that 150,000 died of outright starvation, 100,000 from fever and other diseases, 80,000 from smallpox and 180,000 from poisonous or otherwise harmful food." It has also been characterized as "the most costly natural disaster in the history of the western hemisphere."
Global mortality can only be estimated as a level of magnitude. Arup Maharatna in a recent systematic review of demographic debates and literature in both India and China points to a combined Asian mortality range of between 20 million and 25 million famine-related deaths. No greater precision seems possible. What is certain is simply the staggering scale and worldwide synchronization of starvation, unprecedented since the four horsemen of the apocalypse cut swathes of famine, war, pestilence and death through Europe and China in the early fourteenth and mid seventeenth centuries.
## PART II
## [**El NiΓ±o and the New Imperialism,
1888β1902**](05_Contents.xhtml#s8)
##
## **The Government of Hell**
> Thousands of thatched-roof huts lament their empty hearths; at each step, a cadaver, a skull, scattered bones tell of the horror and the extent of the famine.
>
> β R. Anastase, Ethiopia in 1889
The Great Drought of the 1870s was merely Act One in a three-act world tragedy. Millions more, likely tens of millions, would die during global El NiΓ±o droughts in 1888β91 and especially in 1896β1902. There was first, however, a famous interlude of agricultural expansion and relative prosperity. The decade after the end of famine in 1878β9 was characterized by well-distributed, plentiful rainfall and abundant harvests in both hemispheres. It was the Age of Wheat.
The boom was propelled, in the first instance, by the climate crisis of the late 1870s and the huge harvest shortfalls throughout the British Isles. With British demand for food imports soaring, massive amounts of London-generated capital flowed into the railroads that opened up the American Great Plains, the Canadian Prairie, the Argentine pampas, and India's upper Gangetic plain. Maxim and Gatling guns efficiently eradicated the last indigenous resistance to the incorporation of these great steppes into the world economy. By mid-decade, British redcoats had defeated Riel's utopian-socialist Northwest Rebellion in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, while the Argentine army crushed the last Indian resistance in the pampas. The grain trade, under the leadership of great cartels like Bunge and Dreyfus, for the first time achieved authentically global scope and integration. As thousands of square miles of virgin grassland were converted into wheat belts, the Liverpool Corn Trade Association and the Chicago Board of Trade (Wheat Exchange), with their new-fangled invention of "futures" trading, became the twin poles of a single world market in subsistance.
In northern India, where railroads had recently integrated thousands of villages into international trade, these were the years of a fabled wheat export boom: a "golden age for rich peasants," if not for their poor neighbors. Exporters and government officials pressed cultivators to take advantage of the good monsoons and expand wheat into areas where erratic rainfall or poor soil had previously favored only hardy millets or cattle. After the demographic catastrophe of the 1870s, officials were cheered by the population rebound of the 1880s and the Bombay government boasted that "only an utterly insignificant proportion of the population of this Presidency can be deemed [any longer] in danger of starvation." In the irrigated valleys of the Tamilnad, agricultural prosperity, based on booming rice exports, produced the biggest decadal population surge (16.9 percent) of the nineteenth century. A dramatic expansion of irrigation in the Irrawaddy Delta likewise guaranteed rice supplies for peasants in Bengal and Java who were turning from subsistence farming to the cultivation of export crops like jute and sugar cane. The French meanwhile coerced additional rice exports from the Mekong Delta.
In North America, this was the decade of the "Great Dakota Boom" when "an unusual amount of moisture fell throughout much of the Great Plains," and what an earlier generation had seen as hopeless desert was now christened a "rain belt" by eager immigrants from northern Europe. This was equally an era of wheat bonanzas and peasant expansion in the Russian steppe and the frontier farmlands of Manchuria. In Australia, meanwhile, former sheep walks were ploughed and planted in wheat varieties specially adapted to the antipodean climate. Everywhere, including the semi-arid margins of the Deccan, the _sertΓ£o_ and the highveldt, the wetter weather lured farmers. There was widespread optimism, endorsed by leading scientists and agricultural experts, that "rain followed the plough" and that cultivation, especially by white pioneers, was permanently improving the climate.
In fact, the weather "had not been cured, as the optimists claimed. It had only been in remission." On five continents, Donald Meinig explains, this decade of "folk experimentation with the land" turned into one of the nineteenth century's greatest follies, resulting in "incalculable social and economic cost[s]." As throughout history when intervals of above-average rainfall have allowed agriculture to expand beyond the ecological boundaries of its long-term sustainability, the inevitable manmade consequence was a drought cataclysm: as occurred in the Great Plains, India, Brazil, Russia, Korea, the Sudan and the Horn of Africa in 1888β89 and again in 1891, punctuated by extremely wet weather and flooding in many places in 1889β90. (Flooding and resulting famine had already claimed millions of lives in northern China in 1888.)
These extreme droughts and floods, we now know, correspond, although there is not necessarily a causal relation in each regional case, to powerful, clustered El NiΓ±o (1888β89 and 1891β92) and La NiΓ±a (1886β87 and 1889β90) perturbations in the eastern equatorial Pacific. The new, globally integrated grain trade, moreover, ensured that climate shocks and corresponding harvest shortfalls were translated into price shocks that crossed the continents with the speed of a telegraph. A futures "corner" in Chicago or a drought in the Punjab could now starve (or enrich) people thousands of miles away. As the trend of US grain prices from 1891 onwards indicates, El NiΓ±o found a dramatic new "teleconnection" in the speculative price accelerator operated by the major boards of trade.
**Drought Follows the Plow**
In North America, it was the worst environmental crisis of the second half of the nineteenth century. "The wheat and land boom in Dakota," Gilbert Fite writes, "was really over by 1887, but if any life remained, it was destroyed by the terrible drought of 1889." All along the 100th meridian, from Manitoba to Texas, suddenly destitute "boomers" watched their crops wither and die under a scorching sun. Towns that once boasted of being future "Omahas" or "Topekas" lost most of their population or disappeared altogether. Hunger unexpectedly stalked the "world's bread-basket." "Conditions became so bad by the winter of 1889β1890 that many people were in dire want. In Miner County [South Dakota] where wheat and corn averaged between 2 and 3 bushels to the acre some 2500 individuals were reportedly threatened by death from starvation." Church groups that ordinarily sent contributions to relieve famine in Rajaputana or Shandong, mobilized instead to feed drought-stricken farm families in the Dakotas and western Kansas. Across the southern border, most of Mexico (except for the Bajio) escaped hardship in 1888β89, but the strong La NiΓ±a of 1890 brought droughtβthe most severe of the centuryβto much of the country that escalated the bitter struggle between _hacendados_ and small farmers over water rights, especially in La Laguna and the North. It was a preview of the drought-fueled agrarian conflict that would help destroy the Porifiato in 1910.
In India, meanwhile, drought was severe in widely scattered parts of the subcontinent, although the total area affected was much smaller than in 1876. In Argul and the tributary states of Orissa, as well as in the neighboring Ganjam district in Madras Presidency, a failed monsoon and poor harvest were followed by a "price famine"βthere was never really a true shortage of grainβthat struck viciously at the pauper groups like the pariahs, a tribal people who were prevented by new forest laws from "turning to jungle fruits and products on which they had customarily depended in the past in times of distress." According to Digby, 155,000 died. In 1891β92βrated as a "very strong" El NiΓ±o year by modern meteorologistsβthere was a more general monsoon deficiency (ranging from 15 percent in Madras to 25 percent in Hyderabad) that affected almost every corner of India except the Central Provinces and the North West. In Kurnool and Bellary (epicenters of the 1876 famine), "abnormal" deaths from hunger and the cholera that accompanied it were officially estimated at 45,000; about the same number died in several districts of Bengal and Bihar. Again the victims were the poorest of the poor.
Cattle losses meanwhile through Rajaputana were "enormous" and grain riots broke out in Ajmer. The Marwaris were forced to migrate en masse in search of subsistence for themselves and their animals. In the neighboring Punjab, the 1891 drought was less devastating than the locust plague that it unleashed on crops in all of Peshawer, Derajat and Rawalpindi as well as some districts of Lahore. The natural destruction in turn was magnified by the operation of the world market. The Punjab had become an important shock-absorber for Britain and, to a lesser extent, continental Europe in face of poor harvests and higher prices in the US wheat belt. The coincidence of drought in the North America and South Asia was particularly dangerous for poor Punjabis. Thus in spring 1891, as Navteg Singh explains:
This enormous European demand for wheat at a higher price induced the exporters not only to buy up old stocks largely, but also to make "forward" purchases of wheat to be supplied from the new crop at similar prices. Thus, an enormous amount of wheat was purchased at high price to be exported to Europe, resulting in a general depletion of stocks within the province. One European Company, namely, Messrs. Ralley Brothers & Co. purchased even the standing crops for the purposes of export to Europe. The local trader or _bania_ as usual raised the prices of grains, thereby causing distress in almost all the districts of the Punjab.
When villagers attempted to hold onto their grain, fearing that famine prices would soon exceed the export merchants' purchase price, they were in some cases beaten or coerced by agents of Ralley Brothers & Company. On the other hand, as creditors foreclosed on farms, some smallholders chose pre-emptive violence over pauperization. A Rawalpindi paper, quoted by Singh, reported that "it has become a common practice with the _zamindars_ to get rid of a creditor by murdering him if he presses for payments of debts." The "price famine" in the Punjab seemed to be leading to much larger clashes when heavy rainfall in October 1891 ended the drought.
Although authorities learned little from the agricultural crisis of 1891, the explosive feedback between local crop conditions and world market forces was a disturbing preview of the future. Census data later indicated an "excess mortality" of 3,120,000 in regions affected by the droughts of 1888β89 and 1891β92. In his famous "bombshell circular" that winter, the Congress Party's general secretary, Allan Octavian Hume, warned that British neglect was "pauperizing the people... [and] preparing the way for one of the most terrible cataclysms in the history of the world." The "famine of the century" only five years down the road would tragically vindicate his prophecy.
In China, where vast areas of the North had still not recovered from the 1877 catastrophe, the Yellow River had breached its new, hastily constructed dikes about twenty miles above Kaifeng and recaptured its old channel to the Yellow Sea at the end of September 1887. (The floods may have been the result of La NiΓ±aβgenerated rainfall anomalies, July 1886 through June 1887.) Repair work was unfinished when the annual flood came earlier than usual in June 1888. According to an English civil engineer who visited the site at the end of the summer, "The breach through the dike was a full mile in width and the flood swept onward toward Hun-tze Lake and the Huai River, inundating a strip variously estimated at 20 to 50 miles in width, carrying away houses and villages and parts of walled cities."
The correspondent for the _London Spectator_ , struggling to convey the immensity of the disaster, picturesquely compared it to "five Danubes pouring from a height for two months on end" onto a "vast, open plain, flat as Salisbury Plain, but studded with 3,000 villages, all swarming as English villages never swarm... a scene unrivaled since the Deluge." Contemporary accounts claimed that 7 million drown or died in the ensuing famine in northern Henan and in Shandong that continued through 1889. A British consul later told the Manchester Geographical Society that "at least a million people were drowned, perhaps several millions."
Korea's problem, meanwhile, was drought not flood, and the resulting food shortgages were exacerbated by the export of rice under contract to Japan and the relentless fiscal pressure on the peasantry. The southern Cholla provincesβthe peninsula's traditional granary but highly vulnerable to climate fluctuationβsuffered especially from a "vicious circle" of rising and disproportionate revenue exactions. The region had long been a social tinderbox. "After the drought of 1888β89 in Cholla," Woo-keun Han explains, "the situation became really serious." Social banditry and violent protest became commonplace and eventually spread to other provinces:
Farmers had turned bandit before in bad times, of course, but not to this extent. Well-armed and organized robber bands began to appear, with bases deep in the mountains, attacking shipments of tax grain and convoys of imported goods on their way to Seoul. Another result was a wave of local uprisings of various kinds, usually against corrupt officials. Miners revolted in Hamgyong and Kyongsang Provinces, and the fishermen of Cheju rebelled. There were peasant risings in almost every province, sometimes led by former officials or government slaves.
The unrest in the countryside was aggravated by the growing visibility and arrogance of the foreign community. In addition to the scandal of food exports in the midst of drought and famine, fantastic rumors (common also in the Chinese countryside) circulated about ghoulish Western conspiracies. "Seeing that the Europeans had no cows yet drank milk from cans, [peasants] believed the story that the foreigners kidnaped women and cut off their breasts in order to obtain the condensed milk." Like the White Lotus sects in China, the underground Tonghak ("Eastern Learning") Societyβanti-Western and anti-Confucianβprovided a millenarian framework for peasant resistance to intolerable taxation and foreign exploitation. In early 1894, demanding an end to rice exports to Japan and more equitable taxes, 100,000 peasant rebels under loose Tonghak leadership gained the upper hand over government troops in Cholla. Both China and Japan used the uprising as a pretext to send troops to Korea, precipitating the Sino-Japanese War, which the modernized Japanese military easily won. The tough Tonghak farmers, however, were more difficult to defeat, and even after a systematic extermination of their civilian base in Cholla province, embers of the revolt (regrouped in the Chondogyo or "Heavenly Way" movement) remained to trouble the Japanese for many years.
In Russia, poor harvests during the dry years of 1888β90 were prelude to the catastrophic drought in spring and summer of 1891 that brought famine to the black soil provinces of the Volga valley as well as the Orenburg wheat-belt south of the Urals (epicenter of drought during the 1997β98 El NiΓ±o). Seventy percent of the rye crop, the chief subsistence of the muzhiks, was lost. As was so frequently the case in India, the tax collector had previously stripped peasant households of any savings in money or grain. Still staggering under the financial burden of their redemption payments from serfdom, peasants in 1891 also struggled to cope with the punitive tax offensive, launched in 1887 by finance minister Vyshnegradskii, that aimed to force them to export more grain. (" _Nedoedim no vyvezem_ βWe may not eat enough, but we will export" was the official slogan.) As a result, a majority of rural communes ( _obshchinas_ ) were essentially insolvent and "even before the disastrous harvest of 1891," writes Richard Robbins, "many of the signs associated with famine had begun to appear." Local priests, _zemstvo_ physicians and visiting scientists had all warned of appalling poverty and widespread near-starvation.
Now, in the grim winter of 1891β92, more than 12 million peasants, having already sold their cattle and horses, were forced to burn the thatched roofs of their huts for heat and bake almost nutrition-less "famine bread" from goosefoot and other wild herbs. Reports reached Moscow of "mothers attempting to murder their children in order to spare them the pain of hunger." Unlike British India a few years later, however, the government of the soon-to-be-assassinated Czar Alexander III was able to prevent outright starvation. Although there was widespread criticism of the incompetence of _zemstvo_ institutions, the disorganization of public-works initiatives, and the additional financial burden of the loans forced on the peasantry, the official relief campaign succeeded in keeping the death rate in the affected provinces from increasing more than a single percentage point (from 3.76 percent in 1881β90 to 4.81 percent in 1892). By contrast, much vaunted British efforts during the famines of 1896β97 and 1899β1900 were accompanied by mortality spikes of 20 percent or higher. Most of the 400,000 to 600,000 victims in European Russia were killed by typhus and cholera spread by famine refugees rather than by starvation per se.
In southern Africa the 1888β89 drought forced tens of thousands of farmers from their land, a tragedy that was welcomed as a godsend by European planters vexed by persistent labor shortages. Thus in 1889 John Peter Hornung wrote to his brother (the future bestselling author of _Raffles_ ) about the windfall of desperate drought refugees from outside the district that were allowing him to proceed on schedule with the poppy harvest on his new opium plantation in Mozambique. Hornung, a leading _narcotrafficante_ of late Victorian times, managed the so-called Mozambique Produce Company for Jardine Mathieson, the giant Hong Kong firm "whose existence was historically wedded to the sale of opium to the Chinese."
Brazil's "Drought of the Two Eights" (1888), as it is still remembered in the Nordeste, began as early as January 1887, when sowing was delayed due to the failure of the rains. Weak thunderstorms partially broke the drought, but it returned with a vengeance in 1888, then abated only to resume with new intensity in 1891. "The circumstances," writes one historian, "were not unlike those of the devastating years of 1877β1879." As crops failed and herds died, _sertanejos_ again asked themselves, like the protagonist in the Graciliano Ramos novel, "could [they] go on living in a cemetery?" In CearΓ‘ alone, 150,000 said no.
While some headed directly for Fortaleza and hence Para and Amazonas, others clustered around interior river towns and oases. In one of these famine refuges, the small town of JoΓ£seiro in CearΓ‘'s Cariry Valley, a small miracle took place whose full importance for the history of northeast Brazil would not become apparent until a second wave of drought, hunger and rebellion in the later 1890s. Maria de Araujo, a 28-year-old laundress and beata (lay nun) in the household of a charismatic local priest Cicero RamΓ£o Batista, was attending a special mass to invoke the power of the Sacred Heart of Jesus against the drought when her communion host suddenly turned the color of blood. For weeks, the transubstantiation repeated itself before ever growing crowds. Finally, on the feast day of the Precious Blood in July 1889, Monseignor Monteiro, Cicero's patron and another fiery millennialist, led a procession of 3,000 people to JoΓ£seiro's little chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows.
Before an overflowing assembly, Monteiro mounted the pulpit and delivered a sermon on the mystery of Christ's passion and death that reportedly brought tears to the eyes of his listeners; then he dramatically thrust aloft a fistful of altar linens which were visibly stained with blood; that blood, he declared, had issued from the host received by Maria de Araujo, and it was, according to the Rector, the very blood of Jesus Christ.
**Ethiopia: The 'Cruel Days'**
Meanwhile, in the ancient Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, desperate prayers went unanswered and there were no sudden miracles. Few regions have ever endured such a literally biblical declension of disasterβstill known as the _Yakefu Qan_ or "Cruel Days"βas did the Horn of Africa beginning in 1888. The protracted drought that began in late 1888 and lasted until 1892 (almost certainly linked to the back-to-back El NiΓ±os) was accompanied by rinderpest, a cattle plague or murrain, that quickly killed off 90 percent of domestic and wild ruminants in the Horn of Africa before spreading south through the Rift Valley. Five hundred years before, in the famine-stricken decades of the early fourteenth century, rinderpest had wiped out much of the livestock base of feudal agriculture in Western Europe. The catastrophic symptoms of the epidemic closely resembled cholera in humans.
It was a terribly devastating disease, which ran its course in an infected animal over a period of a week or so. The animal initially manifests discharges around the nose, mouth, and eyes; these early symptoms (which sometimes are not conspicuous) are succeeded by astonishing stench, recurrent debilitating and explosive diarrhea (with subsequent dehydration), and, perhaps most arresting, tenesmusβthe painful struggle of the beast to defecate even when nothing remains to be voided. Death is followed by very rapid putrefaction.
The swiftness with which rinderpest decimated herds throughout the Ethiopian highlands was indeed extraordinary. "Alaqa Lamma Haylu, a young man traveling through Gojjam at the time, recalled awakening from an intense fever and finding all the cattle dead." European missionaries described herds of a thousand or more cattle reduced to one or two scrawny survivors. Emperor Menelik II was said to have lost 250,000 head. Without their sturdy plough oxen, highland farmers were reduced to scraping at the soil with sticks, while strictly pastoral people, like the Galla, were "utterly destroyed." The origins of the outbreak have been traced to infected cattle imported from India as part of the provision for an Italian army invading Eritrea under General San Marzano. "Many Ethiopians," writes Richard Pankhurst, who interviewed survivors of this period in the 1960s, "knowing of Italian ambitions in the country, believed that the disease had in fact been spread deliberately."
Drought and the blast-furnace heat that accompanied it only intensified the deadly murrain. "Cattle and wildlife were concentrated at the few remaining waterholes, thus creating perfect conditions for the spread of the rinderpest virus." At the same time, the scorched fields of the peasantry were overrun by successive invasions of caterpillars (army worms), locusts and rats. While locusts are a perennial pest in the Horn of Africa, the caterpillar plague was apparently unprecedented and its ecology has never been elucidated. Contemporary accounts by European travelers and missionaries, surveyed by Pankhurst, emphasize the terrible swiftness with which verdant landscapes were transformed into bleak wastes. What had been "very beautiful fields of durra and barley, numerous herds of cattle, sheep and goats" were stripped down to skeletons of sand and rock: "absolutely a desert; no more inhabitants, no more cultivation, no more flocks."
In Ethiopia's highlands, rinderpest and the other plagues struck at a society whose pillar was the ox. The farmers who struggled with the heavy, rocky soils of Wallo and Tigray were every bit as dependent upon their cattle as any pastoral people. "Evidence in written and oral form," explains James McCann, "plus contemporary studies of rural conditions in the area, indicate that for northern Wallo was a whole (and probably the entire northeast as well), the scarce unit of production was neither land nor labor but capital in the form of plow oxen. Far more than the acquisition of landβwhich was readily available to the vast majority of householdsβthe breeding, buying, borrowing, and maintaining of oxen determined household strategies of land and labor allocation, affected cropping decisions, and cemented vertical patterns of dependency and stratification within the producing classes." Oxen, in other words, were simultaneously a means of production, store of wealth and symbol of social rank. Their decimation brought rapid social collapse.
Without animal traction, moreover, the peasantry was unable to resume cultivation when the rains briefly returned in June 1889. Some farmers, to be sure, tried to work their fields with iron-tipped hoes, but the yields were only fractions of what they had produced two years earlier with plough oxen. Simultaneously at war with Sudanese Mahdists, Tigre secessionists and (a little later) Italian invaders, Ethiopia had almost no wherewithal to import food. Although the new emperor, Menelik II (crowned in November 1889 after Emperor Yohannes was killed in battle with the Mahdists), promptly opened his granaries to his subjects and turned his soldiers to farming, the imperial supplies were quickly exhausted. When Menelik tried to import grain, "the caravans were pillaged going through Somali and Danakil country where the people were also starving." The consequence was a radical shortage of food and livestock that threatened even the survival of the rich. Pricesβto the extent that they retained any meaningβincreased a hundredfold or more. Table 4.1 is constructed from contemporary reports of the Russian explorer Mashkov and analyzed by Pankhurst. It shows famine-driven inflation at its most extreme.
**Table 4.1**
**Ethiopia: Famine and Prices**
| **1889
Price:Quantity** | **1890
Price:Quantity**
---|---|---
Wheat | 1:200 | 1:1.5
Barley | 1:400 | 1:2
Plough oxen | 2.4:1 | 80:1
Cattle | 1:1 | 60:1
Menelik's most recent biographer, Harold Marcus, emphasizes the fundamentally incomprehensible character of so many simultaneous disasters. "Populace, clergy, and makwanent," he writes, "were mystified and bewildered by the catastrophe engulfing them, and attributed their troubles to a lack of piety." Accordingly, Menelik (whom Marcus depicts as anything but a fatalist) issued a despairing proclamation at the end of July 1889 which blamed drought and plague on lack of prayer. "When the animal epidemic was starting, I made a proclamation, saying 'Pray to God.' The animals are... all dead... all this has happened because we have not prayed enough. Now the epidemic is turning to people and has begun to destroy them." Marcus asserts that "millions of people died" in the ensuing two years, and that the famine permanently reconfigured Ethiopia's regional hierarchy, shifting power from Yohannes' Tigreans to Menelik's Shewans. The once-powerful economies of Begemder (where an astounding 75 percent of the population was said to have perished or fled) and Gojjam were disabled, and the desperate efforts of Ras AlulaβMenelik's chief competitor for the throneβto preserve Tigrean hegemony were undercut by lack of provisions. "Feeding a small army even for a very short time was soon to become impossible in the shattered Tigre."
When nobles and warriors went hungry, the rural poor of course died en masse. The French priest Coulbeaux, writing in March 1890 from Keren, reported that "everywhere I meet walking skeletons and even horrible corpses, half eaten by hyenas." A British consular agent on the Somali Coast complained of the "heart-rending cries and lamentations" of the starving that kept him awake each night. One Italian traveler described the great Tigrean trade hub of Adwa as simply a "cemetery," while another found children frantically searching the dung of mules and camel for kernels of grain. "Horrified I turned away," he wrote, "only to see other boys whom the zapte [police] are driving away by force from the carcass of a horse, the stinking leftover of the hyenas, from this carcass they snatch, biting with their teeth at the entrailsβthe entrails because they are softer, softer because they are the most putrid." Famished people also "disputed the prey of vultures, hyenas, jackals, and pie-dogs," while others sold themselves to Moslem slave-dealers. Worst was the famine-induced insanity and cannibalism. Ethiopian writers would horrify later generations with stories of mothers cooking and eating their children. Even in the extremes of starvation, however, Ethiopians retained a gallows' sense of humor. A popular song, supposedly based on the true story of a man who killed and ate his spouse, was called "His Wife Gave Him Indigestion."
Nature was perceived as radically disordered in other ways as well. One of the strangest and most horrifying aspects of the catastrophe was the utter boldness with which wild animals, crazed with hunger and thirst, attacked the weakened human population. "Contemporary accounts describe the country as swarming with animals and birds of prey who had lost all their fear. Old people of Tigre such as Abba Jerome and Wayzaro Sangal say it was common at night to hear the cry or groan wasadanni ('it is taking me away, away!') uttered by famine-enfeebled victims, often old men and women, as the hyenas carried them off to eat." From every corner of the countryβthe Shewan highlands, Karan, Harar, and so onβmissionaries and local officials reported that the wild beasts "reigned supreme." In Bagemder, for example, "lions, leopards, etc., have taken the upper hand and attack and eat human beings in broad daylight"; while at Burka, "leopards, jackals and lions attacked [the inhabitants] as far as their villages and ate large numbers of them."
**Figure 4.1 The Horn of Africa and Sudan**
Human predation also increased. Ethiopia's feudal system, despite Menelik's energetic efforts, threatened to decompose into a Hobbesian war of the strong against the weak. Hunger became so acute that provincial governors and their warrior levies abandoned administrative responsibilities to forage as marauding bands. Pankhurst cites, for example, the case of Dajazmach Walda Gabreel, "the governor of the Charchar area, southwest of Harar, [who] had been obliged to abandon his province; in order to live he and his soldiers had gone to raid Arussi which was still well supplied with grain and had for that reason already been pillaged by the troops of Ras Makonnen [governor of Harerge] and later by those of the incumbent governor Ras Darge." Governor Makonnen, meanwhile, raided deep into the Ogaden, where he fortified water holes and garrisoned them with nomadic Somali allies (thus establishing an Ethiopian claim to the Ogaden that would be invoked in the bitter border war of 1977). The Ethiopian invasion on top of the drought did vast damage to Somali society. An Englishman who visited the Ogaden a few years later "marched for over seven hours south across a desert that had once been covered with corn. Traces of irrigation were to be seen everywhere and many deserted villages. This was, ten years ago, the greatest grain-producing district in the country, the inhabitants supplying... Somaliland with corn."
A famished peasantry that was easy prey for hyenas and robbers, of course, was equally a lush target for epidemic disease. Dysentery, smallpox, typhus and influenza killed tens of thousands, while the great raiding parties sent by Menelik to the Ogaden to bring back cattle for his farmers also returned with cholera. It was conservatively estimated by Dr. R Wurtz, a French physician who arrived in 1897 to conduct pioneering studies of the country's public health, that one-third of the population of Ethiopia, and perhaps of the entire Horn region, perished by 1892. Mortality, of course, was much higher in certain regions. In the pastoral Galla south, for example, Wurtz and other foreign observers estimated that somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of the population had disappeared. Vast tracts of once arable highlands, as well as semi-arid grassland, were desolate and abandoned. Meanwhile, a second wave of drought (correlated to the powerful El NiΓ±o of 1891) revived famine and epidemic through 1892, just as Ethiopia was moving closer to all-out war with Italy.
**Famine Defeats the Mahdists**
The drought and low Nile of 1888 was equally devastating to the central and northern Sudan, where famine unhinged the great design of the Mahdists for a jihad against Egypt. In April 1887, the Mahdi's successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, had sent messengers to Wadi Halfa in upper Egypt bearing letters "summoning the Khedive Muhammad Tawfiq, Queen Victoria, and Sultan 'Abd al-Hamid to submit to the Mahdia." When Buckingham Palace and the Sublime Porte refused to submit, a large army was concentrated at Dongola in Nubia under the al-Nujumi, the most talented of the Mahdia's generals. Even before the failure of the annual flood, the thousands of warriors, their camp followers and horses had overwhelmed the scant food resources of the local riverine tribes, who became so starved, according to one account, that "they stole the Dervishes' sheepskins, on which they prayed, and ate them." With grain suddenly scarce everywhere along the Nile, al-Nujumi was ordered to march on Egypt without waiting for reinforcements from the south. The Khalifa reassured his followers that the Egyptians would welcome them as liberators, and sent along a "final set of warnings to the khedive, Queen Victoria and the British agent in Cairo. Accompanying these were a number of documents proving the recent Mahdist victory over King John [Yohannes of Ethiopia]."
But the hungry _fellahin_ of upper Egypt, their own crops dying in the fields for lack of water, provided little succor to the Mahdist army whose advance on empty stomachs "was being made a terrible cost." Al-Nujumi's holy army was already half dead from hunger went it finally collided with the well-fed Egyptian levies of the British general Grenfell at Tushki in August 1889. The annihilation of Mahdists on the battlefield was followed by a desperate exodus of the starving population of northern Sudan, who left a trail of skeletons along the sad road to Egypt.
In the following year, famineβexploited with cruel genius by another British general, Kitchenerβalso wrecked Mahdist plans to overrun the Egyptian garrisons at Kossier and Suakin along the Red Sea. Previously, writes Holt, "trade with the local tribes was proceeding through Suakin and the import of grain was to some extent alleviating the hardships caused by the famines. The military authorities were strongly opposed to this policy, since it amounted to feeding the enemy. The political authorities thought differently, since it was desired to win over the support of tribes who were not fully committed to the Mahdia." In the event, Kitchener simply ignored his civilian superiors and cut off the food supply to eastern Sudan. The tribes starved and Kitchener won easy fame defeating the remnant of the jihad at Tukar in February 1890.
In Darfur, a vast region of the size of France in the western Sudan, the famine was also "possibly the worst ever," but Alexander de Waal principally blames civil war and Omdurman's grain requisitioning. "At one point there were more than 36,000 Mahdist troops in El Fahser, and when on campaign they 'ate, drank, wore or stole' everything there was. In western Darfur the armies are remembered as having 'eaten' the villages." The devastation was so complete that one of the rebel leaders referred to his country as simply "a heap of ruins."
Meanwhile unspeakable scenes were being enacted in the great, bloated Mahdist capital. According to the captive Austrian priest Ohrwalder, "All the principal towns and villages on the Blue Nile as far south as Karkoj have been destroyed, such as Kemlin, Messalamieh, Wad Medina, Abu Haraz, Wad el Abbas and Rufaa; the inhabitants of all these towns, men, women, and children, under great fatigue, had come to Omdurman, where they sheltered in the north of the town near Khor Shambat." They came believing that the Mahdiya, which was importing grain from Fashoda in south, would shield all equally from starvation. In fact, the Khalifa was transforming Omdurman into a murderous tribal dictatorship.
"The onset of the famine," Holt explains, "had occurred at a particularly critical time since it coincided with the migration of the Ta'aisha [the Khalifa's tribe] to Omdurman. The provisioning of their multitudes as they passed through Kordofan was a serious problem and when they reached Omdurman they were supplied with grain at preferential rates. The situation in Omdurman was aggravated by the influx of distressed provincials who fled from the famine in their villages only to starve in the capital." The military defeat of the Egyptian jihad was now redoubled by the moral defeat of Mahdists' claim to represent an uncorruptible, egalitarian community of belief. When the courageous, non-Ta'aisha commissioner of the treasury, Ibrahim Muhammad 'Adlan, attempted to "shield the poor from the exactions required by the overgrown military case," refusing to provision the Ta'aisha at all cost, he was promptly hung by the Khalifa. The Mahdiya was becoming a "government of hell."
Another of the Khalifa's prisoners, the Italian priest Rosignoli, recounted the gruesome and unequal struggle for survival in Omdurman in 1888β1889:
Omdurman became a stage on which horrible scenes took place. The Mahdists had insulted the besieged Egyptians in El Obeid for eating dogs, donkeys, leather and other filth. Now they were forced to go even further; they ate their own children.
The rich were able to save themselves by buying up in time stocks of _dura_ , but for the poor there was no escape. From 60 lire per ardeh the price rose to 250. The emaciated crowds with besotted eyes that I have seen in the streets of El Obeid during the siege, I saw once more in even greater numbers. There were large mobs searching for anything merely to prolong their lives. The streets were full of dead bodies and there was no one to throw the corpses into the Nile or event to take them to the area selected by the Khalifa to be the cemetery. Today there are piles of whitened bones being the remains of those who died during the famine. Hyenas finding such an abundance of food convened in large numbers and became so daring that they wandered through the streets of the city...
Children ran the risk of being kidnapped. One night we succeeded wrenching from the hands of a starving man, a boy who had raised the alarm by his desperate screams. On another occasion a girl ran to the _Mahkama_ begging protection from her mother who had already devoured the smallest of her sons and had told the girl that this was to be her fate. The wretched woman was imprisoned and died insane a few days later. Mothers came to us offering their infants as their dried up breasts could offer them no substance. One day a woman came to Father Ohrwalder begging that he buy hers. He gave the woman some handfuls of _dura_ and sent her away with God's blessings. The next day she reappeared with only two children, one having died of hunger. On the third day she was accompanied by one only. She was never seen again.
Another European witness, Rudolf von Slatin, who served the Khalifa in various capacities, wrote that "the majority of those who died belonged rather to the moving population than to the actual inhabitants of the town, for the latter had managed to secret a certain amount of grain and the different tribes invariably assisted each other." Like Father Rosignoli, he titillated European readers with lurid accounts of Darwinian spectacles in the streets of the Mahdi's starving capital.
One nightβit was full moonβI was going home at about twelve o'clock, when, near the Beit el Amana (ammunition and arms stores), I saw something moving on the ground, and went near to see what it was. As I approached I saw three almost naked women, with their long tangled hair hanging about their shoulders; they were squatting round a quite young donkey, which was lying on the ground, and had probably strayed from its mother, or been stolen by them. They had torn open its body with their teeth, and were devouring its intestines, whilst the poor animal was still breathing. I shuddered at this terrible sight, whilst the poor women, infuriated by hunger, gazed at me like maniacs. The beggars by whom I was followed now fell upon them, and attempted to wrest from them their prey; and I fled from this uncanny spectacle.
Conditions outside Omdurman in the Nilotic countryside, if contemporary witnesses are to be believed, were even more appalling. "I think the Jaalin," wrote von Slatin, "who are the most independent as well as the proudest tribe in the Sudan, suffered more severely than the rest; several fathers of families, seeing that escape from death was impossible, bricked up the doors of their houses, and, united with their children, patiently awaited death. I have no hesitation in saying that in this way entire villages died out." In addition, he added, "The Hassania, Shukria, Aggalain, Hammada, and other tribes had completely died out, and the once thickly-populated country had become a desert waste." Father Rosignoli likewise reckoned that the toll from famine and disease was nearly incalculable: "Many tribes have disappeared from the face of the Earth." Refugees told him terrifying stories, comparable to accounts from Ethiopia, of starving humans turned into the prey of wild animals. "Since the number of men formerly hunting them has diminished, the number of wild beasts has increased a hundred-fold. They have become so fearless that they enter villages in large numbers to devour the children and the sick, that is those unable to defend themselves against the horrible invaders."
Comparable tales also were being told in the savannas of western Africa, where the drought-famine, as in the Sudan, was known as "Year Six" (Sanat Sita) because it began in the year 1306 (1888) of the Muslim calendar. According to Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, there was a great famine in Walata, along the bend of the Niger River, in 1888β89 that took the lives of thousands of captives and slaves. Starvation was also reported in Katsina and Kano. The major bloc of independent and militarily formidable societies remaining in Africaβthe Muslim states of the Sahel/Sudan and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopiaβwere suddenly rendered vulnerable by drought, famine and internal disorder. As the threat of Mahdist expansionism abated, the European powers grasped at the opportunity to turn the crisis to their own colonial advantage.
From their toehold on the Eritrean coast, the land-hungry Italians (encouraged by the British as a check on French ambitions in the Red Sea region) were the first to act. "The Colony of Eritrea," wrote a contemporary Italian commission, "is able to serve in the future as the vent of part of Italian emigration." Invoking "famine abandoned lands" as a pretext, they occupied Asmara in the summer of 1889 as staging area for the colonization of the drought-ravaged Eritrean highlands and the Tigre plateau. The rest of Ethiopia, meanwhile, was declared under the "protection" of Rome. (Menelik famously responded: "Ethiopia has need of no one; she stretches out her hands to God alone.") Deprived by rinderpest of horses for his famous cavalry, and lacking provisions to sustain a large army on the march, Menelik (who had utilized Italian support to wrest his throne from the Tigreans) was initially forced to give way before the Italian columns. The fiery Empress Taitou, "who came close to accusing her husband of treason," exhorted him to defend Ethiopia's sovereignty at all cost. With astonishing patience and skill (as well as French arms), he eventually rallied his stricken but valiant people to annihilate a large Italian expeditionary corps at Adawa on 1 March 1896. It was Europe's greatest defeat in Africa and the end of Prime Minister's Francesco Crespi's dream of a "second Roman Empire" in the Land of the Queen of Sheba and Prester John.
**Fin de Siècle Apocalypse?**
Ethiopians had little opportunity to celebrate, however. While Menelik's victorious army was marching back to Addis Ababa, drought was againβfor the third time in less than a decadeβfastening its grip on the Horn of Africa. It was a global curse. "The period 1895β1902," Sir John Elliot told the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1904, "was characterized by more or less persistent deficiency of rainfall over practically the whole Indo-oceanic area (including Abyssinia)." More recently, a leading historian of the world grain trade has emphasized the extraordinary synchronization of crop failure across six continents.
[T]he years 1896 and 1897 were characterized by abnormally bad weather throughout widely dispersed wheat-producing areas. World yield per acre (12.1 bushels) for the 1897 crop remains the lowest ever recorded. Thus there was drought in 1896 in India, Australia, the winter-wheat belt of the United States, and North Africa, while locusts and late rains reduced Argentine yields. But weather was worse in 1897; the rainfall distribution in the principal wheat-producing areas was most abnormal. Drought occurred in India, Australia, southern Russia, Spain, and North Africa, France had excessive rain at seeding time. Heavy rains and storms during May and June reduced yields in the Danube Basin. Argentina had locusts, drought, frosts in November, and rains at harvest. In Canada there were summer frosts, late heavy rains, and even hail in some areas... Of all the important exporters, only the United States had a good crop.
Other cereals were equally affected, and a third wave of drought and famine, comparable in magnitude to the 1876β79 catastrophe, swept over India, northern China, Korea, Java, the Philippines, northeast Brazil, and southern and eastern Africa. Hunger also stalked the Upper Nile, where famished peasants ate dirt; southern Russia, where Tolstoy wrote about the despair of the muzhiks in the face of drought and oppression; and Australia, which lost half of its sheep in the worst drought in its modern history. We now know that an extraordinary clustering of El NiΓ±o eventsβ1896/97, 1899/1900 and 1902βwas largely responsible for this global agricultural catastrophe. The wet intermission of 1898, perhaps the nineteenth century's most powerful La NiΓ±a, brought its own horror in the form of devastating floods in the basin of the Yellow River. Perhaps one quarter of the earth's population, mostly in what would become known as the "third world," was directly affected by ENSO-related dearth.
Indeed, the century's end became a radical point of division in the experience of humanity. For Europeans and their North American cousins, as David Landes has written, "the wheel turned" in 1896 and the depression that had started with the Panic of 1893 was replaced by a new boom. "As business improved, confidence returnedβnot the spotty, evanescent confidence of the brief booms that had punctuated the gloom of the preceding decades, but a general euphoria such as had not prevailed since... the early 1870s. Everything seemed right againβin spite of rattlings of arms and monitory Marxist references to the 'last stage' of capitalism. In all of western Europe, these years [1896β1914] live on in memory as the good old daysβthe Edwardian era, la belle epoque."
For most non-Europeans (Japanese and southern cone Latin Americans excepted), on the other hand, this was a new dark age of colonial war, indentured labor, concentration camps, genocide, forced migration, famine and disease. The epidemic-disease dimension of famine was much more lethal than in the 1870s. In Asia, for example, the new subsistence crises coincided with the Third Plague Pandemic that eventually killed more than 15 million people, while the rinderpest catastrophe (which also affected the East Indies) destroyed the economic foundations of traditional society throughout eastern and southern Africa. As health and longevity standards dramatically rose in the industrial cities of Europe and North America, they were collapsing throughout Africa and Asia. This vast human crisis, moreover, was aggressively exploited by the New Imperialism and its Christian counterpart. "Europeans," one African told a missionary, "track famine like a sky full of vultures."
As a result, the fin de siΓ¨cle in the non-European world careened toward the apocalyptic, with an explosion of millenarian revelations, uprisings and messiahs. Everywhere desperate cultures set their calendars to End Time. Many Muslims, for example, believed that the conclusion of the thirteenth Koranic century (1785β1882) would be promptly followed by the end of the world. In India it was widely expected that the month of Kartik in the Sambat year 1956 (November 1899) would "initiate an age of affliction and catastrophe for India and the world." Similarly in North China, insurgent peasants embraced the White Lotus sect's prediction of an approaching world calamity, associated with the turning of a Buddhist _kalpa_ , that "meant the elimination of existing society and the coming to power of the Eternal Mother." Most Chinese also believed that the year 1900, because of "the fateful conjunction of an eighth intercalary month with the gengzi year of the lunar calendar" (the first since 1680), was destined to bring cataclysmic social disorder (which, of course, is what happened). Throughout the _sertΓ£o_ , moreover, dissident Sebastianist priests and lay _beatos_ were identifying the new Brazilian Republic with the reign of the Anti-Christ and the advent of the Last Days.
Not surprisingly, as Charles Ambler writes about Kenya in 1897, "people saw a connection between the disaster of drought, famine, and disease on the one hand, and the advance of European economic and political power on the other." Whether among the Ndebele insurgents of the Mwari cult in Zimbabwe, the Maji-Maji fighters (after 1904) in German East Africa, the Tawara followers of Kanowanga in Mozambique, the "Ethiopianist" churches in the Rand, the _conselheiristas_ in northeast Brazil (victims of internal colonialism), the anti-French _phumibun_ movement of Ong Man in Laos, the messianic Papa Isio guerrillas in Negros, the adherents of the Madhi (Kasan Mukmin) in Java, or the Boxers United in Righteousness outside the gates of Beijingβthere was a pervasive belief that natural disaster was "the most immediate and punishing element of a larger social and cosmological crisis... a terrible symbol of the advent of colonialism." "It was an age of anxiety," John Lonsdale adds, "of sudden witchcraft panics, a time when the politics of survival seemed to demand desperate tyrannies." Some Europeans, to be sure, were almost as apprehensive. If Kipling's verse exalted colonizing optimism and scientific racism, Conrad's troubling stories warned that Europe itself was being barbarized by its complicity in secret tropical holocausts. _La belle Γ©poque_ , in his view, was dangerously downriver of the Apocalypse.
##
## **Skeletons at the Feast**
> I am firmly convinced that in India we are working up to a hideous economical catastrophe, beside which the great Irish Famine of 1847 will seem mere child's play.
>
> β H. M. Hyndman, 1886
India's rulers, of course, had no premonition that Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (1897) would be celebrated in carnage: "the saddest year in its accumulation of calamities since the time that India passed from the hands of the East India Company to the Crown," as Romesh Dutt would later tell the Indian National Congress. Instead, as the subcontinent anticipated the monsoon of 1896, there was smug confidence (the recent deaths in Orissa notwithstanding) that famine mortality on the scale of 1876 was no longer possible. Thanks to the 1880 report of Sir Richard Strachey's Commission, there were now regional famine codes that instructed the organization of local relief and provided new controls (registration within subdistrict "famine circles") over panic-driven population movements like those that had so alarmed the government twenty years earlier. Moreover, a Famine Relief and Insurance Fund had been established in 1878 to ensure that Calcutta could finance relief during major droughts and floods without fiscal risk to its other priorities, especially the permanent military campaign along its northwestern frontier.
In addition, wrote a contemporary economist, "the historic conditions controlling production and distribution... had been revolutionised." The integration of Burma's huge rice surpluses into the imperial system, along with the 10,000 miles of new railroad track (much of it financed by the Famine Fund), were heralded as providing the rural population with a decisive margin of food security. "Famine in the original sense of the word, that is to say as a result of a lack of food, has become impossible. In case of shortfalls, Burma feeds the Punjab and the North Western Provinces or vice versa; Madras comes to the aid of Bombay or the other way around." As Lord Elgin reassured Queen Victoria: "The improvement of the means of communications particularly by railway makes it possible to cope with scarcity now in a way that was out of the power of the officers of former days."
In the event, these improvements were all but meaningless. Even his worst enemies marveled at Lord Elgin's singlemindedness in following Lytton's path to exactly the same calamitous destination. A severely deficient monsoon prevented the sowing of the spring 1896 crop throughout the Punjab, North Western Provinces, Oudh, Bihar and the Madras Deccan. The failure of the rains was even more devastating in the Central Provinces and eastern Rajputana (Rajasthan), where three years of bad weather and poor harvests had already immiserated the peasantry. Throughout India grain prices rose, then skyrocketed after the autumn monsoon likewise failed. Grain reserves, especially in the wheat belt of northern India, had been depleted by massive exports to make up the previous year's terrible harvest in England. Meanwhile Elgin's "revolutionary" improvements in distribution simply ensured that prices were as high in districts unaffected by the drought (like the well-watered Godavari Delta in Madras) as in those where most of the crop had failed.
The mere existence of railroads, moreover, could not bring grain into districts where mass purchasing power was insufficient. British officials, with their doctrinaire faith in market rationality, were startled to see the price of millet and other "poverty grains" surpass that of the milled wheat used in European bread. As for the vaunted Famine Fund, a substantial portion had been diverted against the protests of Indians to pay for yet another vicious Afghan war. (At the inaugural meeting in London of a campaign for Indian famine relief in January 1897, the socialist leader Henry Hyndman was pulled off the dais by police when he proposed that "home charges for the current year should be suspended and the whole amount be devoted to expenditure on famine relief.")
The government, moreover, had categorically discounted warnings from Indian nationalists as well as their own health officers about the ever-increasing population of poor people vulnerable to any sharp increase in food prices. Malnutrition, critics believed, had reached epic levels unprecedented in Indian history. The Dufferin Enquiry in 1887 had shown that "forty million of the poor go through life on insufficient food" and "half of our agricultural population never know from year's end to year's end what it is to have their hunger fully satisfied." Five years later in his famous "bombshell" circular to the Indian National Congress, Allan Octavian Hume lamented that poverty was "swallowing up our lower classes like a rising swamp, it is deepening, widening, blackening..." William Wedderburn, John Bright's old friend and sometime leader of the Parliamentary Opposition on India, lobbied an apathetic House of Commons to undertake a major enquiry into Indian poverty before famine again decimated the subcontinent. But the India Office in 1896 was no more eager than in 1876 to face the "nightmare" of poor relief in India. The _Spectator_ , denouncing Hume, Wedderburn and the "baboos," warned its readers that "if India were as with England and had the same Poor-law, there would be eighty millions of paupers in receipt of relief."
**'Government Charnel Houses' (1896β97)**
High prices, meanwhile, were rapidly turning drought into famine. Acute distress was already visible in the North Western and Central Provinces in August 1896; by October, the police were opening fire on grain looters in Bihar and the Bombay Deccan. The _New York Times_ published a letter written in October from the American Board missionary R. Hume in Ahmednagar. Pointing out that the drought was much more widespread than in 1877, Hume despaired that "for two days my servants tried in vain to buy 50 cents' worth of grain for use." With "no more rain... likely to fall for eight full months," the next possible harvest was nearly a year away, and thus Hume was not surprised at the desperation of his normally "quiet, orderly" neighbors.
Already grain riots are common. Grain merchants will not sell grain, largely because they know the price will greatly increase, though even now prices are 300 per cent. above normal. So people break open grain shops and granaries, and threaten to kill the merchants if they interfere. They say: "We shall have soon to die without grain. If you interfere with our getting your grain, and we kill you in the struggle, it will be all the same." Similarly, these people say to the police and courts: "Arrest us for stealing and support us in jail. There we shall not die from starvation."
At nearby Narsinghpur, the American missionary Margaret Denning described the heartrending ordeal of a Moslem smallholder who was forced to sell, first, his land, then his hut and finally his cooking utensils to provide food for his wife and two small children. Since "the government was doing nothing to relieve the poor," he gave his oldest child to the infidel missionaries in violation of his religion. "The man brought the boy to us, telling the child he could care for him no longer, although he had always hoped to send him to school, but that now he saw no way to save his life and educate him other than to give him away. The boy was not to think his father did not love him, and, if he lived and learned how to write, he was charged to write to his parents. The father bade him goodbye and, asking nothing for himself, went away." (Later the government begrudgingly opened a poorhouse in the vicinity, but the father, together with the child's mother and baby brother, perished under a squalid regime of poor sanitation, inadequate rations and hard labor.)
Such stories were commonplace and they began to sow unease abroad. Sir Edwin Arnold was mobilized to reassure the Americans that "the British in India rule for the sake of the Indians first, and for revenue, reputation and power afterward." But with Spectator and other prominent editorial pulpits chiding him for excessive parsimony, the viceroyβotherwise preoccupied with destroying rebel villages along the Afghan borderβreluctantly agreed to open limited relief work in the most stricken districts. He remained stubbornly opposed, however, to private charity, including international missionary appeals, and bitterly condemned the press for their "exaggerations." Like Lytton before him, Elgin foreclosed more liberal policies on a local or regional level. Thus the Bombay municipal committees were "banned to utilize their funds for running fair price shops," and the government of Bengal was forbidden to advance money to traders to import grain. (Burma, as a result, exported its large rice surplus to Europe.) Finally, "as his coffers were drained by war on the North Western Frontier, his government... reduced the contribution to the [Famine] Fund from Rs. 1.5 crores to Rs. 1 crore," in gross violation of previous official promises to Indians.
**Figure 5.1 Famine in India, 1896β97**
In early December Elgin passed through Jubbulpur in the Central Provinces, a town that would figure centrally in international debates over British famine policy. The drought here had been unbroken since the fall of 1895 and the monthly death rate had been over 10 percent since September. The government had previously refused desperate local appeals to open relief work or control the price of grain. But Elgin, like Temple and Lytton in Madras a generation before, was stonily unmoved by anything he saw. "I can only say that travelling during the last few days in Indore and Gowalior and now in these Provinces up to the gates of your city I have been struck by the prosperous appearance of the country even with the small amount of rain that has come lately." All India was outraged by this remark, basedβone reporter claimedβon a quick glimpse from "the saloon window of the viceregal train."
**Figure 5.2 "The prosperous appearance of the country..."**
Famine victims at Jubbulpur at the time of Lord Elgin's visit in 1897.
Convinced that Indians were natural shirkers and beggars, Elgin imported that old disciplinary cornerstone of utilitarianism, the poor-house, to the subcontinent. Designated for those too weak for heavy labor, the poor houses were despised by the peasantry who feared that "they would be converted to Christianity, or deported to places beyond the sea." Confinement was especially unbearable to the tribal peoples, like the Gonds and Baigas, whom one missionary claimed "would sooner die in their homes or in their native jungle, than submit to the restraint of a government Poor House." This was echoed by an English authority on the famine: "The hatred of the poorhouse has in many instances proved more strong than the fear of death."
Although the British regarded this antipathy as irrational, a visiting American relief official was horrified by conditions inside the poorhouses, especially the diet. "The food was nothing but dry flour and some salt. An accustomed eye could at once see that THE GRAIN WAS ADULTERED WITH EARTH before it was ground into flour... Alas! alas! for the poor who are obliged to eat the food given to them at the Poor Houses." Mennonite missionaries estimated that "perhaps about eight or ten annas or, at the most, a rupee per month is allowed for each person" by the government. (At 1899 exchange rates this was the equivalent of only 34 cents per month.) As a result, one Mennonite wrote to Louis Klopsch, publisher of the _Christian Herald_ in New York, "The death rate in this district which normally was under 50 in the thousand was forced by starvation up to the appalling figure of 627 in the thousand."
The Americans accused the government of deliberately deceiving world opinion about conditions in the Indian countryside. "How many more might have been saved and be today happy and full of life and vigor if they could only have been reached in time will never be known. Perhaps the bleaching skulls on India's plains could give us some idea. But the long continued withholding of actual facts by the government and the consequent general ignorance of the true conditions of things must be looked upon as the cause of many thousands of deaths." Such accusations were made all the more effective by the shocking photographs of famine conditions that were reprinted in newspapers around the world. (During the 1876β78 famine, dry plate photography had required professional skill with a cumbersome tripod-mounted field camera. The advent of the cheap, handheld Kodak Number One camera in 1888, however, turned virtually every missionary in India into a documentary photographer.)
Rather than slowly die in the government charnel houses, peasants throughout the Central Provinces assaulted grain depots. The worst disturbances ironically occurred in Nagpur District, where the harvest was adequate but soaring market prices had nonetheless imposed starvation on Koshti caste weavers, immiserated by their losing competition against factory-made textiles. The local commissioner, Sir Andrew Fraser, arrogantly dismissed pleas to open relief works, and merchants outraged the public by selling adulterated grain at fantastic prices. After a series of violent clashes, the Lancashire Regiment had to be sent in to reinforce native infantry. As James McLane points out, the rioting was incipient class war that did not spare the local leadership of the Indian National Congress: "In the Nagpur grain riots, the house of a leading Congressman, Gangadhar Madho Chitnavis, was singled out by a mob for looting and was saved by the intervention of sepoys. The rioters chose Chitnavis's house apparently because they believed, as a wealthy money-lender and landowner and president of the municipality, he could influence the price or supplies of grain."
Similar conditions in the Bombay Presidency allowed the "Extremist leader" Bal Gangadhar Tilak to consolidate his takeover of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. Tilak, who had long urged the Congress to adopt the more militant agitational methods of the Irish, now played Michael Davitt in the Deccan, calling for popular resistance against tax collections. (Davitt himself was meanwhile speaking alongside Naoroji and Eleanor Marx at protests against Elgin organized by Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation in London.) Tilak's stirring invocations of the heroic Maratha past roused a martial populism in hungry villagers as they united once again, as in 1877, to oppose the hated revenue man. The British were unnerved. "The assistant collector of Poona district reported that 'not a pie of the revenue instalment' due on 10 December 1896 had been paid to the government." In the Kolaba district the collector was besieged by more than 4,000 ryots demanding remission of their taxes, and the _Times of India_ trembled at the massive response of villagers to Tilak's organizers. The tense political situation in western India was further inflamed by the draconian British response to the arrival of the Black Death from China.
The bubonic plague came to Bombay in summer 1896 probably as a stowaway on a ship from Hong Kong. At the time, some scientists theorized that drought, as previously in southern China, was a critical factor in driving plague-carrying rats into more intimate commensality with human victims. Bombay, in any event, offered an ideal ecology for a pandemic: fetid, overcrowded slums (perhaps the densest in Asia) infested with a huge population of black rats. For years health officers had warned British administrators that their refusal to expend anything on slum sanitation was preparing the way for an "epidemic apocalypse." Florence Nightingale, in addition, had repeatedly crusaded against the city's "phantasmagoria" of disease conditions, but the "European townspeople were united in blocking increased taxation to pay for new water and drainage schemes."
The city's fabulous boom in the 1880s and 1890s moreover had been subsidized by the falling living and health standards of its vast majority: "The wages of unskilled laborers increased only five percent in 35 years while grain costs rose 50 percent and land values and rents tripled." The progressive immiseration of its working classes, Ira Klein argues, was the single most important factor in Bombay's "extraordinary, disproportionate blossoming of death near the turn of the century." Despite several panic-stricken exoduses, the famine in Bombay's hinterlands left little option for the urban poor but to remain in their pestilential slums. Indeed, the drought inundated the city's environs with famished refugees from the Deccan: 300,000 of them in April, May and June of 1897 alone. Starvation and cholera were promptly added to plague: eventually killing a fifth of the city's low-caste laborers. Even more alarming to commercial elites, some foreign ports began to quarantine shipments of wheat from Bombay. There were fears that a general embargo might destroy western India's foreign commerce.
As the city's morale plummeted, the governor's Plague Committee, still ignorant of the plague's true vectors, launched an unprecedented war against the tenement neighborhoods that sheltered the pandemic. The resulting onslaught of fire, lime and carbolic acid utterly failed to stop the plague's advance (it simply drove rats into neighboring homes), but it did unhouse thousands. (In England, some of the press proposed the "radical purification" of burning the entire native city to the ground.) While destroying peoples' homes and shops, however, the government did nothing to control the explosion in grain prices that was spreading starvation faster than plague. "Unrest in Bombay against continuing exports of foodgrains from the Presidency in the face of the serious famine" was thus combined with riots against the housing demolitions and the "kidnapping" of family members to the hated plague hospitals.
Meanwhile railroad shipments of contaminated relief grain spread the plague with great efficiency across the Ghats into the arid and hungry Deccan. Modernization and immiseration were again a deadly combination:
Even more important than travellers in bringing infectious rodent fleas to new locales was India's vast commerce, developed through the encouragement of free trade policies... The transport of rice, bajri, wheat and other grains across the famine-stricken country in the late 1890s, a traffic meant to be life-giving, particularly helped disseminate plague amongst India's malnourished population. Grain was the favorite food of the black rat, while the great plague vector [the flea], "bred best in the debris of cereal grains."... When these fleas arrived at new towns or villages they often carried plague bacilli with them, fastened on local black rats as new hosts, began epizootics and then transferred plague to humans as alternate hosts.
Oblivious to native dignity, the subsequent eradication campaign in the Deccan was militarized under a special executive headed by a haughty racist, W. C. Rand. The new Epidemic Disease Act gave him powers to "detain and segregate plague suspects, to destroy property, inspect, disinfect, evacuate and even demolish dwellings suspected of harbouring the plague, to prohibit fairs and pilgrimages... " Rand boasted that his measures "were perhaps the most drastic that had ever been taken to stamp out an epidemic." As one Indian historian has written: "Rand had summoned British troops to his aid and had swept down on the slums like a proverbial wolf on the fold. Plucking out men, women and children from their homes, he burnt their belongings and desecrated their shrines. Suspected victims were forcibly evacuated, their families coming to hear of them only after they were dead."
The shocking contrast between the huge number of people detained, many of them apparently healthy, and the relatively few ever released alive from the plague camps played on Indians' worst apprehensions about British rule. Rumors spread across the country that Indian patients were being murdered to extract a vital oil to be employed as a magic ointment by Europeans.
Across India, meanwhile, there was growing outrage at the lavish preparations to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's rule. "In the Lahore Town Hall, a group of Indian schoolboys broke up a meeting of leading English and Indian citizens by insisting that money be raised for famine orphans rather than for a memorial to Queen Victoria." But it was in famished and plague-infested Poona that imperial arrogance finally sparked what many feared to be the prelude to a second Mutiny. On 22 June two Indian patriots assassinated Rand and an underling as they were driving away from Diamond Jubilee fireworks at Government House. The murders were followed a month later by an unprecedented Muslim eruption in Calcutta after a court ordered the destruction of a neighborhood mosque. "For several days large groups... roamed the streets, attacked isolated Europeans, and threatened to loot and burn factories. The disturbances were unusual in that the rioters singled out Europeans and ignored Hindus."
**Figure 5.3 The Victoria Memorial Monument, Calcutta**
The Poona assassinations nonetheless gave Elgin a welcome pretext to strike back against the Maharashtrian tax resistance movement as well as his critics in the vernacular press. Tilak, accused of being the "spiritual godfather of the Rand murders," and four newspaper editors were promptly charged under a new sedition law. "Magistrates were empowered to bind down editors of newspapers for good behaviour, and to send them to prison in default of security, without trial for any specific offence." Any native criticism of famine relief, as well as the anti-plague campaign, was effectively criminalized.
Although the _Englishman_ in Calcutta screamed that "India was on the verge of another Mutiny," authorities were in fact surprised by how "little observable" was any violent disorder in the wake of the devastating combination of plague and starvationβ"a heavier burden... than [the country] has known during the century." Indeed, the chief preoccupation of the India Office, as revealed by recent studies of the official correspondence between London and Calcutta, was neither the holocaust in lives nor the threat of revolution, but that Indian disasters might "disturb the intricate system for the multilateral settlement of [Britain's] balance of payments, in which India played a large and vital part." Hamilton and Elgin fretted that sales of Indian wheat, tea and jute would collapse in face of growing foreign fears about the plague and the proposed embargo of trade between India and Europe that the French were advocating. In a land where famished laborers were easily replaced, "The Secretary of State in London was telling the Viceroy that he was 'more concerned about plague than famine' because a 'market once lost, or even partially deserted, is not easily regained.' "
**Suffer Little Children**
> On the way back to the station, on the outskirts of the village, Dr. Ashe found the skeleton of a child, and brought away part of the bones of the head in his handkerchief, to preserve as a memento.
>
> β I. Catanach
Famine mortality crested in March 1897. The next month Elgin himself conceded that 4.5 million poor people had perished. Behramji Malabari, the nationalist editor of the _Indian Spectator_ , countered that the real number, plague victims included, was probably closer to 18 million. At the same time, the _Missionary Review of the World_ , which ordinarily praised British philanthropy, denounced the doublespeak by which the government had downplayed the severity of the crisis and sabotaged missionary efforts to organize prompt international relief. "When the pangs of hunger drive people in silent procession, living skeletons, to find food, dying by the way; the stronger getting a few grains, the feebler perishing, and children, an intolerable burden, are sold at from ten to thirty cents a piece, and when at best a heritage of orphaned children of tens of thousands must remain to the countryβthis is not 'impending' famineβit is grim, gaunt, awful famine itself."
Meanwhile, the agrarian economy of northern India continued to unravel, and the famous jurist and national leader Mahdev Govinda Ranade complained that the "seven plagues which afflicted the land of the Pharaohs in old time were let loose upon us." In the Punjab, where cattle powered wells and irrigation wheels, the decimation of animals was so great that the standing crops in the fields died because villagers could not lift water from their wells. The most extreme distress, however, was still in the Central Provinces where, as the Indian National Congress charged and Lord Hamilton later conceded, revenue exactions had long threatened the subsistence of the poor. Prophetically, eight years earlier after a severe tax hike, 15,000 protesting peasants had confronted the chief commissioner in front of the Bilaspur railroad station. "Their cry was, 'bandobast se mar gaya'β'the settlement has killed us!' "
The protestors' words came grimly true in the winter of 1896β97, when mortality soared in at least one district (Gantur) to an incredible 40 percent (200,000 out of 500,000 residents). In his zeal to maintain fiscal pressure on the peasantry, the Central Provinces' governor-general took little account of the remarkable siege of natural disasterβthree consecutive years of devastating rains, plant rust, caterpillar plagues and black blightβthat preceded the drought. Despite the terrible velocity with which famine spread through an already prostrate countryside, Sir Charles Lyall followed Elgin's lead and downplayed the acuity of the famine. While allowing grain merchants to export the province's scarce reserves, he refused frenzied pleas to suspend revenue collections or provide village-centered relief as authorized in the famine code. Destitute famine victims were instead herded into hastily improvised poorhouses that set new standards for administrative incompetence and corruption.
Reuter's "special famine commissioner," F. Merewether, shocked the British reading public with his exposΓ© of suffering and neglect inside the poorhouses of Bilaspur and Jubbulpur. Although an ardent imperialist whose reports usually depicted heroic British district officers battling natural cataclysm and Hindu superstition, Merewether did not mince words about the atrocities that passed for relief in the Central Provinces:
The actual inhabitants of Bilaspur were dying of starvation, while under the supposed aegis of the Government and within their very gates. I mentioned previously that my opinion was that the famine in the Central Provinces was grossly mismanaged. I collected tangible proofs of this daily, till I had to hand a mass of reliable and irrefutable evidence, which showed only too clearly that the officials and those responsible had not, and did not, fully recognized the gravity of the situation. With reference to the poor-house, there can be no doubt that in addition to supineness and mismanagement, there was decided fraud going on, and the poor hopeless and helpless inmates were being condemned by a paternal Government to a slow, horrible, and lingering death by starvation.
I here came across the first specimens of "Famine Down," which is produced by long-continued starvation. At certain stages of want a fine down of smooth hair appears all over the bodies of the afflicted. It has a most curious look, and gives the wearer a more simian look than ever... There were more than a score of souls who had reached this stage, and their bodies were covered from head to foot with the soft-looking black fur.
**Figure 5.4 The Central Provinces in 1897: A Young Famine Victim**
When Julian Hawthorne, son of the famous New England writer and Cosmopolitan's special correspondent in India, reached Jubbulpur in April 1897, three months after Merewether, conditions in the Central Provinces had grown even more nightmarish. On the long, hot train ride up the Narmada Valley ("the great graveyard of India" according to American missionaries), Hawthorne was horrified by the families of corpses seated in the shade of the occasional desert trees. "There they squatted, all dead now, their flimsy garments fluttering around them, except when jackals had pulled the skeletons apart, in the hopeless search for marrow." In Jubbulpur, he was escorted by the resident American missionary who took him first to the town market, where he was disgusted by the radical existential contrast between "bony remnants of human beings" begging for kernels of grain and the plump, nonchalant prosperity of the local merchant castes.
**Figure 5.5 Famine Victim Attacked by Jackals**
The poorhouses, meanwhile, were converted cattle-pens terrorized by overseers who, as Merewether had accurately reported, systematically cheated their doomed charges of their pathetic rations. "Emaciation" hardly described the condition of the "human skeletons" Hawthorne encountered:
They showed us their bellies β a mere wrinkle of empty skin. Twenty per cent of them were blind; their very eyeballs were gone. The joints of their knees stood out between the thighs and shinbones as in any other skeleton; so did their elbows; their fleshless jaws and skulls were supported on necks like those of plucked chickens. Their bodies β they had none; only the framework was left.
Hawthorne's most haunting experience, however, was his visit to the children in the provincial orphanage in Jubbulpur. In imperial mythology, as enshrined in Kipling's famous short story "William the Conqueror" (published on the eve of the famine in 1896), British officials struggled heroically against all odds to save the smallest famine victims. The Ladies Home Journal (January 1896) version of Kipling's story had featured a famous woodcut by the American artist W. L. Taylor of a tall British officer walking slowly at the head of a flock of grateful, saved children. "Taylor accentuated the god-like bearing of Scott, as seen through the eyes of William [his love interest], standing at the entrance to her tent. The black cupids are there and a few capering goats..."
**Figure 5.6 The British Self-Image: An Illustration from Kipling's "William the Conqueror"**
But as W. Aykroyd, a former Indian civil servant who in his youth had talked to the veterans of the 1896β97 famine, emphasizes, this idyllic scene was utterly fictional. "No particular attention was... given to children in the famine relief operations." Far more realistic than Scott's motherly compassion was the repugnance that Kipling's heroine William feels when, after dreaming "for the twentieth time of the god in the golden dust," she awakes to face "loathsome black children, scores of them wastrels picked up by the wayside, their bones almost breaking their skin, terrible and covered with sores."
Hawthorne indeed discovered that "rescue" more often than not meant slow death in squalid, corruptly managed children's camps. After reminding American readers that "Indian children are normally active, intelligent and comely, with brilliant eyes, like jewels," he opens the door to the orphanage:
One of the first objects I noticed on entering was a child of five, standing by itself near the middle of the enclosure. Its arms were not so large round as my thumb; its legs were scarcely larger; the pelvic bones were plainly shown; the ribs, back and front, started through the skin, like a wire cage. The eyes were fixed and unobservant; the expression of the little skull-face solemn, dreary and old. Will, impulse, and almost sensation, were destroyed in this tiny skeleton, which might have been a plump and happy baby. It seemed not to hear when addressed. I lifted it between my thumbs and forefingers; it did not weigh more than seven or eight pounds.
Beyond, in the orphanage yard, neglected children agonized in the last stages of starvation and disease. Hawthorne thought it obvious that the overseers, as in the adult poorhouses, were stealing grain for sale with little fear of punishment from their superiors:
We went towards the sheds, where were those who were too enfeebled to stand or walk. A boy was squatting over an earthen saucer, into which he spate continually; he had the mouth disease; he could not articulate, but an exhausted moan came from him ever and anon. There was a great abscess on the back of his head. Another, in the final stage of dysentery, lay nearly dead in his own filth; he breathed, but had not strength to moan. There was one baby which seemed much better than the rest; it was tended by its own mother... Now, this child was in no better condition than the rest of them when it came, but its mother's care had revived it. That meant, simply, that it had received its full allowance of the food which is supposed to be given to all alike. Why had the othersβthe full orphansβnot received theirs?
_Cosmopolitan_ pointedly published photographs of famine victims from the Central Provinces next to an illustration of a great monument erected to Queen Victoria. Hawthorne, "on his way home from India," it editorialized, "heard it conservatively estimated in London that a total of more than one hundred millions of dollars would be expended, directly and indirectly, upon the Queen's Jubilee ceremonies." But dying children in remote _taluks_ were no more allowed to interrupt the gaiety of the Empress of India's Diamond Jubilee in June 1897 than they had her Great Durbar twenty years before. Critics of Elgin were uncertain which was more scandalous: how much he had expended on the Jubilee extravaganza, or how little he had spent on the famine that affected 100 million Indians. When the government's actual relief expenditures were published a year later, they fell far below the per capita recommendations of the 1880 Famine Commission. As a new Famine Commission reported in 1898: "Our general conclusion is that, as compared with the past, a considerable degree of success as regards economy had been attained in the relief measures of the late famine."
The relief works were quickly shut down with the return of the rains in 1898. Hundreds of thousands of destitute, landless people, without any means to take immediate advantage of the monsoon, were pushed out of the camps and poorhouses. As a consequence, the momentum of famine and disease continued to generate a staggering 6.5 million excess deaths in 1898, making total mortality closer to 11 million than the 4.5 million earlier admitted by Elgin. Twelve to 16 million was the death toll commonly reported in the world press, which promptly nominated this as the "famine of the century." This dismal title, however, was almost immediately usurped by the even greater drought and deadlier famine of 1899β1902.
**Figure 5.7 Aged by Hunger**
A fifteen-year-old girl.
**Blue Skies of Famine (1899β1902)**
In at least one part of India, however, 1899 is still remembered for the rain that never stopped falling. Indeed, Assam almost drowned in Noachian deluges; the 650 inches that fell in Chriapunji over the course of the year were a world record. For the rest of India, Sir John Elliot, the director-general of observatories, predicted in May an unusually wet monsoon as well. The Simla social season, dominated by Lady Curzon, the Chicago heiress wife of the new Tory viceroy, began with the usual whirlwind of parties, polo and white mischief. There was little discussion of the weather; certainly no apprehension that devastating back-to-back drought was even possible. When the rains punctually commenced in June but then suddenly stopped and did not return through July, Elliot reassured Curzon that the monsoon would resume with heavy rain in August and September. It never did, and 1899 ended as the second-driest year (after 1877) in Indian history.
In the words of a modern researcher, who has reconstructed the synoptic patterns of the 1899 El NiΓ±o, the monsoons simply "jammed": "The rain-bearing monsoon depressions, which usually enter India from the Bay of Bengal near the Ganges Delta and then travel slowly west-northwestward across the country, recurved in 1899 toward the north before reaching western India. Thus, the usual two- to three-week cycles of Indian monsoon rains jammed. Instead of copious rainfalls alternating with brief 'breaks' throughout the season, the western India break which began in late June persisted for the rest of summer." Indeed in many parts of western and central India, the drought continued for three years, until the rains of NovemberβDecember 1902.
"No such complete failure of the rains, after the first month of the monsoon," the glum imperial meteorologist told the viceroy, "is on record." In addition to the traditional famine belts of the Deccan and Rajasthan, the new drought devastated crops in areas like Gujarat and Berar that were considered to be "particularly free from apprehension of calamity of drought" (see Table 5.1). More than 420,000 square miles of farm land was transformed into "a vast, bare, brown, lonely desert." From Gujarat, a correspondent wrote to the _Times of India_ :
**Table 5.1**
**The Great Droughts Compared**
(Percentage of Average Harvests)
| 1896β1897 | 1899β1900
---|---|---
Bombay Deccan | 34 | 12
Karnatak | 25 | 16
Gujarat | n.d. | 4
Source: Bombay Government, _Report on the Famine in the Bombay Presidency, 1899β1902,_ vol. 1, Bombay 1903, p. 114.
Were I an artist of the impressionist school and did I wish to represent the scene, I should dash in yellow grey, a long diminishing streak, which would be the road throwing up the heat that made the distance shimmering and indistinct; a great slash of reddy-brown on either side would indicate the land where the crops should be; and above all a liberal dash of blue from the horizon to the top of my canvas would be the sky. I do not think I ever hated blue before; but I do now.
The famous French traveler Pierre Loti, en route from Pondicherry to Hyderabad, was also unnerved by the oppressive dome of silent sky, "limpid and blue as a great sapphire," that covered India like a bell-jar. He repeatedly resorted to the imagery of a landscape on fire as his train chugged across the scorched eastern Deccan:
The dryness increases hourly as we penetrate further among the weary sameness of the plains. Rice patches, whose furrows can still be seen, have been destroyed as if by fire. The millet fields, which hold out longer, are for the most part yellow and hopelessly damaged.
In those that are still alive, watchers β perched on platforms made of branches β are to be seen everywhere trying to scare away the rats and birds that would eat everything; poor humanity in the clutches of famine trying to guard a few ears of corn from the ravages of famished animals...
The sun is setting, and Hyderabad is at last visible, very white amidst clouds of dust... The river that flows in a large bed at the foot of the town is almost dried up... Troops of elephants of the same grayish colour as the mud banks are slowly wandering along, trying futilely to bathe and drink.
The day declines and the Eastern sky is lighted by a burning glow; the whiteness of the town fades slowly into an ashy blue, and huge bats commence to flit silently through the cloudless sky.
Indians had never known such thirst. Peasants and district officers alike watched with fear as surface streams and canals suddenly dried up and wells "went blind." In the Bombay Deccan irrigation systems (113,000 acres irrigated in 1896) virtually collapsed (only 30,000 acres in 1900). "The central horror of this famine," reported _Manchester Guardian_ correspondent Vaughan Nash, "lies in the fact that the misery and torment of a water famine have to be endured together with a famine of food for people and fodder for beasts." "Rivers, usually flowing full at this time," added an American missionary, "are dry beds of sand. Wells that have never before failed in the memory of anyone living have not a drop of water in them." For the first time in human recollection, the holy river Godavari simply disappeared into its sands.
Rural India, moreover, was still economically prostrate from the 1896β97 disaster. Ryots could not afford to deepen their wells to reach lowered water tables. "The people," wrote a Hyderabad Methodist, "had no reserves either of strength or grain to fall back on, the debts of the previous famine still hung around their necks, money was impossible to get, for lenders tightened their purse strings when they saw no chance of recovering their loans." "Three years ago at the end of the famine," added another missionary from the Bombay Deccan, "there was less wretchedness and starvation than I saw here today at the beginning of the famine... This famine is undoubtedly more severe in these parts than that of '76 or that of '96." What surplus had been harvested in 1898 had been punctually confiscated by the moneylenders and tax-collectors. In the Punjab, for example, "the agreeable harvest of kharif of 1897 and rabi of 1898 had been largely drawn on to pay up arrears of government dues and to pay the banias for their overdrawn accounts of the famine years."
Still, as the official Report on the 1899β1902 famine in the Bombay Presidency would emphasize, there was a surplus of grain in Bengal and Burma sufficient to compensate even such gigantic shortfalls in western and central India. The Report anticipated modern theories of famine as "entitlement crisis" by asserting that it was the regional deficiency of employment and income (which affected Bombay's working class as well as the rural population), not an all-India food shortage, that posed a mortal threat to so many millions.
Owing to the excellent system of communications which now brings every portion of the Presidency into close connexion with the great market, the supplies of food were at all times sufficient, and it cannot be too frequently repeated that severe privation was chiefly due to the dearth of employment in agriculture and other industries, but the failure of the harvests caused loss of ordinary income in an enormous area and to an "unprecedented extent"... Even the skilled artisan felt the pinch of high prices. Other classes too have suffered severely. The mill industry was much hampered by short stocks and consequently high price of cotton, and several factories were obliged to work short hours: the result has been depression...
Small landowners, in particular, were forced to beg relief work in unprecedented numbers. This contravened the official dogma (as Sir Richard Temple, for instance, had explained it to the 1880 Famine Commission) that ryots were self-sufficient and relief was primarily required to protect the "depressed classes of village menials and itinerant tribes." By February 1900 kunbis comprised fully half of the miserable armies breaking stone and digging canals in the Poona and Ahmednagar districts. Moreover, the starvation of the peasantry led to an unprecedented wave of bankruptcy and land alienation. In a single year in the Maharashtran Deccan there was a mortgage or foreclosure for every seven rural inhabitants, a phenomenal index of the insecurity created by the double droughts.
**'A Truly Imperialist Viceroy'**
The British reaction was again as inflexibly ideological as any fundamentalist regime in history. Curzon, even more than Elgin, represented a hardened imperial policy that "believed that the government had gone as far as it should in meeting Indian desires for participation in the public service and legislatures." In a preemptive strike against a future Home Rule movement along Irish lines, he tightened press censorship, clamped down on education, restored aristocratic prerogatives, snubbed the Congress, and, most dangerously, pitted Muslim against Hindu. He was likewise determined to prevent famine from being used as a cause for reform. With hunger spreading on an unprecedented scale through two-thirds of the subcontinent, he ordered his officials to publicly attribute the crisis strictly to drought. When an incautious member of the Legislative Council in Calcutta, Donald Smeaton, raised the problem of over-taxation, he was (in Boer War parlance) promptly "Stellenboshed." Although Curzon's own appetite for viceregal pomp and circumstance was notorious, he lectured starving villagers that "any Government which imperilled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any Government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralised the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime."
**Figure 5.8 Famine in India, 1899β1902**
C. J. O'Donnell, a distinguished veteran of the Bengal civil service, sarcastically commented, "With famine following famine in nearly every province of India, and desolating plague everywhere, who will deny that we have at last found a truly 'Imperialist' Viceroy?" Just before New Year's, Curzon demonstrated his doctrinaire imperialism by cutting back rations that he characterized as "dangerously high" and stiffening relief eligibility by reinstating the despised Temple "tests." This led to a brief skirmish with local authorities, who worried that budgetary retrenchment in the face of such universal suffering might spark rebellion, but Curzon quickly imposed his will. In the Bombay Presidency alone, the government boasted that the tests had deterred 1 million people from relief. Like Lytton twenty years before, Curzon would become the architect of a "brilliantly organized famine."
Curzon was responding to new stringencies dictated by the secretary of state for India, Lord George Hamilton. Financing of the Boer War trumped any "philanthropic romanticism" in India. Two years earlier, with the Northwest Frontier in upheaval, the secretary had in fact offered famine aid to Elgin, but now "Hamilton not only did not approach the Treasury for such a grant but also prevented Curzon from seeking it. The wars in China and South Africa made him more conscious of the Indian obligation with regard to the Imperial wars than of his responsibility to relieve the distress of the famine-stricken people." While refusing appeals to organize a famine charity in England, the secretary pressured Curzon to launch a War Fund in India so that its patriotic subjects could help defray Kitchener's expenses in the Transvaal. Though he did not interfere with the viceroy's plan to build a hugely ornate Victoria Memorial Monument in Calcutta, he urged the most ruthless Lyttonian vigilance in policing the relief works.
Meanwhile, the English public's famed philanthropic instinct had dried up as completely as the Deccan's streams and wells. As Herbert Spencer warned of the "rebarbarization" of the English spirit by rampant jingoism, the popular press ignored the new Indian holocaust to focus almost exclusively on the unexpectedly difficult struggle to subdue the Boers. "So far as the London Press and periodicals are concerned," complained a member of the Fabian Society, "India might almost have been non-existent." A desultory Mansion House fund for Indian famine victims raised barely 7 percent of the Lord Mayor's parallel War Fund for South Africa. "India," wrote an American missionary, "now would have to struggle alone, for the thoughts of every Englishman in the world were centered on South Africa."
The most substantial international aid came not from London but from Topeka: 200,000 bags of grain "in solidarity with India's farmers" sent by Kansas Populists. (American relief organizers were incensed when British officials in Ajmir promptly taxed the shipment.) There were also notable contributions from sympathetic Native American tribes and Black American church groups. In Britain, where the old guard of Wedderburn, Naoroji and Dutt (now organized into the Indian Famine Union) were more isolated than ever, the only ray of hope was among the non-Fabian socialists (the Fabians by and large were staunch imperialists) and the left wing of the labor movement. Indeed, Hyndman's feisty little Marxist party, the Social Democratic Federation, was the only British political organization which never wavered in its attention to India's famine victims. (Typical of the SDF's courageous anti-imperialism was the response of one Scottish branch to the otherwise delirious celebration of the British victory in South Africa in 1902: "While on all sides of the street the harlot, Capitalism, was decked in horrible array of all possible and impossible colours, there was projected from the windows of the SDF a transparency of five feet, giving the statistics of deaths in war, deaths in concentration camps, the numbers of paupers, the number of unemployed in Britain, the famine deaths in India, and the famine deaths, emigration and evictions in Ireland.")
Meanwhile, Curzon continued to implement his "truly imperialist" policies for adjusting famine relief to stringencies of the Boer War finances. The _Guardian_ 's Nash was revolted by the government's obsession with relief cheaters and their "buried hoards of grain and ornaments," which he believed were only "figments of the Secretariat's imagination." Writing from a drought-devastated corner of Gujarat where the population was "really and truly famine-stricken," he described the human consequences of the cruel distance and poverty tests used to discourage "unworthy" relief applicants:
Here, in Broach, where for some weeks the harshest treatment that I have seen in India was meted out, the state of the population beggars description. The "deterrent" element, on which the Bombay Government lay such stress, has had full play with a vengeance, but when the history of the famine comes to be summed up, I doubt if the result will be paraded as a success. The net effect of it on the works has been semi-starvation, sickness, and an appalling death rate, and in the villages, starvation on a wholesale scale amongst the people who were "deterred" by the harshness of the tests, from going upon the works.
As Nash discovered in his visits to dozens of relief camps across northern India, inmates were treated with open contempt and denied resourcesβshelter, fuel, blankets and clothingβthat the Famine Code had prescribed as essential to their survival. Moreover, a draconian system of measured labor and output, based on the British belief in the existence of organized shirking, kept nutrition below subsistence levels. Wages were paid in cash to gangs of thirty according to work quotas calibrated by what British administrators believed should be a strenuous nine-hour output by healthy adult males. Emaciated drought victims were, of course, seldom able to meet these unrealistic expectations, and, as a result, their wages were reduced according to the shortfall in their labor. For the weakest relief recipients in the Bombay Presidency, which again, as in 1877, set the standard for Benthamite severity, the wage was a "penal minimum" equivalent to fifteen ounces of food: less than the infamous Temple wage and only one-half the ration received by prison convicts. At a camp that Nash visited outside Poona, 1,100 inmates received the penal minimum; 900, the minimum; and only 180, a wage between the minimum and the maximum. "It should be explained," Nash told his readers, "that about a third of the recipients of the minimum and the penal minimum were children, and their wages in the case of the lowest class came to only 4.5 annas [43% of minimum] for the week. Seeing also that more than half the adults are women, I think it must be admitted that the punishment is indiscriminate as well as severe."
Although relief officials angrily denied charges by Indian nationalists that they were wantonly starving drought refugees to death, Nash pointed to "the enormous death-rate at the camps where the penal minimum has become the prevailing standard."
In any case, it is curious if the penal minimum to-day is working out so differently from the 1-lb. ration in the great famine of 1877. I described that ration in one of my letters as rather more generous than the one under discussion, and I am confirmed in this view by what I have learned since...
It is an ominous fact that whilst the minimum is being cut down by a quarterβa minimum which assumes that only 15 oz. of solid food a day will go into the stomach of the people who must work nine hours between the rising and setting of an Indian sunβcholera is on the march in Khandesh and God help if cholera attacks the famine camps...
It has been a race between cholera and starvation, a grand hunt of death with scores of thousands of the refugees at the famine camps for quarry.
**The 'Song of Famine'**
Not all the victims of Curzon's cost-cutting were in the countryside. Despite the immense grain stores piled up at the docks, the stringencies of relief in Bombay condemned thousands of refugees from the countryside to starve openly in the streets. Moreover, the unprecedented fall in well levels and water tables led to massive contamination of water supplies and the explosive spread of dysentery, diarrhea and, above all, cholera. From the middle of April 1900 cholera "swept like a destructive wave over the whole country," massacring city-dwellers and peasantry alike. As Ira Klein writes, "Probably half of the increased mortality of 1896β1900 was famine-induced, and famine's influence certainly prevailed in the terrible year 1900, when recorded death-rates were 96.6 per mille."
In the midst of this carnage, the viceroy, breaking precedent with previous governments, decided to deport refugees who had fled into British India from neighboring native states. Of an estimated 85 million drought victims, 43 million lived in native states and 42 million were under direct British administration. As Curzon unquestionably understood, deportation was a virtual death sentence for hundreds of thousands of desperate people. The 688 native states, some of them literally microscopic, were puppet governments with dependent economies and subsidized rulers. If, in some notable instances, native princes (like the Maharajah of Kholapur or Prince Ranjitsinh of Jamnagar, the famous cricket hero) upheld more humanitarian, pre-British traditions of dignified relief and tax forgiveness, othersβtheir power subvented by the Rajβsimply turned their backs on their famished subjects. The worst offenders included Indore, where the maharaja, a bottom-line man like Curzon, vetoed all relief expenditures, and Bundi, in southeast Rajputana, where the rajah let half his subjects starve to death. Conditions meanwhile in the sixty-four tiny statelets that comprised the Central India Agency were simply described as "unspeakable."
**Figure 5.9 Villagers, Rajputana 1899**
Although nearly a million villagers eventually died in the native and British-administered sectors of Rajputana, grain traders earned immense profits as they shifted rice and millet stocks from the countryside to the cities. Foreign observers were shocked by the obscene contrast. An American missionary, for example, wrote of his repulsion at the sight of vast quantities of grain, imported by speculators, sitting on railroad sidings under armed guard. "At many of the railway stations I saw thousands of fat pigeons gorging themselves with grain from the loaded wagons on the siding, while apathetic native officials stood by and saw the precious food devoured in the sight of scores of miserable, famine-stricken villagers crying aloud for food."
Similarly, Pierre Loti arrived in Rajputana ("a land of dead forests, dead jungles, dead everything") on a train pulling carloads of precious grain. His account is perhaps the most chilling memoir of conditions in 1899. At every station weary passengers heard the same terrible "song of famine." It was the wail of starving children:
At the first village at which we stop a sound is heard as soon as the wheels have ceased their noisy clanking β a peculiar sound that strikes a chill into us even before we have understood its nature. It is the beginning of that horrible song which we shall hear so frequently now that we have entered the land of famine. Nearly all the voices are those of children, and the sound has some resemblance to the uproar that is heard in the playground of a school, but there is an undefined note of something harsh and weak and shrill which fills us with pain.
Oh! look at the poor little thing s jostling there against the barrier, stretching out their withered hands towards us from the end of the bones which represent their arms. Every part of their meagre skeleton protrudes with shocking visibility through the brown skin that hangs in folds about them; their stomachs are so sunken that one might think that their bowels had been altogether removed. Flies swarm on their lips and eyes, drinking what moisture may still exude...
"Maharajah! Maharajah!" all the little voices cry at once in a kind of quivering song. There are some who are barely five years old, and these, too, cry "Maharajah! Maharajah!" as they stretch their terribly wasted little hands through the barrier.
If Loti was filled with admiration for the train's Indian passengers, crammed into the suffocating third- and fourth-class compartments, who unhesitatingly gave away their last copper coin or scrap of food, he loathed the official policy that made an unfettered grain market more sacred in principle than the lives of small children crying from hunger:
Even now there are four wagons of rice coupled to the train behind, and loads pass daily, but no one will give anything to the children, not even a handful, not even the few grains on which they might survive for a little while more. These wagons are reserved for the inhabitants of those towns where people still have money and can pay.
For those without the price of a bowl of rice, a major alternative was to join the great exodus of famine victims from the desertified valleys of Rajputana (where a century later, the horror of 1899 remains "stored in the collective memory of folklore, sayings and songs") to normally well-watered Gujarat in British India. As a missionary pointed out, it was an unwitting journey "from the frying pan to fire." Undisturbed by drought or famine for three generations, Gandhi's home province had become the infernal core of the disaster in Bombay Presidency. Indeed, "Gujarat presented the picture of Ireland in 1844β45."
**The Inferno in Gujarat**
As elsewhere, El NiΓ±o worked in sinister partnership with the world market. The drought, which persisted until 1902 in Ahmedabad, Kaira and Panch Mahals, ravaged an agricultural economy already depressed by the global decline of the prices of cotton and cane sugar. It was made even more destructive by the plagues of locusts and rats (so numerous that "they disturb one's rest at night") that consumed what little grain farmers managed to coax to maturity with laboriously hand-toted water. Gujaratis, used to a dairy diet, watched in horror as first their cattle died and then as their lands, mainly loam soils dependent on constant manuring, became infertile. An American missionary, writing to an old Princeton friend, described how a countryside, "once green as a park," had become "a blasted waste of barren stumps and burned fields... Every leaf was torn from the trees long ago for the cattle, and now the trees themselves have been cut down for wood."
Famine, moreover, crossed paths in Gujarat, as in the rest of India, with epidemics of both plague and cholera. By February 1900, there were so many cholera victims in Gujarat that local water supplies were being poisoned by the putrefying corpses. Several hospitals reported 90 percent mortality, and in one camp alone there were 3,000 deaths in four days. Dr. Louis Klopsch of the _Christian Herald_ , a veteran of famine relief expeditions to Russia, Armenia and Cuba, was "appalled at the shocking conditions" nonchalantly tolerated by British officials:
The heat was intense; the thermometer indicated 108 degrees. A hot, blinding sandstorm filled our eyes and nostrils with microbe-laden dust, and the all-pervading stench from putrefying bodies, impregnated clothes, hair and skin. Cholera had broken out a short time before and 2400 famine sufferers had died within a few days and had been buried in shallow ground. Decomposition speedily set in and impregnated the ground with death-dealing malodor. There were no disinfectants, hence the awful, sickening, disease-spreading, suffocating stench... Millions of flies were permitted undisturbed to pester the unhappy victims. One young woman who had lost every one dear to her, and had turned stark mad, sat at the door vacantly staring at the awful scenes around her. In the entire hospital I did not see a single decent garment. Rags, nothing but rags and dirt.
Some formerly prosperous districts like Kaira lost almost a third of their population in less than two years. In the Panch Mahals the 1900 death rate was a macabre 28.1 percent, and in Ahmedabad, 17 percent. (As a result of such concentrations of high mortality, the 1911 census population of Gujarat would be significantly smaller than 1871's.) The holocaust meanwhile began to unravel the tightly woven fabrics of family and religious life. Knowing the missionaries' hunger for young converts, some villagers resorted to selling their young children for a few days' supply of food. "Repeatedly parents have offered me their children for sale at a rupee each, or about thirty cents. And they love them as we love our children. Children are now being offered for sale as low as four cents each, for a measure of grain."
Outcastes and tribals bore disproportionate shares of the suffering. The Dharalas of Kaira, as well as other poor shepherds and pastoralists in the Panch Mahals, faced the "insoluble" problem of "how to look after... their cattle and at the same time labour on the relief works." As a result their mortality was appalling. Likewise in the Surat district, where the overall death rate was only 2 percent, it was closer to 20 percent among the Chodhras. The survivors, having lost their land to unscrupulous moneylenders, were permanently reduced to extreme poverty.
Even more dreadful was the death agony of thousands of Bhil tribals in eastern Gujarat. Forced out of their hills and forests by the unending drought, and fearful of the squalid relief camps, they clung wherever possible to the remaining sources of fresh water. An Englishwoman described her phantasmagoric encounter in early 1900 with a large group of Bhil refugees living in the open around a rapidly desiccating lake: "As the remainder of the water gradually evaporated in the fierce heat, the people were surprised to see the fish so close they could be caught by hand. For two or three whole nights the famished crowds seized, cooked, and devoured the fish as fast as they could." Then cholera struck and cut down people by the hundreds. "The air became laden with the stench of putrefying bodies. While riding over to the burning ground behind my bungalow to see that the bodies were being properly disposed of, I found that the bearers of the dead had themselves been struck down in front of the pyre." Choksey estimates that fully a third of the Bhil population had perished by 1901.
**Figure 5.10 "The Gujarati is a soft man": Bodies in Gujarat Await Cremation**
As elsewhere in India, British officials rated ethnicities like cattle, and vented contempt against them even when they were dying in their multitudes. Asked to explain why mortality in Gujarat was so high, a veteran district officer is quoted in the official famine report:
The Gujarati is a soft man, unused to privation, accustomed to earn his good food easily. In the hot weather he seldom worked at all and at no time did he form the habit of continuous labour. Large classes are believed by close observers to be constitutionally incapable of it. Very many even among the poorest had never taken a tool in hand in their lives. They lived by watching cattle and crops, by sitting in the fields to weed, by picking cotton, grain and fruit, and, as Mr. Gibb says, by pilfering.
As famine waxed in intensity, the government in Bombay decided to milk this "soft man" and his family of their last reserves. "The revenue," it was announced, "must at all costs be gathered in"βa decision denounced by Nash as "picking the bones of the people." When patidar farmers, ruined by the drought, combined to refuse a 24 percent increase in their tax payment, the collectors simply confiscated their land. Officials in the Central Provinces (where 500,000 died in 1900 alone) were equally ruthless. The corruption and incompetence of the Provinces' poor houses contrasted with the efficiency of its militarized revenue campaign. "In the Narmada division, where famine was more intense, it [the government] employed more savage coercion than in the better year 1898β99. Rounding off a terrifying decade, officials claimed near full collections in most districts in 1900β01."
No previous drought in Indian history had lasted for more than two years, so there was widespread expectation that normal monsoons would restore agriculture in 1902. In fact, "the season of 1901β02," the official Bombay famine Report explains, "was again disappointing. In Gujarat the summer rains began late and ceased early, and the winter rains failed almost entirely... The damage done by shortage of rain was intensified by a severe plague of rats and locusts, grasshoppers, and other insects, which assailed parts of the Deccan and Karnatak and converted, in the case of some Gujarat districts, what would have been moderate scarcity into intense distress. In the Desert portion of Thar and Parkar there was an absolute failure of rain, and the crops were practically nil... [I]n Gujarat at least, the distress was more intense in 1901β02 than in the preceding years."
The Bombay authorities were forced to keep relief works open almost until Christmas 1902. As in 1877 and 1897, "the main peak in the famine death rate... occurred relatively late," coinciding with the return of monsoon rains in AugustβSeptember 1900 in the Central Provinces and a malaria epidemic that ravaged the weakened and immune-suppressed population. The India Office estimated famine mortality in British India 1899β1900 as 1.25 million, not counting malaria deaths, but Indian economists led by R. C. Dutt claimed that it "was actually three or four times this." In a recent statistical reconstruction, demographer Arup Maharatna suggests a mortality range (not including 1901β02 victims ) of between 3 and 4.4 million, although Burton Stein believes that the true figure was closer to 6.5 million and W. Arthur Lewis cites 10 million dead. Certainly the uncounted dead in the native states and the heavy mortality through 1902 suggest a total comparable to that of the 1870s catastrophe, making nonsense of Curzon's claim that "there had never been a famine when the general mortality has been less, when the distress has been more amply or swiftly relieved."
**Figure 5.11 Burning Plague Victims in Bombay, 1898**
As in 1876β78, there were local concentrations of super-mortality. In scores of drought districts, at least 10 percent of the population perished; in Gujarat, the toll soared to a sixth of the population, perhaps even more. The slaughter of innocents was particularly appalling. Infant mortality in the Hissar district of the Punjab, according to Tim Dyson, was nearly 50 percent in 1899β1900, while in Berar half the deaths (some 8,000) on large relief works were children under the age of fiveβgruesome evidence of conditions like those denounced by Hawthorne at Jubbulpur in 1897.
In 1901 _The Lancet_ suggested that a conservative estimate of excess mortality in India in the previous decade (calculated from the 1901 Census after subtracting plague deaths) was 19 million. As William Digby reminded English readers at the time, "This statement by what is probably the foremost medical journal in the world, means that the loss of life thus recorded represented 'the disappearance' of fully one-half a population as large as that of the United Kingdom." A number of historians, including Kingsley Davis, Ira Klein and Pierre Le Roy, have accepted _The Lancet_ 's figure as an order-of-magnitude approximation for the combined mortality of the 1896β1902 crisis.
These great fin de siΓ¨cle famines, followed by another El NiΓ±oβlinked drought-famine in 1907β08 that Maharatna estimates took 2.1 to 3.2 million lives in the United Provinces, cast a long mortality shadow over the first decade of the twentieth century. Their immune responses weakened by the long ordeal of hunger, the rural poor in western and northern India were mowed down in the millions by epidemic waves of malaria, tuberculosis and plague. The Black Death, spread by drought-induced rat migrations, entrenched itself in the former famine districts of the U. P. and the Punjab, where it had claimed 8 million further victims by 1914.
The cumulative damage to the subcontinent's productive forces was colossal. "Almost all the progress made in agricultural development since 1880 was nullified during the famines." Srivastava claims that 92 percent of plough cattle in the Punjab died in 1896β97; while in the Bombay Presidency (according to Tomlinson in the _New Cambridge History_ ) the herds did not regain their 1890s levels until the 1930s. Partially as a result of this catastrophic shortfall of animal power, the net cropped area in both the Bombay Presidency and in the Central Provinces in 1900 had declined by 12 percent relative to 1890. In the most stricken districts the decrease in cultivation was 25 percent to 41 percent.
The country's demographic engine likewise ground to a near halt. In the thirty years from 1891 to 1921, India's population barely grew from 282 million to 306 millionβhardly a Malthusian boom. Indeed, in many parts of India there had been a fifty-year standstill in population growth. Thus in Agra, Rohiklhand and Allahabad, among other localities, the 1921 population was less than that of 1872, while in Lucknow, Jhansi, Gujarat, most of the (former) United Provinces and the Native States, merely the same. For India as a whole, only the 1880s had seen a relatively healthy ratio between birth and death rates.
And what lesson did the British draw from these catastrophes? The most comprehensive official survey, the _Report on the Famine in Bombay Presidency, 1899β1902_ , conceded that much of the excess mortality might have been avoided by "widespread gratuitous [home] relief from the beginning," but insisted that "the cost could have been such as no country would bear or should be called upon to bear" (although both the Moguls and the Qing provided this form of relief during the eighteenth century). Likewise the principal finding of the Report of the 1901 [all-India] Famine Commissionβdespite the fact that barely a fifth of estimated famine victims received any British assistance whatsoeverβwas that "the relief distributed was excessive."
##
## **Millenarian Revolutions**
> In 1898 there will be many hats and few heads; in 1899 the waters shall turn to blood, and the planet shall appear in the east with the sun's rays, the bough shall find itself on the earth, and the earth shall find itself in heaven. There shall be a great rain of stars, and that will be the end of the world. In 1901 the lights shall be put out.
>
> βProphecies of AntΓ΄nio Conselheiro
In the autumn of 1901, after a grueling overland journey of many weeks, Francis Nichols, special "famine commissioner" for New York's _Christian Herald_ , arrived at the gates of Xian (Sian), the ancient capital of China. Renowned for his "courageous and adventurous" reportage of the late war with Spain, Nichols had been selected by Louis Klopsch, the _Herald_ 's publisher, to carry cash aid (including a $100 contribution from recently assassinated President McKinley) directly to the epicenter of a terrible drought-famine that was reported to be savaging the loess provinces of Shaanxi and Shanxi. He followed in the footsteps of the Dowager-Empress Tz'u-hsi and her court, who had fled to Xian in late 1900 after the fall of Beijing to the International Expeditionary Force of eight foreign powers. Although Nichols had been warned that Shaanxi was the citadel of anti-foreignism, and that vengeful Boxer remnants might be encountered en route, he was determined to document the ravages of nearly three years of drought in the old Han heartland. Thanks to a pass from Prince Ching, the uncle of the new boy-emperor, he was in fact treated with scrupulous cordiality by _hsien_ mandarins, who expedited his journey with fresh horses and armed escorts. They also warned him of the landscape of famine and death, too horrible to describe in words, that lay ahead. Approximately 2.5 million people or 30 percent of Shaanxi's population had perished, and some _hsien_ (Kienchow, Pinchow and Yungshan, especially) were nearly depopulated.
Indeed, the fabled valley of the Wei River seemed nearly as desolate as the Gobi. "Every quarter of a mile a mud village rose out of the white, treeless desert, which stretched away to the north, east, and west like a limitless ocean. The vast plain was silent. Along the old roads, all worn and sunken, we met no travellers. No farmers were in the fields. In some of the villages were groups of half-starved men and children, the only survivors of communities that had perished." The outskirts of Xian were honeycombed with thousands of "grim, blackened caves nearly all empty." During the terrible winter of 1900β01, an army of more than 300,000 starving refugees had been encamped outside the city walls. The provincial governor, frightened by bread riots and other omens of a peasant uprising, had locked the gates. Reduced to rags and without fuel for fires, the desperate refugees tried to escape the icy Siberian winds by burrowing deep into the loess embankments and hillsides. With the imperial granaries long emptied, this human rodent colony subsisted for a short time on coarse grass, weeds and roof thatch. Before long, however, the survivors were living off the bodies of the dead. "By-and-by human flesh began to be sold in the suburbs of Sian. At first the traffic was carried on clandestinely, but after a time a horrible kind of meat ball, made from the bodies of human beings who had died of hunger, became a staple article of food, that was sold for the equivalent of about four American cents a pound."
**China: 'Bottling Up the Sky'**
The festival of death and cannibalism outside the walls of Xian, related to Nichols by officials who had been powerless to relieve the calamity, was the macabre culmination of the crisis that had begun in 1897 with drought in North China and the German occupation of Jiaozhou Bay on the Shandong Peninsula. For five years, northern China and Manchuria, along with Inner Mongolia, were overwhelmed both by foreign devils and natural disasters. Indeed the two curses were so closely aligned in time and space that they were understood by broad sections of the peasantry as a single, occult evil. Modern historians of the Boxer uprising, like Paul Esherick, Arthur Tiedemann and Paul Cohen, agree with contemporary missionary accounts that drought-famine was the bellows that transformed local sparks of anti-foreignism into a vast populist conflagration across North China. Ordinary people were convinced that the construction of so many arrogant foreign missions, churches and cathedrals had disrupted the _feng shui_ or geomantic balance of nature, thus awakening the Earth Dragon and causing floods and drought. As Boxer "big character" posters declaimed from the walls of Beijing: "No rain comes from Heaven. The earth is parched and dry. And all because the churches have bottled up the sky."
The first phase of drought, which lasted from 1897 through summer 1898, caused acute distress in the western and southern counties of Shandong, where anti-foreign anger was already at a fever-pitch because of repeated German military interventions on behalf of Catholic missionaries. As grain prices soared, banditry increased in tandem, and magistrates complained about the growing boldness of populist, heterodox sects. Although crop failure was considerably less devastating than in western India, the drought was immediately followed by a torrential monsoon in August that swelled the Yellow River to flood stage. On 8 August it broke through its banks first in Shouzhang, drowning 400 villages as its waters swept through Yuncheng to the Grand Canal; a second breach opened up southwest of Jinan, flooding another 1,500 villages. "Finally and most disastrously, the north bank broke at Dong'e producing a vast lake extending through Chiping, where the 'Spirit Boxers' would soon be stirred to activity and on to cover some 3,000 square miles of farm land in northwest Shandong before it finally flowed to the sea." The American consul at Chefoo reported that much of the province was now an Atlantis: "Hundreds of villages are submerged, cities surrounded by water, homes, furniture, clothingβin fact everythingβis under water or destroyed."
Millions fled, as best they could, the great inundation that covered vast sections of Henan as well as Shandong. Separate flooding created havoc in Hebei (Zhili), especially around Beijing. Myriads of villagers were stranded on dikes for three months while waiting for the waters to recede. They tried to survive, with little success, on "a diet of willow leaves, wheat gleanings, and cottonseed mixed with chaff and pits." American missionaries, appealing for aid in the winter of 1898β99, wrote that "the most conservative estimates place the number of starving at 2,000,000, and time and the increasing cold weather will undoubtedly greatly augment the distress." Without protection from the bitter Siberian winds, tens of thousands died of hunger, disease and cold. "Probably no place in the world," said the _New York Times_ , "and probably not in this generation, has there been so much suffering as is now being endured in Shan Tung."
**Figure 6.1 Flood Refugees in North China**
The tragedy was made all the more bitter by the universal belief among the people that the disaster was man-made and avoidable. "Breaches of the Yellow River dikes had been occurring for several years as a consequence of embezzlement of flood control funds by officials of all ranks... The censors in their impeachment memorials had reported this corrupt administration of the Yellow River Conservancy for many years." The chief culprit, the pro-Catholic head of the Conservancy, had been dismissed for his venality, but was restored to power under pressure from the French. The hungry and half-drowned peasantry, according to Esherick, presumed that "this official, brought back at foreign insistence, was through his incompetence and corruption responsible for the great flood."
**Figure 6.2 Boxer Rebels Practicing Archery, 1900**
The foreign powers, meanwhile, seemed callously indifferent to the suffering in North China, ignoring desperate appeals for relief from missionaries and even, in some instances, their own local consuls. When Louis Klopsch of the _Christian Herald_ , for example, begged US Secretary of State Hay for naval help to ferry grain to Shandong, he was brusquely turned away with the explanation that every available transport was needed for the invasion of the Philippines.
Throughout 1898, moreover, the foreign menace seemed to grow day by day. While Beijing was distracted by the flood disaster and an accompanying cholera epidemic, London and Berlin negotiated the notorious Anglo-German Agreement, which acknowledged British hegemony in the lower Yangzi Valley in return for the recognition of a German sphere of influence in the North China Plain. Japan, France and Russia immediately demanded comparable concessions. At the same time, Christian proselytization in China was intensifying so rapidly (a tripling of Protestant missionaries, for example, between 1890 and 1908) that it was widely perceived as a "religious invasion." And, more subtly but no less alarmingly, centrifugal world market forces were becoming visible at the village level. Imported machine-spun cotton yarn from India wreaked havoc on the handicrafts of Shangdong and other northern provinces, while the purchasing power of "cash" (China's popular copper coinage) plunged in tandem with China's worsening balance of trade ("1900 saw... the worst depreciation in the cash sector in the entire period 1890β1910"). There was universal apprehension in north China that Qing sovereignty was being dismantled piecemeal, and with it, the traditional rights and safeguards of the people including imperial commitments to flood control and famine relief. The esoteric doctrines of the Boxer movement were thus underlaid by astute popular perceptions of imperialism. As the veteran missionary and pioneer sociologist of Chinese rural life, Arthur Smith, reminded British readers prone to dismiss the common people as ignorant and superstitious: "No shrewder people than the Chinese are to be found upon this planetβor perhaps any other."
Disaster, moreover, had manufactured rebellion throughout Chinese history. When rivers broke their levies or changed their channels, a traditional adage warned that "the old died and the young became bandits." Thus officials were hardly surprised when flood distress fused with perceptions of foreign conspiracy to produce a significant local uprising in the neighborhood of Wo Yang in northern Anhui as well as widespread violence in northern Jiangsu. In the traditional bandit country of western Henan (especially Baofeng, Lushan and Linru counties) where "water works were in poor repair and thus unable to blunt the harshest effects of geography and climate," a Robin Hood army of 10,000 terrorized foreigners and Qing alike. As Elizabeth Perry has pointed out, these unusually disciplined brigands were scrupulously respectful of the poor and shared with them the impressive ransoms from missionary kidnappings. (A decade later, following a new round of natural disaster, the famous outlaw Bai Lang would assume command of these indomitable Henanese farmer-brigands.)
More menacingly, the anti-Christian "Spirit Boxers"βdirect progenitors of the 1899 "Boxers United in Righteousness" ( _Yihetuan_ )βbegan to spread like wildfire throughout the stricken districts of western Shandong, where the fall harvest had been drowned and the soil subsequently remained too wet to plant winter wheat. A martial arts movement of poor peasants, agricultural laborers and unemployed canal bargemen that combined the attributes of predatory social banditry with the defensive role of traditional village militias, the Spirit Boxers were quickly embroiled in escalating conflicts with both Christian villagers and local authorities. The foreign powers exerted enormous pressure on the Qing court to exterminate the movement, and it might well have been contained in December 1898, following the execution of the three principal leaders, if flooding had not been punctually followed by renewed drought.
The failure of the spring rains in 1899 was like throwing a match into a pool of gasoline. "The drought was great and practically universal," wrote Arthur Smith. "For the first time since the great famine in 1878 no winter wheat to speak of had been planted in any part of northern China. Under the most favorable circumstances the spring rains are almost invariably insufficient, but that year they were almost wholly lacking. The ground was baked so hard that no crops could be put in." Idled peasants and agricultural laborers by the tens of thousands flocked to local boxing grounds where they imbibed the potent new doctrine of Boxer militancy combined with spirit possession and invulnerability rituals derived from the underground White Lotus sect.
Chiping _hsien_ in western Shandong, which had been literally underwater during the floods and now was hammered by drought, was the reputed home of "more than 800" of these boxing associations. "The weather in my region," wrote the local magistrate to Beijing, "has been exceptionally dry and the numbers of the poor have increased. When these poor people assemble they all claim to be Boxers. The majority of these Boxers are poor people without any means of livelihood." Later, after beheading some of the "Eighteen Chiefs" of the original Yihetuan, another mandarin corroborated the plebian, hunger-driven character of the movement: "These Boxers are mostly homeless people... Yan Shuqin and 'Little Pock-Mark' Gao, both of whom have already been executed, did not have any property or other means;... the twelve households connected with Xi Desheng, who also has been executed, altogether owned [a mere]140 _mu_ of land. All of it was ordered confiscated and sold at auction."
The government's inability, variously through insolvency or corruption, to mount a credible relief effort, together with frequent refusal of the rich to share food with the poor, only confirmed the core Boxer conviction that the masses themselves must take responsibility for China's salvation. "A wide range of sources," Cohen writes, "including gazetteers, diaries, official memorials, oral history accounts, and the reports of foreigners, indicate a direct link between the spread and intensification of the Boxer movement, beginning in late 1899, and growing popular nervousness, anxiety, unemployment, and hunger occasioned by drought." Tiedeman, another prominent historian of the uprising, agrees when Cohen adds: "It was this factor [drought-famine], more than any other, in my judgment, that accounted for the explosive growth both of the Boxer movement and of popular support for it in the spring and summer of 1900."
Joining the Boxers, moreover, was a sure way of filling one's belly. Everywhere the movement was active it patriotically cajoled, or if necessary, simply expropriated surplus food from merchants and rich peasants. More violently, it seized and divided the foodstocks of Christian villages and missions. _Wanguo gongbao_ , the missionary newspaper founded by Timothy Richard, warned that while the "weak topple in the roadside ditches... the stronger become outlaws [and] advocate dividing the wealth among rich and poor." Indeed, most accounts agree, the radical slogan "equal division of grain" was central to the explosive growth of the Boxer uprising.
Although some historians have claimed that this slogan only meant to target Christians and foreigners, Qi Qizhang asserts thatβat least by 1900 in Hebeiβit included "wealthy households in general." He cites such official notations as "they commanded the rich households to all give grain, but when they didn't get what they wanted, they took it by force." Likewise Presbyterian missionaries reported in July 1898 that pro-Boxer peasants across north Anhui were "looting the granaries of the wealthy." There is doubt, moreover, that the ultimate endorsement of the insurgency by leading gentry and Qing nobles was a systematic attempt to channel social anger in a purely patriotic, non-revolutionary direction. Virtually certain defeat at the hands of the Great Powers, in the eyes of veteran Manchu statesmen, seemed preferable to an apocalyptic class struggle. The Taiping, in the last instance, still cast the longest shadow over the Forbidden City.
For the drought victims themselves, however, the relevant memory was the holocaust of 1877. The diary kept by Eva Price, a member of the large Oberlin College contingent of missionaries who had been proselytizing in Shanxi since 1889, provides a vivid account of how folk memories of those millions of deaths helped to fuel the uprising against a foreign menace indissolubly identified with drought and famine. The catalytic roles of hunger, rumor and fear, alloyed with resurgent elements of popular culture like the Boxer adoption of a pantheon of animal gods from popular novels and operas, recall _le grand peur_ of 1787, famously analyzed by Georges Lefebvre, that propelled the French peasantry into a similarly desperate adventure. Price's diary entries gain particular poignancy as she gradually realizes that her own fate, like that of her peasant neighbors, hinges upon the course of the drought.
Thus, from the last rains of September 1898 through the terrible starving spring of 1900, she charted the growing popular unease and the increase in anti-foreign insults and incidents. During the early summer of 1899, thunder frequently could be heard to the southwest, but the monsoons never crossed the mountains. "The south city gate has been closed again and the shopkeepers have built little altars outside their shops hoping the gods will honor their worship by sending rain. Everything is so dry and the dust is dreadful." In September the peasantry sowed their winter wheat crop as usual but the monsoon brought only "a little drizzle of rain but not enough to do any good." Over the next season the absence of a normal protective snow cover killed what little wheat actually germinated.
**Figure 6.3 Captured Boxer Rebel**
As hunger spread, villagers began to make increasingly grim comparisons to 1877β79, when at least one-third of the province's population had perished. Rumors arrived of foreign plots and atrocities. "The most terrifying tale of all was one that asserted that foreign ships seized off the China coast were found to be carrying grisly cargoes of human eyes, blood, and female nipples." (Cohen cites another widespread rumor that Christians were poisoning wells.) By March 1900, Boxers were clandestinely organizing in Taiyuan, the provincial capital, under the tolerant eye of the new, anti-foreign governor, Yu Sien. Two months later, as starvation became dramatically visible everywhere in Shansi, villagers began to attack well-fed Chinese Christians and "foreign devils" at missions. Buddhist priests warned peasants that the drought would continue as long as Christians openly defiled Chinese traditions. The fearful Oberlin missionaries, in turn, held their own three-day-long prayer marathon for rain.
In June, the monsoon rains began to break the drought in much of the North China plain, but the loess highlands of Shanzi and Shaanzi remained hot and arid. Rainmaking processions were transformed into ever larger and more militant patriotic demonstrations. Boxers now paraded openly under their slogan, "Support the Qing, Kill the Foreigners." Sometimes they chanted: "See the rain does not come /The sky is as brass /Foreign blood must be spilt /Or the season will pass." On 28 June, Price wrote in her diary: "For months we have been anxious because of drought and feared the suffering that would probably come upon the people, not thinking it would be of any special meaning or menace to us. The past two months have marked such changes that we felt the pressure from lack of rain nearly as keenly as though starving."
A few weeks later, after foreign attacks on the Taku forts, the dowager-empress declared war on Great Britain, Germany, France, the United States, Japan, Italy, Austria, Belgium, and Holland. "For forty years," she says, "I have lain on brushwood and eaten bitterness because of them." In response to her edict, Eva Price, her husband and forty-two other missionaries were punctually slaughtered by Yu Sien's bannermen.
**Figure 6.4 One of the Dead in North China**
As oral histories gathered in the late 1940s and early 1960s by PRC historians have corroborated, the Boxer Uprising was an extraordinarily broad-based, popular movement. "Sympathy for the Boxer cause appeared almost universal in the villages of the north China plain," and "county after county reported boxing rounds as numerous as 'trees in a forest.'" By contrast, last-minute Manchu support from the cabal around the dowager-empress was wavering and ineffective, while the commercial elites of the Yangzi Delta, untouched by famine, acquiesced in foreign intervention with little risk of popular censure. In the end, the courage of the Boxers and Red Lanterns (their female counterparts), armed with little more than sticks and magic charms, was magnificent but of little avail in stationary battles against the combined forces of the Great Powers.
To the millions of deaths in North China from famine and epidemic between 1897 and 1901 were added hundreds of thousands of additional casualties from the exterminating armies of Field-Marshal Von Waldersee (personally ordered by the Kaiser to emulate the carnage of Atila) and the other foreign victors. Even the missionaries rescued by the relief forces were staggered by the scale and ferocity of the vengeance exacted against the Chinese civilian population. "It has seemed," complained Arthur Smith, "as if the foreign troops had come to northern China for the express purpose of committing within the shortest time as many violations as possible of the sixth, the seventh, and the eighth Commandments."
Writing in _The Contemporary Review_ , E. Dillon described the shoals of murdered Chinese floating in the Pei-ho River or washed in heaps upon islets and sandbars. One sight was particularly haunting:
Hard by a spot named Koh So, I saw two bodies on a low-lying ledge of the shore. Accustomed by this time to behold in the broad light of day some of the horrors which the soil of the graveyard hides from all living things but the worm, I should have glided carelessly past them but for the pathos of their story, which needed no articulate voice to tell. A father and his boy of eight had been shot down in the name of civilization while holding each other's hands and praying for mercy. And there they lay, hand still holding hand, while a brown dog was slowing eating one of the arms of the father.
After recounting countless other atrocities committed by the allies, including rapes and murders of women and girls, Dillon presciently warned that the "'good work done' by the brave troops in China" had sown the seeds of nationalist revolution. "The policy of the powers is a sowing of the wind, and the harvest reaped will surely be the whirlwind. But that belongs to the 'music of the future.'"
**Brazil: The Days of Judgement**
Brazil's nineteenth century ended in a bloody sunset of drought, famine and genocidal state violence. Across widening regional and racial divides, the positivist Republic, established by coup in 1889 and dominated by Paulista elites, conducted a ruthless crusade against poor, drought-stricken but pious _sertanejos_ in the Northeast. The 1897 War of Canudos, which culminated in the destruction of the holy city of Canudos in the Bahian _sertΓ£o_ and the massacre of tens of thousands of humble followers of AntΓ΄nio Conselheiro, is one of the defining events in Brazil's modern historyβthe subject of Euclides da Cunha's epic _Os SertΓ΅es_ (1902). Another famous backlands utopia led by a religious folk hero, Father CΓcero RomΓ£o's city of JoΓ£seiro in CearΓ‘'s Cariry Valley, narrowly escaped the fate of Canudos: it survived into the twentieth century only through shrewd compromises with local elites. If eschatological imminence (with the oligarchic Republic as the Anti-Christ) suffused both communities; each was also a pragmatic and successful adaptation to continuing environmental crisis and economic decline in the Northeast. The roots of both movements, moreover, go back to the _Grande Seca_ of 1876β78.
The _sertΓ£o_ had long been a religious volcano. "Sebastianism," based on mystical belief in the return of the Portuguese monarch who had vanished fighting the Moors in 1578, was particularly widespread. The first massacre of millenarists occurred at Serra do Rodeador in the _sertΓ£o_ of Pernambuco in 1819β20. "A prophet gathered together a group of followers to await King Sebastian, who was expected back at any moment to lead them on a crusade for the liberation of Jerusalem." Their roughshod utopia was instead destroyed by a nervous government who viewed the utopian-apocalyptic strand in folk Catholicism with the deepest suscipion. The great droughts of the late nineteenth century, however, only further entrenched Sebastianist eschatology in popular culture. From the ranks of barefoot _beatos_ and _beatas_ , the famines of 1877 and 1889 mobilized fierce new visions of cataclysm followed by Christ's thousand-year kingdom.
Yet millenarism in the _sertΓ£o_ was also a practical social framework for coping with environmental instability. When foreign priests and missionaries fled the scorched _sertΓ£o_ in the spring of 1877, the former schoolteacher turned _beato_ Conselheiro and the ordained priest CΓcero stayed behind with their flocks, sermonizing apocalypse but practicing energetic self-help. The first acquired his reputation for holiness by repairing local churches and graveyards, while the second became locally famous for resettling starving drought refugees in the undeveloped but fertile lands of the Araripe Mountains. "When, during the terrible drought of 1877β79, [CΓcero] dug wells, erected shelters and planted _mandioca_ and _manicoba_ for the refugees, the _sertΓ΅es_ rang with his praises."
As we have seen, the oasis at JoΓ£seiro again became a populist refuge during the scorching, cloudless year of 1888. Under CΓcero's energetic direction, _flagelados_ planted emergency crops of manioc, slacked their thirst in the perennial waters of the Cariri River, and prayed for rain. Maria de Araujo's _milagre_ of the Precious Blood during the Holy Week of 1889 repeated itself for three years, drawing thousands more refugees and pilgrims to JoΓ£siero while opening a bitter breach between CΓcero and a Romanizing church hierarchyβat war with Afro-Brazilian folk Catholicismβwho refused to accept that a poor Black woman in the backlands could be the subject of such divine grace.
**Figure 6.5 AntΓ΄nio Conselheiro**
Drought abated in 1890βthanks, many _sertanejos_ believed, to the miracle at JoΓ£seiroβbut then returned with a vengeance in 1891, one of the most intense El NiΓ±o years in modern South American history. The subsequent bursting of the politically manipulated coffee investment bubble known as the _Encilhamento_ plunged the Brazilian economy into deep crisis and incited runaway inflation even in advance of the world trade depression of 1893. The milreis lost fully half its value between 1892 and 1897, while the Republic, despite its modernizing pretensions, proved even less capable than the old Empire of providing any aid to the drought- and inflation-ravaged interior of the increasingly peripheralized Nordeste. Under the new federalism virtually all relief and public works were concentrated in the south, leaving the _sertanejos_ at the mercy of corrupt and bankrupt state oligarchies.
Simultaneously, there was greater population pressure than in 1877 on the overexploited but simultaneously underdeveloped resources of the _sertΓ£o_. Emancipation in 1888 freed slaves in the coastal plantation belt without providing them with land, tools or real means of independent survival. The decline in the export earnings of sugar at the same time depressed employment. Thousands drifted into the interior, where they joined the multitudes already scratching at the baked earth as sharecroppers, day-laborers or illegal squatters. Rural credit was nonexistent (London still firmly controlled Brazil's finances) and the _sertΓ£o_ 's reliable water resources were jealously monopolized by large landowners. Thus when drought resumed after 1888, there were few reserves to sustain the population on the land. As in 1877, the officials of Fortaleza, Salvador and the other ports were soon blockading roads against an overwhelming influx of famished refugees. Many _sertanejos_ , however, chose a new survival option: they flocked to the "drought arks" being built by CΓcero at Joseiro, and, after 1892, by Conselheiro at Canudos.
Falsely portrayed by his enemies (and, more recently, by Mario Vargas Llosa) as a raving monster, Conselheiro's "dark, unforgiving Catholicism," as Robert Levine has shown, was not unorthodox by traditional standards of the Nordeste. Unlike CΓcero, he was not an impresario of miracles, nor did he encourage a cult around himself or perform sacraments. He may have been the _sertΓ£o_ 's Savonarola or Cotton Mather, but he was not its "messiah." His sermons were typically based on popular missionary tracts, focusing on penitential devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows. Even his interpretation of the recurrent droughts from 1889 on as harbingers of the end of the world was fully in accord with the passionate vision of much of the regular clergy in the Northeast. On the other hand, when Conselheiro's fierce biblical rectitude crossed into the terrain of politics he was branded as a subversive. His "intense feelings about social justice," especially his opposition to slavery and the exploitation of the poor, led him to advocate nonviolent civic and religious disobedience. In the course of his two decades of spiritual peregrination he was repeatedly arrested, abused and deported by various local authoritiesβa persecution that only increased his sanctified stature among the sharecroppers and landless laborers of the _sertΓ£o_.
During the 1888β91 drought, Conselheiro had settled followers on two abandoned _fazendas_ north of Salvador. He also supported local market women in their struggle against new municipal taxes, condemning the Republicβwhich had replaced Jesus with Comteβ"for trying to deliver the people back into slavery." After an assassination attempt by the Bahian police in early 1893, he decided to move his rapidly growing congregation to the more remote locality of Canudos, 435 miles inland from Salvador. Here, in the center of the high _sertΓ£o_ , was a ruined _fazenda_ on fertile land, well defended by rugged mountains and watered by seasonal rivers and reliable springs. Within eighteen months Canudos had burgeoned into a self-sufficient, drought-resistant city of 35,000 peopleβ"a mud-walled Jerusalem" in de Cunha's condescending phraseβthat stunned visitors with its relative prosperity (river banks "planted in vegetables, corn, beans, watermelons, squash, cantaloupes, sugar cane, arrowroot, and potatoes") as well as its religious fervor. Although its population was a broad ethnic cross-section of the _sertΓ£o_ , the community's civic and military leadership tended to be drawn from such previously outcaste groups as the descendants of fugitive slaves, former _cangaceiros_ (outlaws) and the remnants of the aboriginal Kiriri people, whose last two chiefs would die fighting to defend Canudos.
For de Cunha and contemporary Brazilian intellectuals imbued with the arrogant liberalism of Comte and Spencer, this secession from Republican modernity could only be the "objectivization of a tremendous insanity." In fact, as Levine points out, "few joined Conselheiro capriciously or because they were seduced by a crazed magician." Instead, like JoΓ£seiro, Canudos was a rational response to the relentless chaos of drought and depression. In face of the inability of the state to develop, or even slow the decline of the _sertΓ£o_ , it exemplified the practicality of a self-organized, "socialist" alternative, even if its official ideology was Marian and monarchist. And, despite the calumnies of his enemies, Conselheiro did not regiment belief or impose a cult discipline. "Those who wanted to remained in constant touch with neighboring communities; they came and went at will. People visited Canudos, did their business, and left. Many _conselheiristas_ worked outside the community every day. They were not prisoners. They came to Canudos to preserve their Catholicism, not to exchange it for a cult or deviant sect."
As recent histories have emphasized, there was no "rebellion in the backlands" (the English title of de Cunha's account), only an attempt at peaceful withdrawal into millenarian autonomy. Like earlier _quilombos_ (slave republics) in the Northeast, however, Canudos's simple desire to left alone in peace was perceived as a dire threat to social order. On the one hand, the holy city drained the surplus of cheap labor otherwise available to local oligarchs like the legal owner of Canudos, the Baron of Jeremoabo: Bahia's most powerful _fazendeiro_. On the other hand, Canudos signified successful resistance to the new order that the _Paulista_ elites and their republican allies were attempting to impose across Brazil. Like Joasiero, it also contradicted the church's project of subduing backlands Catholicism. As a result, Conseilheiro's premature experiment in a "Christianity of the base" was denounced by Salvador's savants as "communism," by the ultramontane bishops as a "political religious sect," and by the federal government as "seditious monarchism." The Jeremoabos and other big landowners demanded Canudos's prompt destruction.
Towards the end of 1896βduring the onset of a fierce new El NiΓ±o drought that lasted, with only brief respites, until 1907 βa battalion of Bahian troops, responding to landowner's demands for repression, opened fire on a peaceful procession of penitents. More than 150 were mowed down, but the enraged survivorsβmany of them tough _jaguncos_ (cowboys) or former _cangaceiros_ βdrove off the troops with heavy casualties. As drought emptied the countryside, the _Canudenses_ clung grimly, blunderbusses and knives in hand, to their new gardens and homes. While Conselheiro, seventy years old and in failing health, concentrated on the building of his dream church of Bom Jesus Church (later dynamited by the army), the actual defense of Canudos was organized by "the peoples' chieftain" JoΓ£o Abbade, the masterful commander of the Guarda Catolica. In January 1897, he ambushed and routed a second expedition of more than 500 federal troops. As panic swept the coastal cities, a third expedition was prepared under the leadership of "the fearsome infantry commander" AntΓ΄nio Moreira CΓ©sar. Advancing through an arid countryside made even more forlorn by the scorched-earth strategy of Abbade, CΓ©sar's large, well-armed force, equipped with brand-new Krupp cannons, launched a rash frontal assault on Canudos. It was a suicidal tactical decision reminiscent of Custer's foolish charge at the Little Big Horn.
In the end, the very primitiveness of Canudos's construction aided in its defense. The settlement itself became a trap into which the arrogant invaders had been lured. Whole battalions were swallowed up in the mass of huts "as into some dark cave." The defenders ambushed the soldiers, using knives, rifles, scythes, cattle prods, and broken household furniture as weapons.
CΓ©sar's supposedly crack troops were systematically annihilated by the Guarda Catolica aided by their own wives and children. For the _conselheiristas_ it was God's greatest miracle; for the federal government in Rio de Janeiro, an unendurable humiliation and challenge to the very legitimacy of the Republic. While balladeers in the _sertΓ£o_ mocked the ghost of Moreira CΓ©sar ("Who killed you? It was a bullet from Canudos sent by the Conselheiro!"), a fourth expedition of overwhelming powerβBrazil's greatest military exertion since the Paraguayan Warβwas painstakingly organized. Conscripts were told that they were marching off to "combat the forces of the devil." The "final assault" began in July, but the _Canudenses_ , well aware that this was a war of extermination, held out for three long months against modern artillery. "Canudos," da Cunha wrote, "did not surrender. The only case of its kind in history, it held out to the last man. Conquered inch by inch, in the literal meaning of the words, it fell on 5 October, toward duskβwhen its last defenders fell, dying, every man of them. There were only four of them left: an old man, two other full-grown men, and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five thousand men." What had become the Europeanized Republic's race war against the "half-breed" followers of Conselheiro ended in an orgy of revenge.
Some were shot when they could not keep up with the forced march. A pregnant woman whose labor pains had started was placed in an empty shack by the side of the road and abandoned. Soldiers killed children by smashing their skulls against trees... Wounded _conselheirisas_ were drawn and quartered or hacked to pieces limb by limb. Their carcasses were doused with oil and burnedβthe same treatment as was given the surviving dwellings in Canudos. The army systematically eradicated the remaining traces of the holy city as if it had housed the devil incarnate.
While Canudos was fighting for its life, Father CΓcero was desperately refuting published reports that he was organizing an army of "Cearan fanatics" to come to its relief. Although the cannons were not yet pounding its homes to rubble, JoΓ£siero was also besieged by diverse enemies who equated its folk Catholicism (especially the growing numbers of apocalyptic _beatos_ and _beatas_ ) with subversion in Bahia. In 1894, at the behest of the Brazilian hierarchy, the Inquisition in Rome had declared Joasiero's "living saint" Maria de Araujo a fraud and suspended CΓcero from sacramental office. Liberals equally looked for the "Conselheiro-like" glint of sedition in his eyes. But Father CΓcero proved to be a wily politician (twenty years later, he would be acknowledged as the "most powerful figure in the Nordeste") who eschewed attacks on the status quo. In particular, he quelled _fazendeiros'_ fears about disruptions in the labor market by contracting his followers to work on their estates. In contrast to Conselheiro's unyielding refusal to "render unto Caesar," CΓcero "saved" JoΓ£seiro by de-utopianizing it: that is to say, by reintegrating it into traditional economic and political backwardness. As a result, JoΓ£seiro (or Juarzeiro in modern spelling) a century later has shopping malls and slums, while Canudos remains a haunted ruin.
In the end, however, neither the death of Conselheiro nor the opportunism of CΓcero solved the labor problems of the regional elites. The El NiΓ±oβdriven cycle of drought (1888β89, 1891, 1897β98, and 1899β1900) coupled with the declining earnings of all the Northeast's traditional exports led to the gradual depopulation of parts of the _sertΓ£o_. The influx of the 1880s became the exodus of the 1890s. By 1900 at least 300,000 _sertanejos_ had fled drought and repression for the gamble of a new life in the rubber forests of the Amazon. As della Cava points out, the structural and environmental crisis of the Nodeste assumed its most extreme form in AntΓ΄nio Conselheiro's home state of CearΓ‘:
Ample federal subsidies financed the outward passage to the Far North, while CearΓ‘'s state government collected a "head tax" for each able body that departed. Ironically the policy of substituting human exports, capable of remitting earning's home, for the export of raw materials soon resulted in the real crisis of the Northeast... Indeed, without cheap and abundant labor the traditional agriculture of the arid Northeastβcotton and cattleβwas incapable of recovering in nondrought years and, in fact, was threatened with extinction... not even the collapse of the Brazilian rubber boom around 1913 alleviated the Northeastern labor shortage. It remained chronic until the early 1920s.
**Colonial Asia: Starvation as Strategy**
Throughout monsoon Asia, drought and crop failure interacted with increasing disease mortality, especially malaria in its most virulent strain. Rinderpest, as in Africa, ruined tens of thousands of small cultivators in southeast Asia whose major capital was their bullock or ox. Where small peasants and sharecroppers were conscripted into export commodity circuits, the world depression of 1893 had left a legacy of crushing debt, aggravated by the implacable revenue demands of the state. Everywhere, anticolonialism arrived at a watershed between religious millenarianism and modern nationalism. In some cases, like Korea and the Philippines, local messianism and revolutionary nationalism became complexly intertwined. So were environmental crisis and colonial exploitation.
Korea at the end of the Victorian era was still reeling from the terrible repression of the Tonghak Revolution by the Japanese in 1894β95. This undoubtedly explains why, despite the continuing erosion of national sovereignty and rural food security, there was no large-scale counterpart to the Boxers. The drought-famine of 1900β01 in southern Korea, however, did produce new seedlings of peasant self-organization and national resistance. In Cholla and Kyongsang, farmers, some of them Tonghak veterans, formed anti-landlord groups known as _hwalpindang_ ("help-the-poor party"), and on the famine-wracked island of Cheju, troops were dispatched to suppress anti-tax and anti-Christian riots.
In the Dutch East Indies, meanwhile, there was widespread apprehension that the economic fabric of colonialism was beginning to unravel. The drought of 1896β97 was compounded by falling global commodity prices as well as diseases that attacked the sugar and coffee crops, making it impossible for planters to raise output. Rural per capita output and probably income stagnated between 1880 and 1900. Liberal imperialism seemed to be on the verge of bankruptcy:
Prices were falling... exports were almost stagnant, and imports were declining. The long-drawn [out] Achin war was exhausting the country like a cancer; expenses were rising, revenue was falling, and attempts to raise new revenue were unproductive. Prospects were so bad that fewer Europeans sought a living in India, and the population born in Europe fell from 14,316 in 1895 to 13,676 in 1905. Deputies heatedly discussed whether the situation was anxious, alarming, dangerous or critical, but all agreed that the patient was ill. Then in 1900β1 news of widespread crop failure and cattle disease aroused apprehensions of a general economic collapse.
In Java, the greatest distress eventually centered on the Residency of Semarang, where in 1849β50 more than 80,000 peasants had died in a famine that contributed to the decline and fall of the _cultuurstelsel_. From the end of 1899 or early 1900, and continuing through 1902, the region was again battered by drought and hunger as well as rinderpest and cholera. "The people," wrote local officials, "whose number had been decimated by the epidemic in several regions dared not leave their homes, and they abandoned even the fields."
Once again the Dutch were faced with dramatic evidence that village subsistence was collapsing under the weight of the "corrupt exploitation of the peasants' labour power, the land rent and crop payment system, and the appropriation of peasant land." Under indictment was the free-market system that Dutch Liberals had modeled on British India. Although its ideologues had claimed that piecemeal deregulation would lead to a better balance between export and subsistence sectors, the "Liberal period" (1877β1900) actually "represented a major intensification in the exploitation of Java's agricultural resources." Rice consumption per capita, as well as wages, fell significantly, while poor villagers became even more entrapped in debts to moneylenders and grain merchants. It is not surprising, therefore, that colonial officials reacted to the Semarang famine in the true spirit of Sir Richard Temple: blaming the dying peasants for not being able to look after their own interests, and concluding that more compulsion was required in the organization of rice cultivation.
In the Netherlands, however, there was a backlash from socialist and Calvinist parties against the ruthless colonial policy exemplified in the official reaction to the Semarang famine. This led to a famous investigation into "the declining prosperity of the Javanese people," conducted from 1902 to 1905 and published in fourteen volumes in 1914, that finally forced the abandonment of a strictly laissez-faire colonial policy. The so-called "Ethical Policy," as crafted by Alexander Idenburgβvariously, the minister of colonies and governor-general of Javaβwas supposedly based on a new trio of priorities: education, irrigation and emigration. The debate that produced the Ethical Policy has often been favorably contrasted to the obdurate conservatism of the Edwardian Raj. In practice, however, the reforms in Java went hand in hand with the military consolidation of Dutch power in the outer islands (the Dutch, like the Americans in Mindanao, were still mopping up local resistance in the Moluccas and New Guinea until the eve of the First World War.) Moreover, "Ethics" did little to reduce the exploitation, or increase the food-security, of ordinary Javanese. Their real impact, rather, was to shift government investment toward the pacified outer islands in support of Royal Dutch Shell and other private interests who were exploiting lucrative oil and rubber bonanzas.
In the Philippines, drought again brought famine to Negros's infamous sugar plantations in 1896β97, then returned to devastate agriculture on Luzon, Panay and other big islands from 1899 to 1903. Climate stress was alloyed with warfare, poverty and ecological crisis. Thus the first phase of drought-famine coincided with a national uprising against the Spanish, while the second overlapped patriotic resistance to US recolonization. The independence movement itself, moreover, was spurred by the growing crisis of food security since mid-century, when Spain had launched an ambitious campaign to develop exports and commercialize agriculture. Traditional forms of communal land ownership and subsistence-oriented production had been violently dismantled in favor of rice and sugar monocultures operated by pauperized smallholders and debt-shackled sharecroppers. (Spanish and mestizo _hacienderos_ , like ubiquitous Chinese grain merchants and moneylenders, were merely links in a long chain of exploitation ultimately controlled by distant British and American trading companies.) Moreover as the export boom generated a demand for new plantation land, Luzon's interior foothills was rapidly deforested, leading by the 1890s to the silting of river beds, more intense flooding, and gradual aridification of the lowlands.
In addition, as Ken De Bevoise has shown, living standards and public health had been undermined by the ecological chain reaction set in motion by the arrival of the rinderpest virus in the late 1880s. "Arguably the single greatest catastrophe in the nineteenth-century Philippines," rinderpest killed off most of the draft animals on Luzon and forced farmers to drastically reduce the extent of cultivation, aggravating malnutrition and debt. Meanwhile, "untilled land that returned to scrub or vegetation provided favorable breeding conditions for both locusts and anopheline mosquitos... In lieu of its preferred blood meals [cattle], _A. Minimus flaviorstris_ increased its human-biting rate, setting off seasonal epidemics that made it difficult for the labor force to work even the reduced amount of agricultural acreage." Thus debilitated by malaria and impoverished by the loss of their cattle, Filipinos were then exposed to the microbial camp-followers of the invading Spanish and US armies. The 122,000 American troops, especially, brought a whole stream of diseases including hookworm as well as new lethal strains of malaria, smallpox and venereal disease.
The Americans, moreover, surpassed even the cruelest Spanish precedents in manipulating disease and hunger as weapons against an insurgent but weakened population. Beginning with the outbreak of war in February 1899, military authorities closed all the ports, disrupting the vital inter-island trade in foodstuffs and preventing the migration of hungry laborers to food-surplus areas. Then, as drought began to turn into famine in 1900, they authorized the systematic destruction of rice stores and livestock in areas that continued to support guerrilla resistance.
As historians would later point out, the ensuing campaign of terror against the rural population, backed up by a pass system and population "reconcentration," prefigured US strategy in Vietnam during the 1960s. "All palay, rice, and storehouses clearly for use by enemy soldiers," writes De Bevoise, "were to be destroyed. That plan would have caused hardship for the people even had it been implemented as intended, since guerrillas and civilians often depended on the same rice stockpiles, but the food-denial program got out of hand. Increasingly unsure who was enemy and who was friend, American soldiers on patrol did not agonize over such distinctions. They shot and burned indiscriminately, engaging in an orgy of destruction throughout the Philippines." As one soldier wrote back home to Michigan: "We burned every house, destroyed every carabao and other animals, all rice and other foods." As a result, "agricultural production was so generally crippled during the American war that food-surplus regions hardly existed."
As peasants began to die of hunger in the fall of 1900, American officers openly acknowledged in correspondence that starvation had become official military strategy. "The result is inevitable," wrote Colonel Dickman from Panay, "many people will starve to death before the end of six months." On Samar, Brigadier General Jacob Smith ordered his men to turn the interior into a "howling wilderness." Famine, in turn, paved the way for cholera (which especially favored the reconcentration camps), malaria, smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis "and everything else that rode in war's train of evils." In such circumstances, of course, it was impossible to disentangle the victims of drought from the casualties of warfare, or to clearly distinguish famine from epidemic mortality. Nonetheless, De Bevoise concludes, "it appears that the American war contributed directly and indirectly to the loss of more than a million persons from a base population of about seven million." In comparative terms, this was comparable to mortality during the Irish famine of the 1840s.
One of the most remarkable local rebellions during the Philippines' war for independence coincided with the ravages of drought and hunger on Negros. On the big sugar island anti-imperialism fused with stark class conflict between _hacenderos_ and _pumuluyo_ (the common people). The Negrenese elites "to protect their interests against increasingly hungry and dissatisfied workers and peasants" ardently sided first with the Spanish, then with the American colonialists. They chose the Sugar Trust rather than Aguinaldo. As arriving US military officials discovered, the protracted drought had made these social tensions volcanic. "The unusual dryness of the season," wrote the commanding officer of the Manapla and Victorias districts in June 1900, "has operated against the crops... and has materially injured the sugarcane. On this account, many owners of haciendas have been forced to discharge part, if not all, of their laborers as they could not be fed. These laborers are now without means and work and the price of food is high."
When the explosion came, it merged the grievances of unemployed sugar workers and marginalized peasants with those of aboriginal people displaced from their forests by land-hungry haciendas. The largest uprising was led by a Zapata-like plantation worker and _babaylan_ , Dionisio Sigobela, more popularly known as Papa Isio, who conducted guerrilla warfare against the Guardia Civil, then the US Army, from his base on impenetrable Mt. Kanlaon. The restoration of food security and economic independence were principal goals of the struggle. "Although Papa Isio's ideology fused animism with anti-Spanish nationalism," Alfred McCoy explains, "his movement remained a class, rather than racial war, waged by sugar workers determined to destroy the sugar plantations and return the island to peasant rice farming." In the district around La Carlota, Papa Isio's followers chased away planters, murdered those that resisted, and burnt scores of haciendas. The rebellion was not finally defeated until 1908, "five years after the revolution had ended in most areas of the archipelago."
**Africa: Europeans as Locusts**
For most of Africa the 1875β1895 period, with the exceptions of the 1876β79 drought in South Africa and the 1889β91 catastrophe in Ethiopia and the Sudan, had been a period of better-than-average rainfall and ample pasturage, encouraging population growth, the formation of heavily nucleated settlements, and the cultivation of previously marginal soils. Ecological stability reduced the conflicts over grazing rights and water sources that traditionally provoked warfare between cattle-owning peoples. "A striking feature of many travellers' accounts of East and Central Africa in the nineteenth century is the evident agricultural prosperity of manyβthough not allβof its peoples and the great variety of produce grown, together with the volume of local, regional, and long-distance trade and the emergence of a wide range of entrepreneurs." This is the social landscape that some historians have called "Merrie Africa."
Then in 1896β97 the climate dramatically reversed itself. "A map of Africa illustrating the rainfall data for the period from 1870 to 1895 bears a healthy flush of plus signs... but the map for the following twenty-five years is covered with minuses." Disasters "of biblical proportions" engulfed east and southeast Africa "just when Europe decided take over the continent." The unusual fin de siΓ¨cle sequence of a very strong El NiΓ±o in 1896 punctually followed by a powerful La NiΓ±a event in 1898 and then the resumption of El NiΓ±o conditions in 1899 brought severe drought, first to southern, then to east Africa. The Portuguese reported drought and smallpox around Luanda in Angola in 1898. Drought also returned to the Sahel, and there is evidence of another famine (1900β1903) in the bend of the Niger River. Rainfall also faltered over the Ethiopian highlands and the Nile flood in 1899 was the lowest since 1877β78. Indeed, from the flanks of Mount Kenya to plateaux of Swaziland, millions of farmers and pastoralists struggled against crop failure and relentless onslaughts of rinderpest (which killed 95 percent of tropical Africa's cattle), smallpox, influenza, jiggers, tsetse flies, locusts, and Europeans.
The spirit-mediums of the Mwari cult at Great Zimbabwe told the Shona and Ndebeleβwhose lands and cattle had been recently stolen by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Companyβthat this chain of calamity would never be broken as long as the Europeans remained on their soil. ("Drought" and "disaster," significantly, are the same word in Shona: _shangwa_.) In his pioneering "Afrocentric" account of the 1896 risings in Matabeleland and Mashonaland, Terence Ranger stressed the striking similarity of the _mentalitΓ©s_ behind the Zimbabwean and Boxer revolts. Just as Boxer proclamations warned that "the Catholic and Protestant relgions being insolent to the gods... the rain clouds no longer visit us," so the divine Mwari, speaking through the mediums, told warriors: "These white men are your enemies. They killed your fathers, sent the locusts, this disease among the cattle, and bewitched the clouds so that we have no rain. Now you go and kill these white people and drive them out of our fathers' land and I will take away the cattle disease and the locusts and send you rain." Despite incredible courage and early victories, both peoples were soon defeated, as much by _shangwa_ and smallpox as by Rhodes's machine-gunners. Diehard bands of rebel warriors, sometimes finding game but mostly eating wild roots and the rotten skins of cattle killed by rinderpest, managed to hold out in the drought-stricken foothills until the summer of 1898.
In central Kenyaβwhere the 1897β99 drought is still recalled today as _Yua ya Ngomanisye_ , "the famine that went everywhere"βthe small, autonomous farming societies of the highland margin never rose in revolt against the British, but suffered social disintegration nonetheless. In some areas, the rains failed three years in a row and food reserves that might have arrested famine were depleted to feed railroad construction crews and Uganda-bound safaris. In addition, the bubonic plague, most likely brought from India with coolie labor, was the first passenger on the yet unfinished Uganda Railroad. As a result, according to a white settler, "the railway line was a mass of corpses." Suffering was still intense when Halford Mackinder, the future apostle of imperialist geopolitics, passed down the line in July 1899, en route to a first ascent of Mount Kenya. Noting the "horrible evidence of the famine among the Wakamba," which had driven some men to raiding, he criticized the railroad police for indiscriminately burning villages in retaliation: "If food is destroyed the famine is made worse, and that is the prime cause of the raids." He also frowned at the Uganda Railroad's brutal expropriation of all the farmland in a two-mile-wide corridor along its tracks.
Mackinder and his companions, like European observers during the earlier Ethiopian drought, were stunned by the audacity with which drought-crazed lions and other large carnivores stalked men in broad daylight. Indeed, American missionaries in northern Uluwere were so mortified by the sudden aggressiveness of wildlife that they refused to leave their compound. "These are days," wrote one of them, "in which we are witnessing scenes almost too horrible to narrate." As famine victims weakened and collapsed by the roadside, for instance, they were promptly eaten alive by hyenas or had their eyes pecked out by vultures. Although the British eventually made desultory efforts to feed some of the surviving population, the losses were already enormous. In the single village in Gikuyland where a famine census was undertaken, one-third of adult males had died by the end of 1899. Mortality among women and children may have been much higher.
The same drought conditions also brought fearful famine to the Kikuyu and Kamba on the eastern side of the Rift Valley. Like the neighboring and purely pastoral Masai, these more sedentary peoples had already lost the greater part of their cattle wealth to rinderpest and livestock pleuropneumonia. Then, for the three years from 1896 to 1900, crop after crop withered in their fields. The coup de grace, as on the slopes of Mount Kenya, was smallpox, which "attacked the Kikuyu with particular virulence, especially in the more recently occupied southern tip of Kiambu." In these densely populated areas, according to Marcia Wright, the mortality was an incredible 50 percent to 95 percent, and Kikuyu society tottered on the edge of complete disintegration. At the climax of the famine in central Kenya, farmers' sons formed outlaw bands called _muthakethe_. "Ignoring the accepted strict limits on the use of violence, these bands preyed on the most vulnerable members of society, including children, the elderly, and the sick. Ranging out from makeshift bush camps, outlaw raiders attacked poorly defended herds and homesteads, seizing not only cattle and goats, but whatever food and property they could lay their hands on."
"Any kind of concerted opposition to British control," however, "was out of the question." Using the hungry Masai as their mercenaries, the British were able to extend their new protectorate deep into Kikuyu and Kamba territory. The Masai, of course, had their own grievances. They bitterly complained to Mackinder's party that British sponsorship of agriculturalists had intensified the famine by degrading the crucial watersheds and forests upon which their herds depended. "The Wakikuyu being under our protection are not now raided by the Masai. Therefore they have cleared much forest, and cultivated the virgin soil. The Masai are angry about this, because the rivers of the plain are in consequence liable to run dry, and there is no forest grass for their cattle in times of drought."
The famine of 1898β1900, as Frederick Cooper has shown, also accelerated the decline of Arab and Swahili economic hegemony along the Kenyan coast. The decline in grain production, or its diversion to inland famine districts, weakened the plantation sector, while simultaneously the Mijikenda, who occupied the drought-afflicted hinterland behind Malindi and Mombasa, encroached on coastal resources. "In the previous devastating famine in the hinterland in 1884, many children were pawned to coastal slaveowners, but this time Mijikenda came to the coast to obtain food through work, credit, charity, and helping themselves to land." The squatter agriculture of the Mijikenda quickly became a thorn in the side of British efforts to buttress traditional elites and land-titles. During another La NiΓ±a drought in 1914, the British moved savagely against a subgroup of Mijikdena squatters, the Giriama, killing 250 people and destroying 70 percent of their dwellings.
The drought, in association with rinderpest, also devastated Uganda, where an estimated 40,000 people starved to death in Busoga and perhaps an equal number in Bunyoro, where colonial warfare had severely disrupted the economy. Moreover, a new scourge, sleeping sickness, followed hard on the heels of famine. "Whence it came is still a matter for speculation; but by 1902 deaths from sleeping sickness were being numbered in Buganda and Busoga in tens of thousands, and it was spreading to marginal areas elsewhere." In central Africa, however, not every group suffered equal losses, nor did Europeans always gain the upper hand. The formidable Nandi people, for example, remained relatively immune from ecological disaster on their plateau between Lake Victoria and the Rift Valley. Likewise, as rinderpest impoverished the Tutsi and made them more dependent upon the agricultural Iru, the centralized Kingdom of Rwanda waxed in strength.
In Tanganyika the murderous drought of 1898β1900 (following locust famines in 1894β96) likewise combined with rinderpest and the colonial iron heel to threaten the very survival of peasant society. The introduction of monetary taxation in 1898, as elsewhere, was designed to hammer autonomous peasants into malleable wage-laborers on German plantations. When famished villages in the Nguu highlands refused to pay the new tax, German military patrols pillaged their grain stores and randomly murdered local people. Terrorized farmers were thus forced to sell their remaining grain reserves to coastal merchants and missionaries, who promptly hiked prices by 100 percent or more. A decade earlier, during the long "comet" drought of 1884β86, many highlanders had relied on grain supplied by patrons who, in turn, were enriched by the ivory trade. Now the Germans had wrested control of the trade and replaced traditional chieftains with their own functionaries. With the destruction of village patrimonialism, the only option for villagers now reduced to "walking skeletons" was flight to the coastal towns or major inland administrative centers, where congestion favored smallpox epidemics that wiped out nearly half of the population. As ethno-historian James Giblin has shown in a remarkable case-study of the Uzigua region, this temporary abandonment of the countryside also unleashed a nightmare biological chain-reaction. The collapse of vegetation controlβthe constant brush-clearing practiced by local farmersβallowed tsetse fly and tick-borne epizootics to take hold over a vast area of lowlands that they still rule more than a century later.
In Mozambique, drought-driven peasant uprisings coalesced into a war of liberation that briefly threatened to push the colonialists into the sea. Insatiable demands for tax revenue and forced labor, as Vail and White point out, coincided with "a drought and a startling famine which exceeded all previous Portuguese experience." "To Africans plagued by seasonal famines, taxation to be paid in agricultural produce intensified the problems of feeding their own families... In the more arid regions, especially Tete district, the tax obligation threatened the health and well-being of the rural population." In May 1897, Cambuemba led a broad anti-Portuguese coalition that burned plantations and disrupted river traffic in the lower Zambesi Valley. Simultaneously, spirit mediums roused the Tawara (Shona), who, in alliance with the Massangano and the Barue on the upper Zambesi, seized most of Tete and the northeastern frontier. "By 1901 the situation had become intolerable for the Europeans." Although the Barue were eventually crushed, the intensification of drought and cattle fever in 1903, as well as a major smallpox epidemic, renewed warnings from the famed medium Kanowanga that "both plagues would continue until the white men were driven from the ancestral homelands" of the Tawara in Tete and eastern Rhodesia. As earlier in Rhodesia, the ultimate defeat of the Shona Rebellion of 1904 was due to hunger and disease almost as much as to combined British and Portuguese military might.
**Twentieth-Century Repercussions**
This generation of disaster forever transfigured African society. Robin Palmer, in his major study of the roots of poverty in southern Africa, contrasts the dynamic village economies of the early 1890s with the "picture of widespread stagnation and decay" thirty years later: the decline in crop diversity and output, the cessation of inter-African trade, and the forced dependence on mine labor or urban migration. "By 1939 virtually all vestiges of African economic independence have been shattered, African cultivators have become tied to a world market over which they have no control, and a pattern of underdevelopment has been firmly established." The colonial state, moreover, deeply entrenched itself in the social inequalities unleased by drought-famine and epidemic disease. The "traditional" chiefs of the late colonial period were often little more than officially sanctioned vultures who had fattened themselves on communal disaster. "Even more striking [than missionary conversions]," writes Ambler of Kenya after 1898, "was the way that the individuals whom the British recognized as 'chiefs' were able to accumulate power during the famine. Despite sometimes violent local hostility, a number of such men were able to expand substantially both their livestock herds and their circles of dependents and clients... One woman from a poor background pointed to this process of accumulation with some bitterness: 'When the people who had gone away came back those rich who had remained tried to keep those returning from owning anything.'"
The fin de siΓ¨cle famines had comparable repercussions in the rest of the non-Western world. In India, as we have seen, peasant indebtedness and land alienation soared and caste lines hardened during the long droughts. During famine peasants were typically caught in a scissors between the falling value of their assets and soaring food prices manipulated by middlemen who doubled as grain merchants and usurers. In pre-British India, without an effective land market in operation, the livelihood of the moneylenders had been tied to the survival of the peasant household. However, "the decline in the solidarity of the village community in the Deccanβpartly connected with the decline in the social and economic standing of the traditional officials such as the patels, desais and desmukhsβreduced the strength of the customary sanctions with which the villages once could threaten the _vanias_." After the British commodified property rights, moreover, famine became a powerful opportunity for the accumulation of land and servile labor. State enforcement of debt collection through the decisions of distant and hostile courts amounted to (in Banaji's stinging phrase) "an arming of the moneylenders." The parasite, in effect, no longer needed to save its host. Indeed, as Sumit Guha has shown in the case of the Bombay Deccan, middlemen of all kinds, including rich peasants with a greater appetite for land than the mercantile castes, could now profit from the destruction of the independent cultivator. Rich peasants and roving cattle dealers also exploited hard times to buy cattle cheap in drought-stricken regions and sell them dear in unaffected areas.
There has been brisk debate, however, about how such famine-driven asset redistribution affected agrarian class structures. Banaji, for instance, has argued that famine "proletarianized" vast numbers of small cultivators in the Deccan, while Arnold has retorted that real rural capitalism, based on the competitive capitalization of cultivation, was an illusion and that famine victims were only "semi-proletarianized." Likewise Charlesworth has pointed to the "vast increase in tenancy in Bombay Presidency between 1880 and 1920," with the 1897β1902 Maharashtran famines setting "the seal on the stratification process" by driving the poor _ryots_ to the wall "while a stratum of rich peasants consolidated their newly 'dominant' position in village life." (Indeed, Sir John Strachey took social-Darwinist "hope and encouragement" from the fact that famine morality in the late 1890s spared rich peasants while decimating the poor.) Sumit Guha, on the other hand, claims that the social pyramid of the Bombay Deccan was "flattened" not steepened since he believed that the famine had simultaneously killed off poor laborers and impoverished more prosperous ryots. Kaiwar stakes out yet another position, arguing that "despite famines and epidemics there was a remarkable continuity in the composition of both groups [rich and poor peasants] in the years between the 1850s and 1947."
China scholars have engaged in a symmetrical debate over famine, immiseration and stratification in the Yellow River plain. In his careful review of the village social surveys undertaken in the 1930s and 1940s, Philip Huang has pointed to the emergence of an aggressive strata of "managerial" peasants, employing wage labor and fully oriented to the market, who at least from the crisis of 1898β1900 had begun to exploit disasters as "business opportunities in rags." Yet, as Huang persuasively argues, huge structural obstaclesβincluding the lack of capital, the centrifugal effects of partible inheritance, the decline of state investment in flood control, and so onβprevented rich peasants from undertaking capitalist agriculture in any genuine sense. Capitalβlabor ratios did not increase and there was no competition-driven dynamic of investment in farm machinery, fertilizers, irrigation or new cultivation techniques. Wealthier peasants simply took advantage of a labor surplus to enlarge the scale of family cultivation. "There was thus something of a stagnated equilibrium between managerial and family farming. The most successful family peasants became managerial farmers, only to slide back down into the small-peasant economy within a few generations." The key structural trend, ratcheted upwards by drought, flood and famine, was the growing percentage of the rural population desperately seeking wage-labor to supplement output from farms now too small to generate subsistence. These "semi-proletarians" ranged from full-time day-laborers who retained tiny plots to poor peasants who worked seasonally for their "rich" neighbors.
Huang thus joins with Indian historians like Arnold who see "semi-proletarianization" as the dominant structural outcome of the late-nineteenth-century subsistence crises. "In using the term 'semi-proletarianization'," he explains, "I do not mean to suggest that it was transitional to capitalism and complete proletarianization, as if those represented some inevitable stage of historical development [as in Mao], but rather to characterize a process of social change distinctive of a peasant society and economy under the combined pressures of social differentiation and intense population pressure, without the outlet and relief provided by dynamic capitalist development." (Tichelman makes a similar point about Indonesia in the late nineteenth century, where under the pressure of the colonial export regime "class differentiation in the village took no so much the form of proletarianization as of pauperization.") Unlike Western Europe, which had such powerful urban growth-engines supercharged by the products and consumptions of wealthy colonies, Asia had neither burgeoning cities nor overseas colonies in which to exploit the labor of its supernumerary rural poor. The spectacular growth of entrepΓ΄t ports like Bombay and Shanghai was counterbalanced by the decline of interior cities like Lucknow and Sian. In relative terms, urban demography in India and North China (only 4.2 percent of the population) stood still (or even slightly declined) for the entire Victorian epoch. Even the coolie tradeβthe estimated 37 million laborers sent abroad from India, China, Malaya and Java in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesβdid little to ease the crisis of undercapitalization in the Asian countryside.
Did the tens of millions of peasants warehoused by the late-Victorian world economy in the purgatory of marginal petty-commodity production come to constitute a social force in their own right? Likewise, under what conditions did "semi-proletarianization," reproduced by famine and environmental instability, lead to new forms of protest and resistance? The clearest evidence of a juncture between the collective experience of nineteenth-century famine and twentieth-century revolutionary politics, as one might expect, comes from the insurrectionary seedbed of North China. In 1941β42 a Communist research team led by Chai Shufan carefully surveyed the impact of three generations of war and disaster on the regions of northern Shaanxi that had become the fortress of the Eighth Route Army after its famous 1937 Long March. Here the drought catastrophes of 1877 and 1900 had been repeated in the "Great Northwest Famine" of 1928β31 (3 million to 6 million dead), with each famine producing abrupt increases in poverty, landlessness and dependence on wage labor. (Landlordism, so central a peasant grievance in the Yangzi Valley and southern China, was a much more variable and locally specific issue than environmental insecurity in North China.) Pauline Keating summarizes the team's analysis of the "poverty trap that was making the poor poorer." It is a paradigmatic descriptionβworth quoting at some lengthβof Huang's "semi-proletarian" condition:
Under-resourced families typically farmed the least fertile land and, not owning livestock, had to rely exclusively on nightsoil to manure their land. Both tenants and poor landowners often farmed several small plots and had to traipse distances of two or three kilometers between them. Like poor farmers all over China, they always had to look for supplementary employment, and their odd-jobbing during busy seasons was at the cost of their own crops. The 1942 survey team gave the example of a Suide county village in which 31 percent of all poor farmers hired themselves out at one time or another to other farmers each year, and another 31 percent hired out full-time... The Communist survey team estimated that farming in the Suide-Mizhi counties provided full-time employment for less than half of the available workforce in 1942.
Suide's most important and widespread sideline industry was cotton spinning and weaving. Cotton growing had once been well established in places east of the Wuding River, but under the warlords most farms were turned from cotton to opium poppies... The radical reduction of cotton growing, combined with competition from foreign textiles and the collapse of trade during the civil war, all but destroyed the folk textile industry... Still, because a strong spinning and weaving tradition lived on in Suide's peasant households, the Communists found it relatively easy to push forward a "mass movement" of spinning cooperatives here.
As Keating explains, Mao's "Yenan Way," conceived in the historic epicenter of the great drought-famines, was a strategic response to a poor peasantry for whom the stabilization of the natural and social conditions of production, after so much chronic disaster and war, had become a revolutionary life-and-death issue.
## PART III
## **Deciphering ENSO**
##
## **The Mystery of the Monsoons**
> Each veil lifted revealed a multitude of others. They perceived a chain of inter-locking and interdependent mysteries, the meteorological equivalent of DNA and the double helix.
>
> βAlexander Frater, _Chasing the Monsoon_
The search for the cause of the global droughts of the 1870s and 1890s became an extraordinary scientific detective story. What we now understand as the El NiΓ±o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was the elusive great white whale of tropical meteorology for almost a century. Contemporary science, to be sure, believed it had harpooned the beast at first sight during the famines of 1876β78. But initial jubilation over the discovery of the sun's supposed control over monsoon rainfall and tropical drought soon turned into perplexity and frustration as celebrated sunspot correlations evaporated in a chaotic statistical fog. Heroic efforts in the early twentieth centuryβbased on the premise that weather like geopolitics is organized by a few "strategic centers of action"βbrought more order to meteorological data and disclosed the existence of a vast Indo-Pacific seesaw of air mass known as the Southern Oscillation (SO). But no sooner had Sir Gilbert Walker, the Captain Ahab of the Indian Meteorological Service, sighted the SO in the late 1920s than his research program was capsized by its own epistemological contradictions. After decades of demoralization, the hunt was finally revived and carried to a stunning conclusion in the 1960s by an aged Viking warrior of weather science, Jacob Bjerknes.
Before recounting this saga in some detail, it may be helpful to first put the monster itself into clearer view. For the nonscientific reader, especially, it is best to know something about the solution before we have even fully encountered the mystery. In the first iteration (which means robbed of all the complex beauty, beloved by geophysicists, of Kelvin waves and delayed-oscillators), the modern theory of ENSO might be summarized as follows.
World climate (the oceans, atmosphere and ice surfaces acting together) is driven by the excess of solar energy received in equatorial latitudes. Climate, indeed, is just the time-averaged precipitation and wind patterns created by the poleward redistribution of this energy. But the tropical regions, where oceans and atmosphere are most tightly coupled, do not accumulate heat evenly. Tropical solar energy is moved by surface winds and ocean currents into several equatorial storage systems. The easterly trade winds, for instance, drive the warm surface waters of the equatorial Pacific westward. A "cold tongue" (the Pacific Dry Zone) forms off South America where cold water upwells to replace the stripped-away surface layer, while warm water pools around the "maritime continent" of Indonesia-Australia. This Warm Pool, with its atmospheric companion, the Indo-Australian Convergence Zone (IACZ), is the most powerful of the earth's regional heat engines (the others are the Amazon Basin and equatorial Africa) and sustains the largest organized system of deep convection: the transfer of energy from ocean to atmosphere through condensation and release of the latent heat of water vapor. Indeed, it can be imagined as a kind of cloud factory where the warmest surface waters on the globe daily manufacture untold thousands of towering cumulonimbus clouds.
The El NiΓ±o or warm phase of the ENSO occurs when the trade winds subside or reverse direction and the Warm Pool with its vast canopy of tropical thunderstorms moves eastward into the central Pacific, around the International Date Line. Correlatively, the normal "downhill" pressure gradient between the South Pacific High and the IACZ that drives the trade winds reverses itself. The sudden fall of barometers over the east-central Pacific (as measured in Papeete) and their simultaneous rise over the maritime continent (as measured in Darwin) is the "Southern Oscillation." Global wind circulation, meanwhile, reorganizes itself around the IACZ's new location, massively shifting rainfall patterns throughout the tropics and parts of the higher latitudes. The jet streams are displaced equatorward, pushing weather systems into anomalous latitudes. The "El NiΓ±o" aspect of ENSO results from the subsequent warming of the Pacific off Ecuador and Peru due to the cessation of trade-wind-driven upwelling. Usually observed by fishermen near Christmas, hence El NiΓ±o or "Christ child." The central tropical Indian Ocean also catches a fever, which affects the strength and path of the monsoons. In big events, the normal geography of aridity and rainfall in the equatorial Pacific is reversed as thunderstorms flood the hyper-arid deserts of coastal Peru, while drought parches the usually humid jungles of Kalimantan and Papua. The monsoons fail to nourish agriculture in western India and southern Africa, while further afield drought holds northern China and northeast Brazil in its grip.
**Figure 7.1 El NiΓ±o as Eastward Shift of the Warm Pool**
The recognition that normal rainfall patterns over much of the globe change in response to these giant oscillations of ocean temperature and air pressure in the equatorial Pacific is the crux of ENSO theory. Like all profound insights in science, it is a deceptively simple idea achieved by an arduous and circuitous path. And because it touches on the wealth of empires and the subsistence of millions, the ENSO paradigm has a political as well as a scientific history.
**An Imperial Science**
The foundations for tropical meteorology, as Richard Grove has shown, were laid during the great El NiΓ±o of 1790β91, which brought drought and famine to Madras and Bengal as well as disrupting agriculture in several of Britain's Caribbean colonies. For the first time, simultaneous meteorological measurements thousands of miles apart hinted that extreme weather might be linked across the tropicsβan idea that would be only fully developed during the global drought of 1876β78. Moreover, the Indian famines spurred William Roxburgh, a young Edinburgh-trained physician and naturalist working for the East India Company, to explore the historical relationship between climate, food supply and famine in Madras. Although he discovered evidence of a comparable drought in 1685β87 (also most likely a very strong El NiΓ±oβdriven drought), he attributed "the dreadful effects of which I have been constant eyewitness" less to any natural cycle than to the profound disturbances in land use arising from the East India Company's conquests. In contrast to later "climate-reductionists," Roxburgh was not afraid to impeach the Company for aggravating drought through profligate deforestation and intensifying famine through denial of ryots' permanent title to their land: a huge disincentive, in his view, to agricultural improvement and irrigation.
**Figure 7.2 Monsoon Climates: Eastern Hemisphere**
When the monsoons again failed catastrophically in 1876, the British Empire had the operational rudiments of a world climate observation system linked by telegraph and undersea cables. In addition, the First International Meteorological Congress had just standardized the recording of weather data, making it easier to recognize and map large-scale events. Henry Blanford, whose post as imperial meteorological reporter to the government of India had been established only the year before the drought (in a belated response to a chief recommendation of the 1866 Orissa Famine Commission), made urgent appeals for atmospheric pressure data from weather stations throughout the Empire as well as the rest of Eurasia and Oceana. The extreme high pressure system associated with the new Madras drought was unprecedented in a half-century of Indian observations, and Blanford was eager to establish its extent within the larger monsoon belt that dominates the Eastern Hemisphere tropics.
In the months that followed, as reports from Mauritius, Colombo, Singapore, Batavia, Australia and New Zealand were carefully analyzed, he was stunned by the nearly planetary scale and coherence of the event: "The condition of excessive pressure prevailed over not only the Indo-Malayan region and Eastern Australia, but also the greater part if not whole of Asia, probably the whole of Australia and the South Indian Ocean..." He also found evidence that "between Russia and Western Siberia on the one hand, and the Indo-Malayan region (perhaps including the Chinese region) on the other, there is a reciprocating and cyclical oscillation of atmospheric pressure."
Blanford's research, published in tandem with the 1880 Famine Commission report, clearly established that a unitary climate event, like that vaguely glimpsed in 1791, was responsible for drought and crop failure in most of the Indo-Australasian region. Blanford surmised from Beijing observations that northern China also fell within the drought zone influenced by the high-pressure anomaly. His hypothesis of a barometric see-saw regulating rainfall over a vast swathe of the globe, although erroneously located along a RussianβIndian axis, was a seminal idea that would contribute to the eventual discovery of the Southern Oscillation. (More generally, Blanford's dipole was one of the earliest suggestions of a "teleconnection": a persistent spatial structure of weather defined by two or more distinct and strongly coupled centers of action.) Two key pieces of the monsoon puzzleβits planetary scale and its correlation to a gigantic air pressure oscillationβhad suddenly fallen into place.
Yet advances like Blanford's in the quantitative analysis of monsoon climatology were purchased at the price of a narrowed and depoliticized scope of scientific inquiry. Until the Mutiny, the relationship of science to empire was still sufficiently protean that it was possible for savants like Roxburgh to boldly criticize ecological rapine and European exploitationβat least when it was embodied by private monopolies like the East India Company. As late as 1849, surgeon-naturalist successors to Roxburgh, like Edward Balfour in Madras, were still defending his view that famine was "a straightforward consequence of the onset of British colonial rule and revenue policies." By 1876, however, when famine holocausts directly threatened the moral legitimations of empire, tropical science was rapidly being incorporated into colonial bureaucracies like Blanford's India Meteorological Department. Expanded resources for data collection and analysis were bought at the price of subservience to an ideology that contrasted British Progress to "tragic" Indian Nature.
From Lytton and Temple onward, as we have seen, official discourse about famine revolved around the zealously defended dogma that climate was its primary and inexorable cause. Or, as Lockyer and Hunter more poetically put it in 1877, "Indra and Vayu, the Watery Atmosphere and the Wind, are still the prime dispensers of weal or woe to the Indian races." Roxburgh's sophisticated interest in the interaction of natural and social variables was no longer construed as science. Instead, meteorological research focused narrowly, if still heroically, on the search for the global mechanism responsible for synchronized drought across the tropics and parts of the extra-tropics. Having unlocked this secret, it was assumed that it would be possible to use precursory phenomena to predict the course of the monsoon in advance. This would be applied science, its sponsors claimed, of immense advantage to tropical imperialism. As _Nature_ reminded readers during the 1899 drought-famine in India, "Rainfall is perhaps the most important element in the economy of nations."
**Sunspots versus Socialists**
In the decade after the great famine, the secret of the monsoon was widely believed to lie in the variable radiation of the sun. In 1852, the Swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf had demonstrated the existence of an eleven-year sunspot cycle, and by the early 1870s a number of British scientists and scientific amateursβStewart at Kew Garden, Lockyer in Ceylon, Meldrum in Mauritius, Chambers, Hill and Hunter in India, and so onβwere proposing sunspot correlations to the frequency of tropical cyclones and the behavior of the summer monsoon. If the "desiccationist" theory that tied drought and crop failure to the "reckless destruction of [India's] trees and forests" retained some authority among colonial foresters and hydraulic engineers, solar theories otherwise held the high ground. (The dessicationist "Philindus," writing in a popular English magazine, however, poured scorn on tropical meteorologists for "wasting time in finding out when drought may exactly be expected rather than to set to work energetically in order to prevent the occurrence of any drought.")
Famine was still ravaging India when Norman Lockyer and William Hunter informed readers of the _Nineteenth Century_ (November 1877) that "a well marked coincidence exists between the eleven year's cycle of sun-spots and the rainfall at Bombay." The next year Hunter published a widely applauded study, "The Cycle of Drought and Famine in Southern India," that purported to demonstrate a determinate relationship between sunspots and rainfall in Madras since 1813. Hunter also excited Lloyds' actuaries with an article correlating shipwrecks and sunspots based on an analysis of data in the firm's lossbooks. If Hunter balked at including the temperate latitudes in the arena of solar-determined precipitation, the Mauritius-based observer C. Meldrum was convinced that mean rainfall in Edinburgh, Paris and New Bedford was even more strongly determined by sunspot periodicity than in Madras.
The triumphant claims for a solar regulation of the monsoons encountered considerable skepticism from more cautious or statistically sophisticated researchers. Blanford and his collaborator, the mathematician Douglas Archibaldβsupported by India's most eminent amateur meteorologist, Lt.-General Sir Richard Stracheyβargued that any coincidence between the rainfall and sunspot cycles in tropical India involved a range of variation too small to generate crop failures like those of 1876β77. But their reservations were overwhelmed by the general excitement in the international scientific community. The pages of _Nature_ , edited by the sunspot enthusiast Norman Lockyer, were soon ablaze with claims and counter-claims about the influence of the Sun on tropical agriculture. Even Blanford, who was highly skeptical of brazen claims that the solar cycle could predict famine, conceded that the mainspring in his own explanation of global droughtβthe cyclical oscillationβ"appears to conform to the sun-spot period."
Virtually everyone agreed, moreover, that drought obeyed a definite periodicity and was thus orchestrated by some common causality across at least the span of the Indian Ocean, if not the entire tropics. The temporal pattern of eastern Australian droughts had been recognized since 1835, and Meldrum purported to show a sunspotβIndian cyclone connection that affected Mauritius as well as southern India. "His results apparently were so convincing that, in the words of one of his admirers, 'the number of wrecks which came into the harbour... and the number of cyclones observed in the Indian Ocean could enable anyone to determine the number of spots that were on the sun about that time.'" "It would be a final link in this universal chain of evidence," wrote Archibald in 1878, "were we to find that the Cape had suffered drought either during the past or present year." Accordingly when reports of serious droughts in the Central and Eastern Districts of the Cape duly arrived in Calcutta, he declared that "this information therefore supplies the missing link."
Meanwhile, some were wondering if droughts in the Western Hemisphere tropics might not also be determined by the same interactions. Brazilian scientists and engineers, convened in a series of extraordinary meetings at the Polytechnic Institute and later the National Society for Acclimation in Rio to discuss the causes of the _Grande Seca_ , polarized into two acrimonious factions. The "meteorologists," led by Guilherme de Capanema (author of _Apontamentos sobre secas do CearΓ‘_ ), and visiting professor Orville Derby enthusiastically embraced the sunspot theory. Indeed, Derby excited the Indian meteorologists with a note in _Nature_ summarizing the article he had published in _Diario Oficial do Brasil_ in June 1878, which argued (after Hunter) that drought and flood records from CearΓ‘ strongly corresponded to sunspot fluctuations. In contrast, the "rainmakers," including the most eminent Brazilian engineers of the day, attributed the droughts to deforestation and backward agricultural practices, which they blamed on the racial "primitiveness" of the _sertanejos_. In line with Liberal Party fantasies for the development of the Nordeste, they advocated a promethean program of giant dams, reservoirs and afforestation projects to "humidify" the climate. The two camps would continue to battle one another for the rest of the nineteenth century.
Back in England, which was still in the grip of the Great Depression, the work of the colonial meteorologists captured broad public and parliamentary attention. As with Darwinism, a fundamental structure of natural history but with huge implications for contemporary humanity was deemed to have been uncovered. Here, the enthusiasts claimed, was a discovery that not only explained the origin of Indian famines, but also illuminated the hitherto secret engine of the business cycle: not the over-accumulation of capital relative to wages as Karl Marx had argued in a recent book, but the Sun. Thus, in a House of Commons debate in 1878, the renowned India-born scientist, political economist and Liberal MP Lyon Playfair triumphantly cited Meldrum's research as proof that "it was [now] established that famines in India came at periods when sunspots were not visible. Out of twenty-two great observatories of the world, it had been shown in eighteen that the minimum rainfall was at times when there were no spots on the Sun."
Simultaneously, Sir Stanley Jevons, one of the founding fathers of mathematicized, neoclassical economics, was publishing a brace of famous articles on "Sun-spots and Commercial Crises." In 1875 he had excited the British Association's annual meeting with a pioneering paper on the role of solar variability (which he attributed to the gravitational configuration of the planets) in determining the price of grain. Now he proposed a breathtaking theory that the Sun through its influence on Indian and Chinese agriculture drove the entire global business cycle.
Today seen as embarrassing curiosities in the great man's collected works, at the time of their writing these articles had a specific political urgency. Popular faith in free trade, Jevons warned, was being badly damaged by the recognition that "the slightest relapse of trade throws whole towns and classes of people into a state of destitution little short of famine." His principal aim, according to Philip Mirowski, was to prove contra Marx and the socialists that global economic instability, as in the 1870s, was not a failure of capitalist institutions but was inexorably astronomical in origin. "All of Jevons's innovations in economicsβhis pioneering efforts in marginalist price theory, his work on the Coal Question, and his sunspot theoryβmay be understood as a unified response to the increasing skepticism about political economy in Britain... [H]is project was to portray the market as a 'natural' process, so that doubts about its efficacy would be assuaged, or at the very least, countered by scientific discourse."
Although Jevons's correlations between Wolf Zurich relative sunspot numbers and fourteen English commercial crises between 1700 and 1878 became a butt of humor even in his lifetimeβincluding a "satirical statistical study showing that the periodicity of winning Oxbridge teams in collegiate boat races was the same as that of sunspots"βhe stubbornly defended their statistical significance as the cornerstone of any scientific theory of the world economy. Moreover, he argued that periodic booms and famines in India and China were the critical transmission belt (alternately of positive and negative feedback) between the Sun and British industry:
A wave of increased solar radiations favorably affects the meteorology of the tropical regions, so as to produce a succession of good crops in India, China, and other tropical and semi-tropical countries. After several years of prosperity the 600 or 800 millions of inhabitants buy our manufactures in unusual quantities; good trade in Lancashire and Yorkshire leads the manufacturers to push their existing means of production to the utmost and then to begin building new mills and factories. While a mania of active industry is thus set going in Western Europe, the solar radiation is slowly waning, so that just about the time when our manufacturers are prepared to turn out a greatly increased supply of goods, famines in India and China suddenly cut off the demand.
Later, in a note to _The Times_ , Jevons attempted to explain in more detail how solar variation acting upon the poverty of India could be the prime-mover of the prosperity of England. He boasted that historical grain price data from India, which supposedly reflected the sunspot cycle, was "the missing link." "The secret of good trade in Lancashire is the low price of rice and other grain in India." Although he admitted that "some may jest at the folly of those who theorize about such incongruous things as the cotton-gins of Manchester and the paddy-fields of Hindoostan," to those "who look a little below the surface the connexion was obvious":
Cheapness of food leaves the poor Hindoo _ryot_ a small margin of earnings, which he can spend on new clothes; and a small margin multiplied by the vast population of British India, not to mention China, produces a marked change in the demand for Lancashire goods... Let it be remembered, too, that because the impulse comes from India it does not follow that the extent of the commercial mania or crisis here is bounded by the variation of the Indian trade. The impulse from abroad is like the match which fires the inflammable spirits of the speculative classes. The history of many bubbles shows that there is no proportion between the stimulating cause and the height of folly to which the inflation of credit and prices may be carried. A mania is, in short, a kind of explosion of commercial folly followed by the natural collapse.
Although Jevons died in 1882 while fast at work correlating new drought data from Brazil to buttress his theory, "cyclomania" (as Hoyt and Schatten have called it) continued to hold sway through the rest of the decade, and, indeed, to captivate eminent researchers well into the early twentieth century. "Surely in meteorology, as in astronomy," the famous solar astronomer and editor of _Nature_ , Sir Norman Lockyer, preached to eager Victorians, "the thing to hunt down is a cycle, and if that is not to be found in the temperate zone, then go to the frigid zones and look for it, or the torrid zones and look for it, and if found, then above all things, and in whatever manner, lay hold of it, study it, record it, and see what it means." The sunspot cycle, in particular, seemed to be the big wheel that turned all the smaller wheels, regulating fluxes of rain and grain and thereby, as Jevons had shown, exchange rates and share prices. Political Economy was unmasked as a mere province of Solar Physics.
The most triumphal pronouncements came from the ebullient Lockyer, who believed that changes in sunspot spectra represented heat pulses that could be directly correlated with monsoonal rainfall. His research was sponsored by the Privy Council's Solar Physics Committee (including Sir Richard Strachey from the Indian government) and reflected Whitehall's keen interest in any influence upon imperial trade balances. As Lockyer reassured Lord Salisbury, "The riddle of the probable times of occurrence of Indian Famines has now been read, and they can be for the future accurately predicted, though not yet in various regions. The Nile River failures follow the same law."
**Figure 7.3 The Southern Oscillation**
**Geopolitics and the Southern Oscillation**
By the early 1890s, however, heroic solar correlation (if not Jevonsian economics) had begun to run afoul of its own burgeoning contradictions and inconsistencies. For every study that associated drought with sunspot maxima, there seemed to be another that correlated it with sunspot minima. Lockyer's and Hunter's work had quietly sidestepped the embarrassing paradox, pointed out by Koppen as early as 1873, that "in the tropics, maximum temperature coincides more nearly with the minimum than with the maximum of sun-spots; preceding the former, however, by one to one and a half years." As more sophisticated statistical tools became available, it became obvious that the algorithms used to detect these cycles could, in fact, find them in random data. Although Wolf's sunspot cycle was real enough, there was a creeping crisis of confidence in its presumed signature on Indian agriculture and Lancashire profits. The all-encompassing explanatory fabric that astronomers, meteorologists and neoclassical economists had woven in the late 1870s began to unravel.
In the meantime, while others were still counting sunspots, Blanford had launched a pioneer investigation of snowfall in the Himalayas. He had been mandated by the 1877 Famine Commission to develop a method for forecasting drought and suspected that the Tibetan snowpack might be a more reliable precursor than the sun. Since the monsoons were driven by the differential heating/cooling of the mountains and Tibetan Plateau vis-Γ -vis the Indian Ocean, he proposed the logical hypothesis that the "varying extent and thickness of the Himalayan snows exercise a great and prolonged influence on the climatic conditions and weather of the plains of northwest India." In 1885 Blanford won accolades for successfully predicting deficient rains over western India as a result of a late and abnormally large spring snowfall in the western Himalayas. Building on this core technique of using one season's snowfall as an analogue for next season's rainfall, his successor Sir John Eliot added more variables, including Indian Ocean trade winds, Nile floods, and rainfall in South Africa and southern Australia. As we have seen, Eliot's growing confidence in his forecasting skill soon became tragic hubris: "The disastrously wrong forecasts preceding and during the terrible western Indian drought of 1899 threw the methods into disrepute."
From the perspective of modern research, it is clear that Blanford and Eliot were correct in assuming that the Tibetan (or Eurasian) snow mass plays a fundamental role in conditioning the monsoon. (The Himalayas, as they recognized, also regulate the monsoon cycle orographically, lifting warm air flow from the south in the summer and blocking incursions of frigid Siberian air masses from the north in the winter.) But it is only half the story. Monsoon variability, we now understand, is an interaction between the weather of Eurasia and the dynamic convection systems of the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans. In focusing on variable heat storage in the Himalayas, Blanford and Eliot (understandably) ignored clues that might have led them to the discovery of the great Indo-Pacific heat engine: ENSO.
Blanford had first glimpsed its power in the violent atmospheric oscillations that had accompanied the 1877 drought, and researchers in the 1890s were sighting it again. In the lead was Lockyer, the indefatigable solar cyclist, who had been convinced by his son James that analyses of the Indian meteorological record indicated that atmospheric pressure might be a better correlate to solar activity than rainfall. Examining global data, the Lockyers proposed that Blanford's see-saw was actually a conflation of two separate systems of atmospheric oscillation: one in phase with India, the other with Spain. As the elder Lockyer explained it: "If the effect of the sun was to create, say, a lower pressure at some point on the earth's surface, this would necessarily be balanced by higher pressure somewhere else. As the sun's effect varied, so the atmospheric pressure at these two poles would oscillate."
The Lockyers ultimately failed to adduce compelling evidence for a statistical or causal linkage between solar cycles, Indian air pressure variations, and rainfall anomalies. But their emphasis on inter-hemispheric atmospheric oscillations, with possibly more than one frequency, provided a compelling framework for the next generation of research. By 1897, for example, the director of the Uppsala Observatory, Hugo Hildebrandsson, had identified the inverse relationship between mean pressures in Iceland and the Azoresβlater dubbed the North Atlantic Oscillationβthat plays such a large role in regulating rainfall and crop productivity in northwestern Europe. He also believed he had isolated a SiberianβIndian barometric see-saw as well as an oscillation that stretched across the Pacific between South America (Buenos Aires) and Australasia (Sydney). For the first time, the Pacific Basin was identified as a principal "center of action" with influence on the monsoon: a decisive clue that was followed up, after the disgrace of Eliot, by his successor, the Cambridge senior math wrangler and physicist, Sir Gilbert Walker.
As Gisela Kutzbach has pointed out, Walker, an expert on electrodynamics and ballistics, was a newcomer to meteorology who "had to rely for the most part on his own resources." He seems to have been inspired as much by contemporary geopolitics, the new "science of empire," as by geophysics. In an analogy with Alfred Mahon's famous dictum that modern world power depended upon the control of a handful of strategic choke-points of maritime commerce (Gibraltar, Singapore, etc.), Walker surmised that global agricultural production also depended upon a few "strategic points of world weather." Reclaiming the bold optimism of the sunspot-chasers a generation earlier, he pursued a program of geo-historical reductionism whose goal had been adumbrated by Britain's chief geopolitician, Halford Mackinder (whom we last saw among the starving on the slopes of Mount Kenya), in a famous 1904 address on "The Geographical Pivot of History":
In the present decade we are for the first time in a position to attempt, with some degree of completeness, a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations. For the first time we can perceive something of the real proportion of features and events on the stage of the whole world, and may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects, at any rate, of geographical causation in universal history.
For Walker, the meteorological pivot of historyβthe secret of the monsoons, which regulated the lives of more than half the earth's populationβwas hidden in the pyramid of weather data that had accumulated since the observational revolution of the 1870s. To excavate it he proposed to radically increase the volume of computation. Today, of course, supercomputers crunch endless terabytes of weather observations, but Walker, a demon statistician, mobilized pharaonic levies of Indian clerks (a surplus of whom were made available during the First World War) to manually process worldwide pressure and rainfall data through his esoteric regression equations. The widespread drought and agricultural crisis of 1918 gave renewed urgency to these calculations. Yet, as Mark Cane has pointed out, this was little more than a huge scientific fishing expedition: "No conceptual framework supported the patterns he found; [his] methods were strictly empirical." Although Walker speculated, as had Hildebrandsson earlier, that polar circulation might be a driving force of global pressure fluctuations, it was little more than a hunch.
Nonetheless Walker's dogged super-empiricism eventually produced a rich harvest. After twenty years of patiently crunching numbers and expanding his data sets, the (after 1924, retired) director-general of observatories in India was able to present overwhelming evidence (following Hildebrandsson's pioneering work) for three coherent systems of intercontinental atmospheric oscillation:
In 1924, Walker first used and defined the term Southern Oscillation (SO) as a "see-saw" in atmospheric pressure and rainfall at stations across the Indo-Pacific region, where increased (decreased) pressure in locations surrounding the Indian region (Cairo, north-west India, Darwin, Mauritius, south-eastern Australia and the Cape Colony) tended to be matched by decreased (increased) pressure over the Pacific region (San Francisco, Tokyo, Honolulu, Samoa and South America) and decreased (increased) rainfall over India and Java (including Australia and Abyssinia). The two other "oscillations" involved out-of-phase atmospheric pressure between the regions of the Azores and Iceland, named the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and between Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands, termed the North Pacific Oscillation (NPO).
This was a fundamental breakthrough: the global drought pattern first convincingly identified by Blanford in 1877β80 was now unequivocally related to the action of the great barometric see-saw over the equatorial Pacific Ocean. "It soon became apparent that the Southern Oscillation provided the most potential in terms of long-range forecasting [of the three oscillations], in that it displayed marked interannual variability in its lead and lag correlations with climatic conditions in each season over a large part of the earth's surface." Walker clearly grasped that changes in the intensity and location of the great tropical convection cell (the Indo-Australian Convergence Zone) as reflected by the Southern Oscillation, would affect the summer monsoon over India, and in 1928 he proposed an additional link between the SO and drought-famines in northeast Brazil. There was growing confidence in the Indian government, as well as scientific circles, that Walker was breathtakingly close to his quarry.
But it ultimately eluded his grasp. In the absence of any theoretical model for understanding the teleconnections between strategic centers of weather action, Walker was thrown back on an alchemy of formulae. Despite ever more baroque regressions, he could not discover an index or system of equations that would give even proximately reliable advance warnings of drought. Maddeningly, the monsoon consistently turned out to be a better predictor of the SO than vice versa. "Walker found that Indian summer rainfall, while weakly correlated with pressure variations some months earlier in locations as far away as South America, was more strongly correlated with subsequent events." After the initial excitement generated by his pathbreaking papers in the 1920s, this "predicability barrier" (which continues to frustrate tropical meteorologists) was one of a number of difficulties that led to declining interest in the Southern Oscillation from the late 1930s through the early 1960s. "Of particular concern was the lack of any physical mechanisms that could explain pressure fluctuations such as the SO, NAO or NPO, let alone growing efforts to link numerous climatic patterns to lunar, solar and planetary influences. In addition, the correlations and algorithms described and used by Walker and others were often found to have diminished when the original data sets were extended as more data became available." Indeed, no infinity of atmospheric data would have ever provided Walker with ultimate insight into the mechanism of the Southern Oscillation. The missing link to the problem of the monsoon, in fact, lay outside the boundaries of meteorology: in yet unsuspected large-scale temperature fluxes in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.
**A Walker Formula**
Southern Oscillation Index (DecemberβFebruary) = [Samoa pressure] + [North-east Australia rainfall (Derby and Halls Creek in Western Australia, 7 stations in north Australia, 20 throughout Queensland)] + 0.7 [Charleston pressure] + 0.7 [New Zealand temperature (Wellington, Dunedin)] + 0.7 [ Java rainfall] + 0.7 [ Hawaii rainfall (12 stations)] + 0.7 [South Africa rainfall (15 stations, Johannesburg the most northern)]β[Darwin pressure] + [Manila pressure]β[Batavia pressure]β [South-west Canada temperature (Calgary, Edmonton, Prince Albert, Qu'Appelle, Winnipeg)]β[Samoa temperature]β0.7 [Brisbane temperature]β0.7 [Mauritius temperature]β0.7 [South American rainfall (Rio de Janeiro and 2 stations south of it in Brazil; 3 in Paraguay, Montevideo; 15 in Argentina, of which Bahia Blanca is the southernmost)]
**Bjerknes and the ENSO Paradigm**
Forty years after Walker described the Southern Oscillation, Jacob Bjerknes at UCLA began to look at the problem from an oceanographic as well as meteorological point of view. Bjerknes, then in his late sixties, was a legendary figure who during the First World War, collaborating with his father, had revolutionized meteorology with the modern "frontal" theory of how mid-latitude weather is determined by the clash of polar and humid air masses (analogous in their view to the collision of armies on the Western Front). Their "Bergen School" was the fount both of physics-based dynamical meteorology and modern weather forecasting. In the 1960s, moreover, Bjerknes was one of the relatively few meteorologists attentive to recent breakthroughs in understanding ocean heat circulation and internal wave behavior.
Building on the correlation discovered by the Dutch meteorologist Hendrik Berlage in the 1950s between the time series of the SO index and sea surface temperatures off Peru, and using International Geophysical Year (1957β58) data that "provided, for the first time, observations of large-scale oceanic warming extending across the equatorial Pacific beyond the dateline in association with an El NiΓ±o event," Bjerknes argued that the SO and El NiΓ±o were the respective atmospheric and oceanic expressions of solar energy cycling in powerful pulses through a coupled ocean-atmosphere system. (The term ENSO was first used by Rasmusson and Carpenter in 1982 to characterize Bjerknes's unified interaction.)
The Southern Oscillation, Bjerknes argued in his famous 1969 paper, resulted from a "chain-reaction" exchange of energy between the ocean and atmosphere. To begin with, the differential between the (low pressure) Warm Pool in the western equatorial Pacific and the (high pressure) Cold Tongue in the east forces relatively cold, dry air westward where it is heated and moistened over progressively warmer water. This trade wind, part of which returns in the upper levels to sink over the eastern Pacific (an equatorial circulation that Bjerknes named in honor of Walker), pools more warm water in the west and thus reinforces the gradient driving its flow. Or, in Bjerknes's own words, "an intensifying Walker Circulation... provides for an increase of the eastβwest temperature contrast that is the cause of the Walker Circulation in the first place." This, of course, is a classical example of positive feedback and it also works in the opposite direction: should the easterly trade winds abate, the Warm Pool will move eastward, which, in turn, will further suppress the gradient. Sea temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific increase from the influx of warm surface water, while off the Ecuadorean/Peruvian coast the classical El NiΓ±o warming results from the suppression of wind-driven upwelling. Cold events, by contrast, involve an interactive intensification of the trade winds, warm pooling in the west and cold upwelling in the east. In either state of the Walker Circulation, in other words, there is a powerful feedback loop that accelerates movement towards the extreme points (El NiΓ±o and La NiΓ±a, respectively) of the cycle. The Southern Oscillation, moreover, is a real transfer of air mass (not just an epiphenomenon of surface pressure), via intensified or weakened Walker circulations, between the monsoon regions and the equatorial Pacific Ocean.
The great perturbations in tropical weather, in other words, are self-generated and self-sustained: they do not require the intervention of sunspot cycles or other exogenous forcings. The essence of Bjerknes's model, explains George Philander, is that "changes in oceanic conditions are both the cause and the consequence of changes in atmospheric conditions." Anomalies of sea surface temperature cause the trade winds to strengthen or weaken and this in turn drives the ocean circulation changes that produce anomalous sea surface temperatures. "To ask why El NiΓ±o or La NiΓ±a occurs," continues Philander, "is equivalent to asking why a bell rings or a taut violin string vibrates. The Southern Oscillation is a natural mode of oscillation of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system: it is the music of the atmosphere and hydrosphere."
Bjerknes's theory was stunningly bold but it left unsolved a key dynamic element of the problem. What forces or instigates the nonlinear transition from one state to another? And, similarly, how do El NiΓ±os terminate? As Bjerknes acknowledged in 1969, "Just how the turnabout between trends takes place is not yet quite clear. The study of a sequence of global meteorological maps during typical turnabouts may clarify part of the problem. An additional key to the problem may have to be developed by the science of dynamic oceanography." In the event, the latter contribution was most crucial, and it was left to Klaus Wyrtki at the University of Hawai'i in the mid 1970s to rebuild Bjerknes's theory upon a more sophisticated foundation of ocean physics.
Wyrtki conceived of El NiΓ±os as turbulent "heat relaxation events" that arose in response to intensified trade winds and greater-than-average pooling of warm water in the western Pacific. Like the rest of the world ocean, the Pacific is composed of two layers of fluid: a very deep cold layer and a shallow surface layer of warmer water. The abrupt temperature transition between the two is known as the thermocline. The Warm Pool, as we have seen, is a trade-wind-driven pile-up of warm water (more than 100 meters deep) and consequent deepening of the thermocline at the western end of the Pacific Basin. Because it is unable to export all of its annual budget of solar energy, the Warm Pool functions like a planetary heat reservoir or "capacitator." Small surface temperature increases over large ocean areas represent the storage of vast amounts of energy to potentially power weather systems.
The Warm Pool accumulates excess heat (as a deeper thermocline and higher sea level) until a trigger event, like a trade wind reversal, releases the stored solar energy in the form of a wavelike body of warm water (a "Kelvin wave") that sloshes eastward against South America. As the equatorial thermocline flattens, the disappearance of the normal eastβwest surface temperature gradient further weakens the trade winds. The slackening or cessation of the trade winds, in turn, simultaneously releases Warm Pool water eastward while allowing warm surface waters to accumulate off equatorial South America. The complexity of causal feedbacks, of course, makes it difficult to disentangle the ultimate initiating factor.
The idea of westerly wind bursts across the International Date Line that trigger Kelvin waves in the thermocline was first introduced by Wrytki in 1975. Research in the mid 1990s, armed with data from the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) monitoring system, has tied these bursts to unusually strong instances of an intraseasonal (30- to 50-day) atmospheric fluctuation in the tropics known as Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). The MJO interannually waxes and wanes in strength, with peaks in El NiΓ±o years. Researchers are uncertain whether these intensifications of the Madden-Julian are powered by rising sea surface temperature (and are thus predictable) or are simply stochastic.
Moreover, just as ENSO creates weather, it is in turn modified by weather. Although the heat reservoir model explains how El NiΓ±os in general evolve, "part of the reason for irregularity in the ENSO cycle in terms of frequency, duration and amplitude of warm and cold events may... be attributed to the nonlinear interaction of higher frequency weather variability with lower frequency ocean-atmosphere dynamics." On the timescale of El NiΓ±o events, weather (including the feedback effects of powerful storm systems and tropical cyclones) is statistically "noise." To make forecasters' lives more difficult, ENSO, like all nonlinear dynamic systems, also probably incorporates an important quotient of deterministic chaos.
**Figure 7.4
Key Stages in the Development of ENSO Theory**
Wyrtki also clarified the physics of what happens when the Southern Oscillation dips far below the x-axis of the graph. As the system "relaxes" at the end of a warm event (often with the abrupt return of the trade winds and the explosive cooling of the eastern Pacific), it tends to overshoot its mean state. The El NiΓ±o phase is rapidly followed by its inverse mirror image: the cold phase that Princeton's George Philander labeled La NiΓ±a in a famous 1985 article. During a La NiΓ±a event, unusually strong (easterly) trade winds recharge the heat content of the Warm Pool while the IACZ retreats westward over Indonesia to the edge of the Indian Ocean. The extreme climate phenomena accompanying La NiΓ±a are opposite in sign but usually comparable in magnitude to those associated with El NiΓ±o, so that droughts are often followed by severe floods as in China in 1897β98 or 1997β98.
Wyrtki's revision, of course, was not the end of debate about the dynamics of El NiΓ±o (fundamental aspects of which still elude researchers), but it does punctuate the passage from the heroic days of first capturing ENSO in the nets of analysis to an era of mature theory in which the construction of complex predictive models, using data from TOGA arrays in the equatorial Pacific, has become possible. In 1986 two oceanographers, Mark Cane and Stephen Zebiak, encapsulating Bjerknes's key variables in a simple atmosphere-ocean-coupled model, successfully forecast the 1986β87 El NiΓ±o. A decade later, several models (although not Cane and Zebiak's this time) correctly predicted the onset of the 1997β98 event, although its surprising intensity and spectacularly sudden ending (in May 1998) led some ENSO modelers to grade their efforts as "mediocre." Still, the basic physics underlying ENSO is now firmly understood. "El NiΓ±oβSouthern Oscillation variability," declares a leading researcher, "is the first great coupled atmosphere-ocean-biota puzzle that humankind has solved."
**Figure 7.5 Changes in ENSO Amplitude**
**Multidecadal Regimes?**
Among the problems that remain, perhaps the highest priority is understanding the "complex symphony" of ENSO over time. Paleoclimatologists and paleoceanographers are now beginning to make fundamental contributions to ENSO research. El NiΓ±os in modern times have a quasi-periodic frequency of two to seven years, but most researchers are convinced that this oscillation is nested within other cycles, powered by similar physics, with lower frequencies ranging from decades to millennia. Since the compilation of the first ENSO chronologies in the 1970s, for instance, there has been intense curiosity about the weakening of El NiΓ±o from the early 1920s to the late 1950s in contrast to the strong cycles before and after. Figure 7.5, based on sea surface temperatures from the eastern Pacific since 1860, clearly shows a decline in both the frequency and intensity of warm events from 1925 until 1958 (or even 1972). There are also striking differences in the relative percentages of El NiΓ±os and La NiΓ±as. Is this evidence that ENSO oscillates between high amplitude and low amplitude "regimes" on a multidecadal scale? If so, the implications for our understanding of agrarian history in the tropics and north China would be profound.
Some researchers think they can already glimpse the outlines of large-scale temporal structures. Rasmusson, Wang and Ropelewski, after crunching a mountain of historical data, believe that 31-year fluctuations in ENSO-cycle intensity "broadly correspond to changes in all-India monsoon-season rainfall variability, to the modulation of the intensity of drought episodes over the US Great Plains during the twentieth century, and, less clearly, to the century-scale variation in Sahel rainfall." California tree rings and Andean ice cores, as well as instrumental rainfall records, provide additional evidence of changes in ENSO amplitude at a roughly similar frequency. On the other hand, recent coral core data from eastern tropical Pacific, which extends ENSO event history back to 1600, indicates a strong variability in strength and coherence of the signal over 10β25 years. The two sets of data may not be contradictory, since the first frequency might well be a harmonic composite of the second (the awkwardly named "quasi-bidecadal oscillation"). ENSO-cycle variability could even prove "fractal" across a spectrum of time scales.
One explanation for regime variability is that ENSO is modulated by decade- to century-long changes in atmospheric and oceanic boundary conditions, especially in the mid-latitudes where ocean cycles tend to have longer periods. The North Pacific, in particular, has important sea temperature fluctuations at 25- to 40-year-long wavelengths that correspond to putative ENSO regimes or epochs. All the more intriguing, then, that the central and eastern tropical Pacific abruptly warmed in 1976β77 in tandem with the cooling of the central and western North Pacific. This change of base state, which persisted until 1998, probably amplified the effects of succeeding El NiΓ±o events since they were piggybacking an increase in background sea surface temperature. (Conversely, the switch to a colder ocean probably intensified the 1999β2000 La NiΓ±a.)
Some have attributed this change in ocean background state to anthropogenic warming, but others argue that it is the expression of a somewhat mysterious temperature flux known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). (Other reversals in its polarity may have occurred around 1925 and 1947.) Aside from intensifying El NiΓ±os, it also seems to have significantly modified their behavior: "Before 1977, the warming along the Southern American coast led the warming in the central Pacific, whereas after 1977 the warm events first appeared in the central Pacific."
Recent research, however, suggests that the PDO is only one of a quartet of major temperature-thermocline oscillations in the Pacific. If so, ENSO may be complexly interacting with an entire "cacophony of discordant cycles," including perhaps the epochal cycle in the Indian monsoon (described in the next chapter). Untying this Gordian knot of phase-locked and resonating frequencies is, to say the least, a daunting challenge. "The interdecadal change in the strength of interannual variability associated with the ENSO," summarizes Xiao-Wei Quan, "is the result of interactions among climate oscillations in different regions that have different characteristic time scales. Particularly, the interaction between the multidecadal oscillation in the monsoon region and the North Pacific and the interdecadal oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean, and the interaction between the quasi 20-year oscillation in the Tropical Pacific and the quasi 25-to-40-year oscillation in the North Pacific and the 10β15 year oscillation in Monsoon region were of special importance."
Climatologists have also been eager to discover whether large-scale global temperature oscillations operating at the even slower frequencies of centuries have modified ENSO. One of the most remarkable paleo-environmental discoveries of recent years has been the identification in Greenland ice cores (and subsequently in a variety of other natural archives) of a persistent millennial-scale fluctuation in Quaternary climates. Historical periods of global warming and cooling, like the "Mediaeval Climate Optimum" and its successor, the "Little Ice Age," have been unmasked as the muted Holocene expressions of the so-called "Dansgaard/Oeschger Oscillation." Yet so far researchers have had little luck establishing any statistically significant correlation between ENSO-cycle variability and millennial background climate. On the other hand, there remain some intriguing "coincidences," such as the correspondence between the 1876β78 El NiΓ±o, which produced world record sea temperatures, and the generally recognized termination of the Little Ice Age circa 1880.
Hugely controversial has been the claim by some researchers that ENSO has been punctuated by chaotic flickering or temporary shutdowns. They have interpreted data from laminated lake sediments and western Pacific corals as proving that the ENSO cycle was somehow turned off during the early Holocene (between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago). It is unclear what might have been the "switch": possibly higher temperatures during the so-called Altithermal period or perhaps the changing strength of the seasonal cycle due to different orbital variables. Since there is unambiguous evidence of ENSO fluctuations during the glacial maximum (before 12,000 years ago), scientists are baffled by why El NiΓ±o would suddenly go AWOL.
In addition to understanding its temporal patterns, researchers would also like to establish better parameters for the range of ENSO magnitudes. "Great" El NiΓ±os like 1876, 1982 and 1997, for all the global havoc they have caused, are not the top of the class. Paleoclimatologists in South America have found startling evidence of megaβEl NiΓ±os like the mediaeval "Chimu flood" (circa 1100 CE)β"vastly more powerful than the most severe historical event"βassociated with epic droughts and fires in the Amazon and biblical deluges in coastal Peru. Radioactive carbon-14 dating has placed these events, whose Eastern Hemisphere impacts have not yet been identified, at approximately 1,500, 1,000, 700 and 500 years before the present. Although rare, these 300- to 500-year events may have left indelible imprints in history.
Finally, there is urgent concern to understand the relationship between ENSO and global warming. Some believe that the El NiΓ±o cycle has been speeding up and intensifying. In the historical ENSO record, for example, there have been only eight or nine "very strong" El NiΓ±os since 1728: an average of once every 42 years. Yet two of the three largest (1982β83 and 1997β98) have recently occurred within 14 years of one another. Even stranger was the persistent El NiΓ±o of 1990β95: the longest in the historical or, indeed, paleoclimatic records. Trenberth and Hoar, among others, have argued that "the prevailing warm condition during the 1990s is unique when compared with the remainder of the historical record, and is a result of anthropogenic global warming." A popular hypothesis is that much of the additional heat trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in an expanded Warm Pool and deepened thermocline in the western tropical Pacific Ocean, then released in more frequent and larger El NiΓ±o events. An enhanced ENSO cycle, in other words, may be the principal modality through which global warming turns into weather.
##
## **Climates of Hunger**
> Where is the all-powerful white man today? He came, he ate, and he went. The important thing is to stay alive... If you survive, who knows? It may be your turn to eat tomorrow. Your son may bring home your share.
>
> β Chinua Achebe, _A Man of the People_
After the cycle of the seasons itself, ENSO is the most important source of global climate variability. No other interannual environmental perturbation has such amplitude or far-reaching impact, capable of bringing hardship to a quarter of the human race on five continents. Although certainly not the only harbinger of catastrophic drought or flood, it is the most frequent and thus far the most predictable. Instructed by two great El NiΓ±os (1982 and 1997) in a single generation, social as well as environmental scientists are beginning to appreciate ENSO's impact on world history. In attempting to visualize El NiΓ±o historically, however, it is far easier to surmise its existence through teleconnected droughts and floods than to directly observe its feverlike outbreak in the eastern tropical Pacific. If its theater of influence includes the ancient, densely populated agrarian heartlands of Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Java, China and Peru, the region of its origination is a vast, obscure oceanic desert with scarcely a sprinkling of inhabited islands. With growing claims and counter-claims about El NiΓ±o's impact on civilization, how can we discern and authenticate its fingerprints in history?
**Teleconnection and Causality**
Walker and his contemporaries sought the influence of the Southern Oscillation on rainfall in different regions of the globe without knowing what actually linked anomalies over such great distances. The physics underlying global drought were still a black box. Bjerknes, by contrast, was sure that ENSO pulses, originating in the ocean, were transmitted along the Equator by displacement of the Walker Circulation and broadcast to the extratropics by shifts in the alignment of semi-permanent high- and low-pressure systems. After earlier researchers, he called these disturbances "teleconnections." They are the coupling between ENSO in the tropical Pacific and the rest of the world climate system. As the Indo-Australian Convergence Zone (the convection system driven by the Warm Pool) moves into the central Pacific during an El NiΓ±o phase, for example, it shifts the position of the interhemispheric "wave train" of troughs and ridges as well as the weather patterns they organize. Storm paths are displaced and seasonal rainfall and aridity end up in unusual places for the time of year. Teleconnections are considered well established when regions show high probabilities of large, statistically significant signals during eastern equatorial Pacific warm events and equally large signals of the opposite sign during cold events.
But ENSO is a complex quasi-periodicity (a "devil's staircase" in fractal terminology), not a clockwork cycle like sunspot fluctuations, and its geography is therefore subject to important reconfigurations over time. Teleconnections, for example, are simultaneously robust and delicate. ENSO can be analogized to a planetary game of musical chairs played with jet streams and semi-continent-sized air masses. But it is a game played more vigorously in some periods than in others. Teleconnections are strongly seasonal, but they also fluctuate over longer periods. There is persuasive evidence that the global power and organization of teleconnection patterns wax and wane according to strong/weak states of the underlying ENSO "regimes" that were discussed in the last chapter. Teleconnection fields were strongest and spatially extensive in 1879β99 and again after 1963. The El NiΓ±o events of 1876β77, 1899β1900, 1972β73, 1982β83 and 1997β98 produced exceptionally coherent teleconnection patterns. Conversely, they were "weakened, fragmented and their spatial scales tended to be most contracted" between 1900 and 1963, especially during 1921β41.
In addition, ENSO never exactly repeats itself: each El NiΓ±o is a distinctive, even eccentric, historical event. "Although there are often characteristics common to events, no two ENSO events are the same in terms of genesis, life cycle and cessation." In the language of the earth sciences, El NiΓ±o may not be the best example of uniformitarianism. Researchers learned this the hard way. In the early 1980s, there was an ambitious attempt to define a "canonical ENSO event" based on a comparative analysis of all the El NiΓ±os since 1941. "However, no sooner had this model of ENSO become established than a massive El NiΓ±o event occurred in 1982β83 that provided the grounds for some serious reassessment of the canonical concept of the nature and structure of ENSO." Analysis of 1997β98 El NiΓ±oβmore extreme in ocean warming but shorter in duration than 1982β83βwill undoubtedly lead to further tinkering with the canonical model. The individual personalitiesβor what meteorologists like to call the "flavors"βof ENSO events in the Pacific are believed to arise principally from differences in internal ocean dynamics, especially the relative importance of advection (horizontal transport) or overturning in surface heating.
Moreover, because there is a "multiplicity of interaction modes" between ENSO, major circulation regimes and other periodic variables, the possible effects outside the tropical Pacific are quite complex. Indeed the major ENSO teleconnections must be seen not as simple climate "switches" turned on and off every three to seven years, but as individual systems of selective interaction between the Southern Oscillation and other independent variables that can amplify or diminish its influence. ENSO is the enabling or necessary condition, but rarely by itself a sufficient cause. For example, El NiΓ±o warming contributed to the great 1993 flood in the upper Mississippi Valley by strengthening the subtropical jet stream and shifting storm tracks southward, but the extraordinary spring and summer rainfall required in addition a continuous supply of moisture provided by low-level flow from the Caribbean. The conjuncture of these two independently variable conditions was the true "cause" of the exceptional precipitation that, interacting with unwise floodplain land use, produced $35 billion in flood damages.
**Figure 8.1 Teleconnection as Selective Interaction**
Peter Webster and his colleagues, in a comprehensive review of ENSO-monsoon simulations, have usefully suggested a heuristic model for understanding the causal complexity of these teleconnections. In a simple system, an El NiΓ±o (La NiΓ±a) impulse directly modifies another system, for example, the South Asian or East Asian monsoon. A change in one circulation compels a change in the other. "Relative to the growth of internal errors, the influence is linear and the system highly predictable." Such simplicity in causation was the object of Walker's thirty-year quest, but nature is seldom so obliging. More likely is a complex hierarchy where ENSO and the monsoon are linked through another variable like Eurasian snowfall. "Within the complex hierarchy the monsoon may feed back on the ENSO system through the third system or vice versa." Error growth can easily become nonlinear, thus diminishing predictability. Least predictable would be a tangled hierarchy where "each system interacts with the other, and the routing of the interaction is difficult to decipher." The South Asian monsoon, for instance, might have important feedback effects on ENSO, perhaps even sometimes acting as the "detonator" of El NiΓ±o/warm phases. In such chaotic circumstancesβwith three or more variables free to blow their horns independentlyβit is impossible to define which phenomenon is the "precursor" of the other, and determinism is essentially lost. (Probabilistic prediction, however, may still be possible, especially if one of the linkages is dominant over time.)
**Figure 8.2 Two Modes of ENSO/Teleconnection Regulation**
In these entangled modes, ENSO impulses interact on longer time-scales with regional climate periodicities, which, depending on phase, can either amplify or decrease the signal from the Pacific. Even with the same tropical forcing, extratropical responses can vary dramatically. Thus the strength of the ENSO teleconnection to the Indian monsoon depends upon interdecadal trends in Eurasian snow-cover, while the teleconnection to western North America is modulated by poorly understood 20- to 30-year oscillations in the North Pacific. Some climate researchers, moreover, believe that "forecasts based on established [ENSO] teleconnections, even those considered highly statistically significant, could fail or even reverse sign in the future due to decadal time scale climate variability." The recent "decoupling" of ENSO and the Indian monsoon, as we shall see, is a dramatic case in point.
To summarize, then, the pattern and intensity of ENSO teleconnections are regulated over time in two different ways. On one hand, the amplitude of ENSO is conditioned by low-frequency variability in the background state of the tropical Pacific (like the PDO and its unnamed sisters). "Strong" and "weak" ENSO regimes appear to follow one another at roughly 20- to 40-year periods. On the other hand (and independently of ENSO regime), the statistical significance of specific teleconnections seems to depend on whether the signal from the tropical Pacific is in-phase or out-of-phase with other, slower oscillations. Thus, as we shall see, monsoon epochs and tropical Atlantic dipoles modulate the impact of ENSO events on rainfall in India and the Sahel, respectively. Figure 8.2 is a conceptual cartoon of these two different modes of modulation: one "precedent" (or "upstream") and the other "consequent" (or "downstream") to ENSO heat-storage release events.
More broadly, these manifold interactions and overdeterminations ensure a distinctive global pattern during each event. It is extremely unlikely that all the independent variables co-determining ENSO's regional impacts will ever line up twice in the exactly the same way, although synchronicity and coherence are increased by the power of the initial event (see Table 8.1). Finally, the further the teleconnection is from the main theater of ENSO activity in the tropical Pacific, the greater is the influence exercised by "weather-noise" (the feedback effect of major storm systems) and natural chaotic variability. Mid-latitude climate with its constant frontal clashes between polar and subtropical air masses is inherently more turbulent and unpredictable than tropical climate. What meteorologists like to call the "signal/noise" ratio (the percentage of variation attributable to ENSO variability) correspondingly diminishes with distance from the equator.
**Table 8.1**
**Teleconnection in Five Major El NiΓ±o Events**
| 1877β78 | 1899β1900 | 1972β73 | 1982β83 | 1997β98
---|---|---|---|---|---
India | D** | D* | D* | d | β
Indonesia | D | d
(D 1902) | D | D | D
Philippines | d | D | d | D** | d
Australia | D | D** | D | D | D
North China | D** | D* | D | d | d
Yangzi | F | β | β | F | F
South Africa | D | d | D | D | D
East Africa | f | D
(1898 La NiΓ±a?) | β | β | β
Horn of Africa | d | d | D | D | D
Sahel | d | D | D** | D | β
[Mediterranean] | d | β | D** | d | β
[Russia] | d | β | D** | β | d
Nordeste | D | d | D | D | D
South Brazil | Γ· | ? | β | F | β
D=intense drought; d=moderate drought; F=intense flooding; **=most severe in century; *=second most severe. Brackets=possible teleconnection only.
Source: Collated from research in Glantz, _Currents of Change,_ pp. 65, 70β72.
To understand, therefore, how El NiΓ±o has helped to shape geographically specific "climates of hunger" in India, Indonesia, north China, southern Africa and northeast Brazil, we need to know something about these key non-ENSO variables. A survey of recent research on teleconnectionsβwhich also provides an opportunity to rediscuss some of the meteorology of the 1876β78 and 1896β1902 droughtsβis followed by a brief overview of the archives and "proxies" used to establish ENSO chronologies. Needless to say, this account is self-consciously hostage to progress in a dynamic research arena, particularly as ENSO climatologies become more fine-tuned by season and subregion.
**Regional ENSO Climatologies**
INDIA
"Unlike the West where the year is divided into four seasons, the Indian calendar consists of a triad: the Cold Season from October to December, the Hot Season from January to May and the Rains of the summer monsoon from June to September." Drought in the subcontinent is a deficiency (delay, interruption, or early withdrawal) in the crucial summer monsoon, which provides 75 percent to 90 percent of rainfall for agriculture. (Only coastal Tamil Nadu, among drought-prone regions, depends primarily on the OctoberβDecember northeast monsoon.) "When the number of monsoon depressions or low pressure areas is normally low, and/or the monsoon trough lies close to the Himalayas for extended periods, there will be drought." The dry savannas and scrub forests of the Deccan Plateau in the rainshadow of the Western Ghats, along with the semiarid plains of Rajasthan and the Punjab, are the regions most sensitive to ENSO-driven fluctuations in the monsoon, although, as the calamity of 1899β1902 revealed, more than two-thirds of India (all but the west coast and the northeast) is susceptible to drought at some time. Annual rainfall variability, less than 15 percent along the west coast and in Assam, rises to more than 40 percent in Rajasthan. According to modern estimates by the Ministry of Agriculture, 56 million hectares of farmland are subject to inadequate and highly variable rainfall.
Famine can originate from floods (Bengal, 1883) or war (Bengal, 1943), but drought is the proximate cause of most Indian subsistence crises, and twenty-one out of twenty-six droughts since 1877 have been attributed to El NiΓ±os. (Conversely, out of twenty-two El NiΓ±o years between 1870 and 1991, twenty were associated with Indian droughts or below-average rainfall.) If ENSO events are thus "the strongest control governing the inter-annual behaviour of the Indian monsoon," there is also internal "epochal" variability in monsoon rainfall over India and Southeast Asia that is probably related to fluctuations in Eurasian snow-cover, especially on the Tibetan plateau, whose thermal properties determine monsoon intensity.
Monsoons, of course, are driven by the seasonal temperature/pressure gradients between land and ocean. An unusually large winter snow-cover over Tibet, as Blanford surmised in the early 1880s, will weaken the summer monsoon because there is decreased opportunity for protracted surface warming and accordingly less gradient to drive the air masses northward. Thus, high snow-cover (weak monsoon) will reinforce the effect of an El NiΓ±o event, while low snow-cover (strong monsoon) will tend to counteract it. Meteorologists talk in terms of "constructive" and "destructive" interference patterns between the two phenomena. Indeed researchers at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology have recently shown that the greatest modern droughts (1877, 1899, 1918 and 1972, in that order) have occurred when there was phase-locking between in intense El NiΓ±o and a below-normal rainfall epoch.
**Figure 8.3 ENSO and Deviations in All-India Rainfall**
Source: Julia Slingo, "The Indian Summer Monsoon," in Navarra (ed.), p. 107 (Fig. 5.4a).
On the other hand, powerful ENSO events can fail to produce serious droughts when the Indian rainfall oscillation is cresting in its above-normal mode. The situation since 1980, however, is "without precedent in the historical record." Recent Eurasian surface warming, and thus the thermal gradient driving the monsoon, is larger than in any previous era of the instrumental record. At the same time, the El NiΓ±o low-pressure center (the displaced Pacific Warm Pool) has moved further southeast during post-1980 events, consequently shifting monsoon-blocking subsidence (high pressure) in the Indian Ocean away from India toward Indonesia. As a result, India escaped widespread drought and confounded meteorological predictions during the great El NiΓ±os of 1982 and 1997. Researchers are now exploring the "intriguing possibility that global warming has broken the link between ENSO and the [Indian] monsoon by preventing monsoon failure." If so, it would be a singular silver lining in the present trend (also possibly driven by anthropogenic warming) toward more frequent and destructive El NiΓ±os.
Figure 8.3 shows the annual deviations of all-India rainfall from the long-term mean (853 mm). Huge negative spikes correspond to the 1877, 1899, 1918 and 1973 El NiΓ±o droughts. The stable weather of the 1880s is clearly legible, as is, even more dramatically, the subdued El NiΓ±o cycle from 1922 to 1972. The final bars register the delinkage of Indian rainfall and ENSO in the 1990s. Such large-scale data, however, cannot reveal crucial regional variations. The devastating drought of 1896β97 in central India, for instance, is masked by positive rainfall anomalies elsewhere.
Indeed, as Ramasamy Suppiah demonstrated in a pathbreaking 1989 study of El NiΓ±o's impact on Sri Lanka, national climate statistics are artifacts that need to be resolved into finer-grained temporal and spatial patterns. Looking at ENSO influence from the perspective of Sri Lanka's constituent "rainfall fluctuation regions," with their distinct, orographically determined seasonal relationships to monsoon circulation, he discovered decisive correlations that are obscured at the national aggregate level. "Relationships are not clear in the first intermonsoon and northeast monsoon seasons if Sri Lanka is considered as a single unit. Yet the relationships are clear between the rainfall of the different regions and the seasonal Southern Oscillation Index." Although the overall effect of El NiΓ±o on Sri Lanka is increased rainfall, the regional patterns range from positive to negative depending on rainfall season and time-lagged correlation to the SO. Suppiah provided a model, since widely emulated, for analyzing teleconnections at a subnational scale where ENSO impacts on agriculture are most clearly legible.
CHINA
Of the world's major grain belts and early seats of civilization, north China (the loess highlands and the deltaic plain of the Yellow River) is unique in the frequency of flood and especially drought disasters. With 45 percent of modern China's population, the provinces north of the Yangzi Valley, where rainfall variability can exceed 30 percent, account for only 18 percent of the country's surface run-off. The north, moreover, receives 70 percent of its mean annual rainfall of 21 inches during June, July and August. The seasonal cycle "consists of a dry and windy spring, a hot dry summer with showers at long intervals, a very wet late autumn bringing two-thirds of the whole year's precipitation and causing great erosion if not serious floods, then finally a severe dry winter with wind-borne snow." Wheat is harvested in June, and millet and _kaoliang_ (a tall grain sorghum) in September. If the spring rains fail, there is a poor wheat crop; if the summer monsoon fails, however, there is no harvest for the entire year. Unfortunately, rainfall fluctuations are most common during June, "the critical month for the northern farmer." Over a modern period of fifty-five years, Beijing has had twenty-one Junes with deficient rainfall and five with virtually no rain at all. Undependable rainfall, however, has to some extent been offset historically by irrigation, intense efforts at the conservation of soil moisture, and the marvelous qualities of the loess soil itself, which is unique in its perpetual fertility and capacity to retain moisture. ("With more adequate rainfall," observed an American expert in the 1930s, "it might form one of the most productive soils in the world.")
The East Asian monsoon, like the ENSO cycle that modulates it, seems to fluctuate in a low-frequency pattern. The incidence of extreme climatic events for China as a whole during the late Victorian period 1870β1909 was only exceeded in the last half-millennium by the extraordinarily unstable period 1630β1669. Other research confirms a dramatic "jump" around 1870, coincident with one of history's most catastrophic Yangzi floods, "from smaller [climate] variability to larger variability" and "from a state of few disasters to a state of frequent disasters." This may have involved a transformation in the greater Asian monsoon from a "zonal" to "meridional" regime of circulationβchanging again around 1900.
Since the late nineteenth century there had been speculation about a possible atmospheric flywheel that might synchronize monsoon failures in the Yellow River basin with droughts in India and Java. But it was not until what was officially labeled the "Great North China Drought of 1972" that a sustained research program, led by Wang Shao-wu at Beijing University, began to systematically explore linkages between the Southern Oscillation and the drought/flood history of north China. These studies revealed "a longterm coupled oscillation between the equatorial eastern Pacific sea surface temperature [that is, the ENSO phase] and the location and intensity of the western Pacific subtropical high pressure system." When an El NiΓ±o event warms the eastern equatorial Pacific in winter, the subtropical high correspondingly intensifies and shifts westward the following summer. This blocks the monsoon from moving as far north as usual, resulting in decreased rainfall or drought in the Yellow River basin. Typhoon landings in north China also decline in El NiΓ±o years. A "dry area index" based on the percentage of weather stations in north China reporting drought shows a consistent correlation with ENSO warm phases since 1870, with the index highest in 1877, 1965 and 1972, followed by 1878, 1891, 1899, 1941, 1957 and 1982. Ding Yihui has also pointed to an intriguing relationship between El NiΓ±o droughts in north China and cold injury to agriculture in Manchuria, Siberia, Korea and northern Japan.
While La NiΓ±a teleconnections have not yet been as well studied as El NiΓ±o interactions, there is evidence that flooding of the Yellow River Delta, as in 1888, 1898 and 1924, is synchronized to powerful cold phases. Far better documented is the inverse precipitation relationship between north and south China during warm events. As the East Asian monsoon stalls over the middle and lower Yangzi Valley in the mature phase of an El NiΓ±o, it is very likely to cause severe flooding there and in southern China during the Mei-yu, the concentrated heavy rain period in June and July. Thus it is not surprising that China has so frequently experienced combinations of drought in the north and flooding in the south, or vice versa, depending on ENSO phase. During the spring and summer of 1876, while the monsoon had forsaken most of north China, the southern coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong were pounded by destructive torrential rains, and central Hunan, Jiangxi and Zhejiang were under flood waters. Similarly, in their study of the post-1950 period Chenglan Bao and Yanzhen Xiang found that "all three extemely severe floodings (1954, 1991 and 1983) and all five severe floodings (1969, 1987, 1965 and 1957) in the Yangzi-Huaihe rivers took place during the summer of an El NiΓ±o year, or in the summer following." (Yihui cautions, however, that El NiΓ±o's teleconnections to the climate of subtropical China are especially complex and produced contrasting anomalies in 1982/83 [cold and flooding] and 1986/87 [warm and drought].)
Like their counterparts in India, leading researchers believe there is a multidecadal pattern in northern China rainfall, although there is yet not enough data to convincingly tie this to low-frequency regime variations of ENSO. One team from the Tokyo Metropolitan University claims to have uncovered a statistically dramatic transition in the "interdecadal drought/flood index in eastern China"βthe biggest in several centuriesβthat coincides with the 1896 El NiΓ±o. Others see a switch to more frequent and intense drought in northern China, coinciding with the circa-1976 regime shift in the Pacific. Meanwhile, a still unexplored question is the historical relationship between ENSO periodicity and the Yellow River hydraulic cycle. The river's extraordinary rate of sedimentation (subject to human acceleration, as we shall see, through watershed deforestation) eventually elevates its bed too high above the north China plain to be confined by dikes and revetments. The history of each successive system of hydraulic control, therefore, has been a spiral of gradually increasing, then finally exploding costs, followed by catastrophic breakdown. It was a singular misfortune of the late Qing that an intensified El NiΓ±o regime in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century coincided with an advanced state of sedimentation and decay in the flood-control infrastructure.
Finally, there is controversy over the contribution of ENSO to the agricultural catastrophe of Mao's Great Leap Forward. The drought-famine of 1959β61, which killed 20 million peasants (the death toll officially admitted in 1980 by Hu Yaobang) was the most deadly of the twentieth century, perhaps of all time. Given the PRC's impressive commitments to food security and disaster mitigation in the early 1950s, as well as its dramatic success in raising average life expectancy, the scale of this holocaust is stupefying and, for many sympathizers with the Chinese Revolution, almost inexplicable. Certainly, the "strong" El NiΓ±o of 1957β59, which also produced a famous famine and nearly a million refugees in the Brazilian _sertΓ£o_ , was the likely culprit responsible for the onset of drought in 1958β59, but recent interpretations radically disagree over the relative importance of climatic and political determinants. In _Hungry Ghosts_ , a Robert Conquestβlike exposΓ© of Mao's orchestration of "the darkest moment in the long history of China," Jasper Becker fails to mention any natural context for the famine whatsoever, although Chinese meteorologists have characterized the drought, which affected one-third of the nation's cultivated acreage, as the most extreme of the twentieth century. For the first time in human memory, people could actually wade across the Yellow River.
Taking a more sober approach, Y. Kueh (1998) has used impressive statistical modeling to show that "the weather was the main cause of the enormous grain-yield losses in 1960 and 1961," but that the communes could still have survived the crisis without mass mortality if Beijing had not stupidly reduced sown acreage in 1959 (to divert labor to public works and backyard steel-making) and criminally enforced confiscatory procurement quotas in 1959β60. A hideous culpability (although not the conspiratorial malevolence that Becker alleges) thus falls upon the Maoist leadership. Although drought was again a proximate cause, the truly key variable was the absence of socialist democracy. As Amartya Sen has emphasized in a well-known contrast of postcolonial India and China, "The particular fact that China, despite its much greater achievements in reducing endemic deprivation, experienced a gigantic famine during 1958β61... had a good deal to do with the lack of press freedom and the absence of political opposition. The disastrous policies that had paved the way of the famine were not changed for three years as the famine raged on, and this was made possible by the near-total suppression of news about the famine and the total absence of media criticism of what was then happening in China."
SOUTHEAST ASIA
In the classical El NiΓ±o pattern, an anomalous high-pressure zone forms over Indonesia as the Pacific Warm Pool moves eastward towards the International Date Line. This can delay the onset of the western monsoon, especially in the central and eastern parts of the country, by more than a month. The Dutch meteorologist Hendrik Berlage, who resumed Sir Gilbert Walker's research on the Southern Oscillation, calculated in the 1950s that fully 93 percent of Javanese droughts during the colonial period had occurred in the course of these negative SO anomalies (El NiΓ±os). His findings have been corroborated by updated analyses of the instrumental record, as well as by tree ring series taken from teak that extend the ENSO correlations as far back as 1514. Recent El NiΓ±o research has also revealed that "periodic long-term droughts and subsequent forest fires have been apparently been more frequent in Borneo than formerly realized. As in other humid tropical woodlands and societies, they have also been more critical to both social organization and local ecological processes." The intensity of drought in the East Indies, however, does not always correlate with the magnitudes of Indian droughts or Peruvian El NiΓ±os. Thus the 1902 El NiΓ±o ("strong plus" as measured by Peruvian events) produced a much bigger rainfall deficit in both Indonesia and the Philippines than did the 1899 event ("very strong").
**Table 8.2**
**Indonesia: Most Severe Modern Droughts**
El NiΓ±o Year | Rainfall Anomaly
(cm/month)
---|---
1982 | β7.1
1902 | β7.02
1972 | β6.9
1914 | β6.5
1965 | β5.1
1930 | β3.9
1941 | β3.8
1905 | β3.6
1963* | β3.6
1923 | β3.4
1987 | β3.2
1899 | β2.6
1896 | β1.8
*NonβEl NiΓ±o year.
Source: Assembled from International Research Institute for Climate Prediction data (iri.ucsed.edu/hot_NiΓ±o/impacts/indones/index.html).
Wetland rice production, which requires at least eight inches of rain per month, is highly sensitive to erratic or deficient rainfall. In areas where the precipitation regime is especially variable, like eastern Java, southeast Borneo, Sulawesi, Timor and Irian Jaya, cultivators had traditionally countered environmental uncertainty with agricultural diversity: using staggered plantings and varieties of rices. In contrast, colonial monocultures with their simplification of crops and rotations increased vulnerability to drought. Yet the complex island and mountain topography of Indonesia and "its puzzling variety of rainfall regimes" has always mitigated against drought-famines on the scale of India or China. General collapses of agricultural production are unlikely. Famines in the nineteenth century tended to be confined to those drought-stricken regions where the terrain dictated high transport costs and market prices for rice that were accordingly out of the reach of the poorest peasants. Since the 1960s, moreover, with more intensive multinational exploitation of Indonesia's hardwood resources, El NiΓ±o droughts have been associated with an increased frequency of uncontrolled forest fires, like the vast conflagrations in East Kalimantan and North Borneo during 1982β83 and 1997.
The rest of Southeast Asia, according to a recent study of historical rainfall records (excluding Indochina) by R. Kane, also experiences deficient rainfall or drought during strong El NiΓ±os, with the exception of the northwest Philippines, which is more strongly under the influence of the East Asian monsoon and thus tends towards flooding. The impact of ENSO perturbations, as in India, is modified by interdecadal fluctuations (probably due to Eurasian snow-cover trends) in the strength of the monsoon. Kane found that in Thailand these "epochs" average about thirty years, similar to India; while in more equatorial countries, like Singapore or Indonesia, they tend to be only a decade or so in duration.
The ENSO signature is particularly vivid in Philippine history where it has often been associated with rural unrest and peasant revolution. Although there is no tradition of local research comparable to Berlage's Southern Oscillation time series for Indonesia, the teleconnection may be very robust (with a reversed signal in the case of northern Luzon). The International Research Institute for Climate Research data set, for example, shows a 95 percent correlation between El NiΓ±o events and below-average rainfall, with the most severe droughts in 1941, 1915, 1902β03, 1983 and 1912. The period of national revolt and US colonial occupation, 1897β1915, was also the most environmentally turbulent in the last 200 years, with seven significant El NiΓ±o droughts as well as severe La NiΓ±aβrelated flooding in 1910.
The commercially important plantation island of Negros has been especially vulnerable to the ENSO cycle, with eight of nine famines in the second half of the nineteenth century coinciding with El NiΓ±o events. In the twentieth century, adds Lopez-Gonzaga, the conjugation of periodic drought and volatile sugar prices has produced so much hunger that Negros "became known world-wide as the Philippines' 'Ethiopia.'" Negros's rich tradition of messianic and class-based resistance movements, however, has ensured that deprivation did not go unchallenged. During the terrible 1982β83 El NiΓ±o drought, for example, thousands of unemployed Negrense sugarworkers flocked to the banner of the communist New People's Army. "By mid-1985, many of the haciendas and the upland settlements in the south-central towns of Negros were identified as NPA 'red liberated zones.'"
Drought and flood disasters have also episodically sharpened agrarian discontent on other islands. The most recent crisis was in the winter of 1997β98 when 90 percent of the Philippines experienced moderate to extreme drought. Nearly a million people suffered the early stages of starvation as the impact of crop failure was magnified by the East Asian financial crisis. The archipelago is also frequently in the direct path of typhoons spawned in abnormal numbers by the warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific. The typhoon rains and tropical storms that battered Luzon and Mindanao during the El NiΓ±o summer of 1972 have been described as "the worst natural disaster in Philippines history."
AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA
As we have seen, contemporary observers interpreted the synchronous droughts in Australia and India in 1877 as a correlation having almost oracular significance. Ten years later, in a review of historical data, Sir Charles Todd, government astronomer and meteorologist for South Australia, confirmed that the coincidence was indeed a fundamental meteorological relationship. "Comparing our records with those of India, I find a close correspondence or similarity of seasons with regard to the prevalence of drought, and there can be little or no doubt that severe droughts occur as a rule simultaneously over the two countries." Modern research has shown, however, that while mean surface pressure and rainfall over most of Australia fluctuate with the Southern Oscillation, the correlation of drought with ENSO is strongest in New South Wales and northern Victoria, where tremendous losses were sustained by agriculture and the wool industry during the El NiΓ±o events of 1877, 1884, 1888, 1897, 1899, 1902, 1915, 1918 and 1958. At such times, vast areas become an antipodean Dust Bowl. "Not surprisingly," Ann Young explains, "the most severe wind erosion occurs during droughts. At the end of the 1895β1903 drought a huge series of dust storms engulfed Victoria and parts of New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia over a three-day period from 11 to 13 November 1903. Many places experienced gales of dust, fire balls, lightning, and darkness during the day that was so intense that the fowls roosted." El NiΓ±o also orchestrates the fire cycle in the sclerophyll flora of eastern Australia, which episodically climaxes in great regional firestorms like the Ash Wednesday disaster of 16 February 1983.
The environmental history of Papua New Guinea/Irian Jaya is poorly understood, but El NiΓ±o droughts and La NiΓ±a floods are probably prime movers of episodic migration and intercultural violence. In 1997, for example, the combination of drought and killing frost (from colder temperatures during cloudless nights) forced tens of thousands of highland farmers to trek to the lowlands in a desperate search for food and water. The shortage of water also forced the huge gold mine at Porgera in the central highlands to shut down, and fires did terrible damage to forests on the western side of the island.
ENSO is also the major control over rainfall in New Caledonia and, presumably, the rest of Melanesia. As the Warm Pool and its associated convergence zone move eastward, "there is a tendency for local colder than average sea surface temperature, for saltier than average sea surface salinity and consistent rainfall shortage." In strong El NiΓ±o years, river-flows decline by more than half (with disastrous impacts on taro irrigation systems), while during La NiΓ±a events they double. The La NiΓ±a effect is sometimes catastrophically reinforced by typhoons that track in the direction of New Caledonia during cold event years.
As the most important variable in the ecological metabolism of the tropical Pacific, ENSO has also deeply shaped Polynesian history. In New Zealand, the north and east coasts of the country, including most of the urban population, are vulnerable to El NiΓ±o drought, while higher than average rainfall occurs along the west and south coasts of the South Island. All the island groups near the International Date Line, meanwhile, are subject to drastic rainfall variation as the Warm Pool shuttles back and forth in the course of the ENSO cycle. The Southern Oscillation likewise determines the geography of tropical cyclone activity in the Pacific and "island communities east of the Date Line [like Tahiti] experience high risk of damage during ENSO events."
El NiΓ±o is the major control on agricultural output and water supply in the Hawaiian Islands. During warm events, the subtropical jet stream intensifies and moves southward, leaving Hawai'i on the anticyclonic side in a region of strong subsidence. The colder sea temperatures in the north-central Pacific likewise reduce evaporation and promote subsidence. "Nearly all major statewide Hawaiian droughts have coincided with El NiΓ±o events," with the driest years in 1877, 1897, 1926 and 1919. The recurrent droughts from 1982β83 onwards played a major role in the decline and eventual shutdown of most of the state's once dominant sugarcane industry.
Fijian agricultureβboth the sugar industry and food crops like rice and _kava_ βhas likewise suffered severely from recent El NiΓ±os (as it did, presumably, in the nineteenth century). The 1997β98 drought was the worst in Fiji's modern history and led to the declaration of a state of emergency with 270,000 people at one point dependent on relief. The drought crisis, which especially undermined indigenous subsistence agriculture, was probably a contributing factor to renewed ethnic tensions that led to the coup and hostage crisis in summer 2000.
SOUTH AMERICA
Brazil's Nordeste has long been a puzzle to climatologists. "Due to its geography (1 to 18 degrees South), one would expect a rainfall distribution typical of equatorial areas. However, the annual mean rainfall over this region, which is in the immediate vicinity of the largest tropical forest, the Amazon, is much smaller than the average equatorial rainfall." Although the _sertΓ£o_ is certainly not the desert imagined by many urban Brazilians (the mean annual precipitationβ28 inchesβis slightly more than that of Paris), very high rates of evapotranspiration and soil dryness conspire against stable rainfed agriculture. Its semi-aridity, most researchers now believe, is principally determined by the way the tip of the Nordeste protrudes well into the influence of the stationary South Atlantic subtropical high. ("This is the same stable air mass," Webb points out, "that provides the brilliant, transparent nights in the _sertΓ£o_. Many poems and songs have been inspired by the 'luar do meu sertΓ£o.'")
What has most decisively shaped the human ecologies of the _sertΓ£o_ , however, is not the climate's mean trend but its extreme fluctuation. The core of the _sertΓ£o_ , for example, experiences rainfall variability in excess of 40 percent. Even compared to north China, this is an extraordinarily high quotient of environmental instability. Moreover, "even during a 'normal' year 80β90% of the rainfall is concentrated during the wet season. The duration of the rainy season is fairly constant but its starting point, which coincides roughly with sowing time in the agricultural calendar, may vary by between fifty-five and eighty-five days... The reduction of total rainfall by one-third can have disastrous effects if the start of the rainy season is delayed for long enough to make the crops fail." _Sertanejos_ believe that if the rains don't come by St. Joseph's Day, 19 March, a _seca_ will surely ensue. Erratic seasonal distribution, in other words, is just as much a problem as an annual deficit in rainfall.
Sir Gilbert Walker was convinced that the _sertΓ£o_ 's irregular rainfall resulted from some influence exercised by the Southern Oscillation. He even proposed a statistical formula in 1928 that tied the incidence of drought-famine in CearΓ‘ to the phases of SO. Subsequent research has elaborated Walker's insight in terms of ENSO teleconnection theory. It works like this: rainfall in the northern and central _sertΓ£o_ is concentrated in the months (MarchβApril) when the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in the Atlantic Ocean reaches its most southerly position. During strong El NiΓ±o phases, an anomalously strong Atlantic high squats off the coast of Brazil and the ITCZ is blocked from moving southward into its usual rainmaking position. One interpretation is that when the Warm Pool/IACZ moves into the east-central Pacific it pushes the major equatorial standing waves (troughs and ridges) eastward. The influence on the Nordeste's rainfall, however, seems to be very sensitive to the exact timing of the onset of the El NiΓ±o, and not all warm phases bring droughts. Nonetheless, rainfall records from Fortaleza (which date back to 1849) show that the ten driest January-to-July periods have all been synchronized to strong El NiΓ±os. In addition, there seems to be a strong inverse relationship between El NiΓ±o (La NiΓ±a) drought (wet) incidents in the Nordeste/Amazonas and unusually wet (dry) episodes in southern Brazil that is analogous to the dipolar relationship between north China and the Yangzi Valley.
Although the droughts of 1877β79 and 1888β91 were the most severe as measured at Fortaleza, recent data from the International Research Institute shows the 1896β97 drought, which accompanied the War of Canudos, was also exceptionally intense by twentieth-century standards (see Table 8.3). Moreover, general drought conditions persisted almost unbroken until 1907 and then, after a few humid years, resumed with the sharp El NiΓ±o spikes in 1915 and 1918 (respectively, the second and fourth most severe rainfall anomalies in the last century). Indeed, the three decades from 1888 to 1918, as elsewhere, constitute an epoch of extraordinary environmental turmoil in the Nordeste.
**Table 8.3**
**Northern South America: Droughts and ENSO**
El NiΓ±o Year | Rainfall Anomaly
(cm/month)
---|---
1896 | β8.2
1915 | β3.3
1982 | β3.2
1918 | β3.2
1958 | β3.1
1905 | β2.1
1930 | β2.1
1902 | β2.0
1925 | β1.8
1972 | β1.7
Source: IRI, ibid.
El NiΓ±o droughts have also played destructive roles in the history of Andean and Amazonian cultures. As the research of C. Caviedes has shown, the phasing of droughts on the Altiplano of Bolivia and Peru, as well as the outer Amazon Basin (centered around Manaus), is synchronized with ENSO. "Although the inter-annual precipitation variability in the Altiplano is not as large as in northern Peru, there are years when the winter dryness extends into spring and summer, thus producing droughts. It has been demonstrated that these droughts are especially pronounced during the years when northern Peru is struck by ENSO episodes." Southern Peru's most severe modern droughts were in 1940β41 and 1956β58, with the later leading to near-famine and widespread agrarian unrest.
In Amazonia, Caviedes has demonstrated that Manaus's rainfall is severely reduced by El NiΓ±o blocking of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. ENSO, in fact, may be the chief climatic regulator of Amazon Basin ecology, producing the periodic droughts and accompanying wildfires (as in 1998) which are the major natural "disturbance regime." Even in the absence of fire, El NiΓ±o events, which lengthen the Amazon dry season, have stunning impacts on forest productivity and resultant carbon fluxes. A recent study of 1982β93 satellite data suggests that powerful warm events can temporarily transform the Amazon Basin from a major net CO2 source to a net sink of comparable magnitudeβa phenomenon with planetary biogeochemical implications. Archaeologists, meanwhile, speculate that major discontinuities in cultural sequences throughout the Amazon, like counterpart sites in coastal Peru, probably correspond to El NiΓ±o catastrophes (drought in Amazonia, flooding in Peru). In the twentieth century, both the 1925β26 and 1982β83 El NiΓ±os were associated with severe droughts in Amazonia: during the former, forest fires raged uncontrolled for months, reputedly trapping and killing "thousands of rubber gatherers."
When Amazonia, the Altiplano and the Nordeste are dry, most of the Southern Cone is anomalously wet. The great ParanΓ‘ River basin, which encompasses 2.6 million square kilometers of Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, typically experiences rainfall maxima during El NiΓ±os. The 1982β83 event, for example, produced the ParanΓ‘'s greatest historical flood with flows of almost Amazonian volume. Across the Andes, central Chile is similarly inundated during most El NiΓ±o years. Researchers have shown how the wave train of troughs and ridges in the Southern Hemisphere, as in the Northern, is realigned by warm events; a blocking high over the Bellinghausen Sea usually leading to intensified winter storm systems over Chile's most populated provinces. It is an impressively consistent relationship, with twenty out of twenty-three of the wettest years in central Chile over the last century correlating to El NiΓ±os.
NORTH AMERICA
During a canonical El NiΓ±o event, some of the warm water that piles up against the equatorial coastline of South America is driven far northward. (Technically, equatorial trapped Kelvin wavesβthe sloshing of the thermocline eastwardβare transformed into coastal trapped Kelvin waves.) The subsequent warming and rise in sea level by as much as a foot of Mexico's Pacific coastal waters have profound meteorological effects. During the 1896 El NiΓ±o, for instance, central Mexico was gripped by severe drought while the north of the country experienced excessive precipitation, a pattern that was repeated during the very powerful 1982β83 event. Again, in 1997β98, soaring ocean temperatures produced a crippling drought in the western parts of central Mexico. Hundreds of forest fires broke out and "covered the entire country with a thick layer of smoke that extended to the adjacent areas of the United States." Under La NiΓ±a conditions, as in 1999β2000, the pattern reverses: unusually wet conditions in the Mesa Central contrast with severe droughts in Chihuahua (see Table 8.4) and states east of the continental divide of the Sierra Madre.
**Table 8.4
Drought in 20th-Century Chihuahua**
Year | ENSO?
---|---
1907β10* | La NiΓ±a (1907β10)
1918β21 | ? (La NiΓ±a 1916β18/
| El NiΓ±o 1918β20)
1929* | La NiΓ±a (1928β29)
1934_35 | β
1947β48 | El NiΓ±o?
1950β51 | La NiΓ±a (1950β51)
1953 | β
1956 | La NiΓ±a (1955β56)
1964 | La NiΓ±a (1964)
1974 | La NiΓ±a (1973_75)
*Extreme drought.
Source: Drought chronology from Luis Carlos Fierro; ENSO from NOAA and Allan, Lindesay and Parker.
**Figure 8.4 ENSO and Rainfall in Southeastern Africa**
Source: From Eugene Rasmusson, "Global Climate Change and Variability: Effects on Drought and Desertification in Africa," in Michael Glantz (ed.), _Drought and Hunger in Africa: Denying Famine a Future_ , Cambridge 1987, p. 10. I have interpreted two of Rasmusson's non-ENSO droughts as in fact El NiΓ±oβrelated (circa 1891 and 1915).
Although local research is still in its relative infancy, it is clear that ENSO has been one of the major environmental forces shaping Mexican history. Indeed, the devastating drought from 1907 to 1911 (fusing with monetary and trade crises) that destabilized much of Mexico and helped precipitate the downfall of the Porfiriato coincided with the most protracted (four to five years) La NiΓ±a event of the last century. Droughts, moreover, have been a major "push" factor in the modern fluxes of Mexican labor to Texas and California.
North of the border, however, ENSO has conferred immense geopolitical power on US and Canadian grain surpluses. According to a 1997 study by researchers at the University of Illinois, the year preceding a warm event onset usually correlates with bumper crops in the US Midwest, while the El NiΓ±o year itself typically brings mild winters and early spring plantings. A 1999 paper, more specifically focused on the cornbelt, also found a positive relationship between farm output and the ENSO warm phase. American grain production, in other words, is typically in meteorological anti-phase with El NiΓ±o droughts and crop failures in India, north China and (most likely) the Russian chernozem belt. This potential to relieve the world's hunger during periods of synchronous global drought, as Kansas Populists realized in the 1890s, was also a partial solution to the problem of periodic overproduction in the Plains states. Later, Herbert Hoover showed how it could be elaborated into full-scale foreign policy of famine relief and food aid. Occasional flood damage in Southern California and the Gulf states during El NiΓ±o years is usually more than offset by enhanced bargaining power within world grain markets as well as by lower winter fuel bills and reduced hurricane damage. Stanley Changnon claims that the Midwest reaped almost $9 billion in net gains, and the United States as a whole more $14 billion, from the weather effects of the great 1997β98 El NiΓ±o.
But ENSO's relative benign impact on the US GNP should not be taken for granted. In an important 1998 study, Cole and Cook find that ENSO's influence on the continental US moisture balance has a low-frequency pattern that corresponds to regime shifts in the Pacific, probably associated with the PDO. "Long ENSO records reveal decadal modulation of ENSO intensity [vis-Γ -vis US hydrology], with stronger variability in the early parts of this century, a general weakening around 1925, and stronger variability since about 1955." Stronger ENSO events, as theory would predict, produce more consistent teleconnection patterns and greater penetration of moisture anomaliesβdrought (1988) or flooding (1993)βfrom the Southwest rim into the southern Great Plains and Midwest. In the case of the 1988 drought, farm output in the scorched southern plains declined by almost one-third. New research also suggests a La NiΓ±a teleconnection that increases drought probabilities in the Midwest through a strengthening of the Mexican summer monsoon.
SOUTHERN AFRICA
Catastrophic drought has been one of the principal axes of the history of southern Africa. The devastating aridity in Zimbabwe and much of South Africa since 1980, culminating in the 1991β92 drought (the worst this century) and an 82 percent decline in maize production, reminds us of what the protracted droughts of the 1820s, 1870s and late 1890s must have been like. Dependent like northeast Brazil on the unreliable southern migration of the ITCZ, Natal, Zululand, the Transvaal, the Zambezi Valley and the low veld of southern Mozambique have been accurately described as "kingdoms of uncertainty" where rulership was traditionally legitimated by rainmaking power and the relief of the poor during droughts. Moreover, there is compelling, generally accepted evidence of strong teleconnections between rainfall in southern Africa and ENSO. A 1998 study confirmed a correlation between the ten strongest twentieth-century El NiΓ±os and rainfall over the entire southern half of Africa. The three major centers of synchronized drought were eastern South Africa, southern Tanzania to northern Mozambique and, surprisingly, along the South Atlantic coast from Namibia to Gabon. As elsewhere in the tropics, the shifting IACZ rearranges ridges and troughs, pushing the westerly jet stream equatorwards and weakening convection over southern Africa and sometimes the Horn of Africa, while typically strengthening it over East Africa. The inverse pattern of exceptional convection in the south, associated with strong La NiΓ±a events, can also be devastating to agriculture as the great flood of winter 2000 in Mozambique grimly demonstrated.
The impact of ENSO is modulated by two other circulation regimes: an eighteen- to twenty-year regional rainfall cycle (strongest in the northeast of South Africa and parts of Zimbabwe) and the transequatorial phenomena known as the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, which involves reversals of stratospheric winds. The 1957β58 and 1977β78 El NiΓ±os, for example, had virtually no impact on southern Africa. Nonetheless, it is estimated that at least 20 percent of summer rainfall variance in southeastern Africa is "accounted for solely by the relationship with the Southern Oscillation," and ENSO forecastsβwhich provide surprisingly accurate predictions of maize yield in Zimbabwe up to a year in advanceβare now being used as an "early warning system" for millions of African farmers.
THE HORN AND EAST AFRICA
ENSO impacts on the Horn and East Africa are less straightforward. In Ethiopia there are three agricultural seasons: the main rainy season, _kremt_ (June to September); the dry season, _bega_ (October to January); and the season of small rains, _belg_ (February to May). Meteorological research, especially analyses of the fluctuations of the Nile flood, which originates in the Ethiopian Highlands, supports a persistent teleconnection between Ethiopian weather and ENSO. However, the outcomes for agriculture are highly variable since El NiΓ±o phases correlate both to catastrophic failure of the _kremt_ rains and to above-normal belg rainfall. In 1997, for example, the rains largely failed during the kremt, but November, usually the driest month, was unusually wet. Still, because the kremt is most critical for agriculture and pastoralism, the impact is usually severe. Table 8.5 shows why El NiΓ±o has become synonymous with hunger in northern Ethiopia, especially in Wallo and Tigray which are in the rainshadow of the great highland massif. On the other hand, the autumn rainy season (the _Der_ ) of southern Ethiopia (Ogaden) and Somalia, like the short rainy season in neighboring coastal East Africa, has a positive linkage (greater than normal rainfall) to El NiΓ±o. Here drought-famine, as in 1998β2000, occurs in the wake of protracted La NiΓ±as.
**Table 8.5**
**ENSO and Drought-Famine in Sudan and the Horn of Africa**
**ENSO** | **Famine Years** | **Region**
---|---|---
1828 | 1828β29 | Shewa, Sudan
1835 | **1835β37** | Ethiopia, Sudan
1864 | 1864β66 | Tigray/Gondar
1876 | 1876β78 | Tigray/Afar
1889 | **1888β92** | Ethiopia, Sudan
1896 | 1896 | Ethiopia
1899 | 1899β1900 | Ethiopia, Darfur
1912 | **1913β14** | N. Ethiopia, Sudan
1918/19 | 1920β22 | Ethiopia
1953 | 1953 | Tigray/Wallo
1958 | **1958** | Tigray/Wallo
1965 | 1964β66 | Tigray/Wallo
1972/73 | **1973β74** | Tigray/Wallo, Sudan
1982β83 | **1983β84** | Ethiopia, Sudan
1987 | 1987β88 | Ethiopia
1990β95 | 1990β94 | Ethiopia, Sudan
1997/98 | 1997β98 | Ethiopia, Sudan
1999β2000 | 1999β2000 | Ogadan/Somalia
β’La NiΓ±a. Largest crop failures are in bold.
Source: Based on chronologies in Joachim Von Braun, Tesfaye Teklu and Patrick Webb, _Famine in Africa_ , Baltimore 1998, pp. 36 and 39; and Workineh Degefu, "Some Aspects of Meteorological Drought in Ethiopia," in Glantz, _Drought and Hunger in Africa_ , pp. 29β31.
**Table 8.6**
**ENSO and East African Droughts**
**Year** | ENSO | Departure from Average
1951β80 Rainfall
---|---|---
1898 | La NiΓ±a | β50%
1917 | La NiΓ±a | β30%
18991 | β | β28%
1921 | ? | β38%
1892β93 | La NiΓ±a | β26%
19902 | β | β25%
1943/44 | La NiΓ±a | β23%
1. Strong La NiΓ±a through the first quarter of 1899; El NiΓ±o in the third quarter.
2. The 1989 La NiΓ±a persisted through winter 1990.
Source: Derived from Figure 5.6 in Mike Hulme, "Climate Change Within the Period of Meteorological Records," in Adams, Goudie and Orme, p. 96; and La NiΓ±a chronology in Allan, Lindesay and Parker, p. 137.
The Sudan and Upper Egypt, as we have seen, have tended to experience famine in synchronization with the Horn. Nile flows, of course, are the addition of seasonal rainfall over the Ethiopian Highlands, which supplies 80 percent of basin discharge via the annual flood of the Blue Nile, and the smaller but more regular outflow from the Great Lakes of central Africa via the White Nile. Within the vast Nile Basin as a whole it is estimated that as much as 40 percent of interannual rainfall variability is due to ENSO, but the two major watersheds, as one would expect from their different climatologies, react independently and asymmetrically to global forcings. Thus El NiΓ±o phases primarily affect the Blue Nile system, with Ethiopian droughts leading to 5 percent to 15 percent reductions in the total Basin water budget, while La NiΓ±a phases can produce spectacular 10 percent to 25 percent increases in precipitation over the White Nile catchment.
Like Brazil's Nordeste, East Africa is surprisingly dry for its low latitude. "Undoubtedly the most impressive climatic anomaly in all of Africa," writes G. Trewartha, "is the widespread deficiency of rainfall in tropical East Africa." The highlands of Madagascar intercept much of the moisture in the southeast trade winds, while the "rain-bearing equatorial trough passes the region rapidly, being hastened far to the north in the northern summer and far to the south in the southern summer." According to Laban Ogallo and his colleagues at the University of Nairobi, an estimated 50 percent of East African rainfall variance is directly attributable to ENSO. In Kenya, where the major growing season is March to June, the devastating rains of 1998 upheld the hypothesis that the same displacement of the ITCZ that produces drought in southeastern Africa brings extreme rainfall to eastern equatorial Africa. Conversely, historical rainfall data from the Kenyan coast, commencing in 1900, demonstrate a consistent relationship between La NiΓ±as and dry anomalies. This suggests that the devastating Kenyan drought at the very end of the nineteenth century, which overlapped with El NiΓ±o droughts elsewhere, arose from the powerful La NiΓ±a event of 1898 that punctuated the El NiΓ±o pulses of 1896β97 and 1899β1900. As the annual rainfall anomaly index for East Africa shows (see Figure 8.4), this event was extraordinary in magnitude.
Such broadbrush portraits, however, are locally modified by the region's Great Lakes and complex topography. Current research has thus adopted a methodology similar to the "rainfall fluctuation region" approach pioneered by Suppiah in his analysis of ENSO in Sri Lanka. Working from rainfall records in 136 stations throughout Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, Ogallo and his colleagues have identified eight coherent subregions with distinct seasonal patterns of rainfall and correspondingly different interactions with ENSO. Under this higher magnification, East Africa in strong El NiΓ±o/La NiΓ±a years presents a variegated pattern of local drought amid generally abnormal regional rainfall (or vice versa). Thus during warm phases, when coastal rainfall is torrential, there is frequently a late onset to the MarchβMay rains in the western highlands of Kenya, northwestern Kenya and northeastern Uganda, as well as significant deficiencies in summer rainfall over the central Rift Valley. "The suppression of this seasonal rainfall [in an otherwise 'wet' year] can have severe socio-economic impacts especially on agriculture. The JuneβSeptember rainfall maintains the different growing stages of crops especially wheat planted by both large-scale farmers and small-scale peasant farmers." Distinguishing between regions of Uganda with single and dual season rainfall zones, Phillips and McIntyre have similarly noted that El NiΓ±o events, which typically depress August but enhance November precipitation, can have very different impacts on agriculture in one part of the country from another.
THE SAHEL AND MAGHREB
"Of ENSO-sensitive regions," caution Allan, Lindesay and Parker, "the Sahelian is perhaps one of the most complicated as it is also influenced markedly by multidecadal fluctuations in the climate system, and thus ENSO impacts wax and wane over time." In simple models, El NiΓ±o/La NiΓ±a events regulate rainfall in the Sahel by displacing the location and modulating the strength of the globe-spanning Walker Circulation discovered by Bjerknes. Shifts in the eastβwest Atlantic Walker cells force "anomalous subsiding/ascending vertical motions over western Africa." However, these zonal (eastβwest) anomalies are only part of the story. Equally or more important is the emergence of a powerful meridional (northβsouth) sea temperature gradient in the tropical Atlantic. "Dry years," writes Bette Otto-Bliesner, "are associated with El NiΓ±o conditions in the eastern tropical Pacific and a dipole pattern in the tropical Atlantic with positive anomalies south of 10 degrees North and negative anomalies north of 10 degrees North. The latter results in a weakening of the Atlantic Hadley cell [the major atmospheric circulation of heat from the equator to the mid-latitudes] and associated moisture flux into the Intertropical Convection Zone." This complex interaction between perpendicular circulations, moreover, takes place at differential speeds: "The tropical Atlantic dipole-Sahel precipitation connection is best defined on decadal time scales with Pacific SST anomalies playing a larger role on sub-decadal time scales."
Conceptually we are on familiar ground, with the equatorial Atlantic dipole playing a comparable role to epochal variability in the Indian monsoon. Both modulate the impact of El NiΓ±o pulses on decadal scales. It is not surprising, therefore, that a sophisticated study of rainfall records for ten Sahelian stations (covering 1900β88) shows that the ENSO teleconnection (statistically most significant at Dakar and Kano) should fluctuate in intensity, almost vanishing, for instance, during the wet period of the 1950s and early 1960s. North of the Sahara, meanwhile, ENSO dances with a different partner, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)βthe air-mass/pressure see-saw between Iceland and the Azores that was named by Walker in the 1920s. Although NAO, on the whole, exercises more control over Maghrebian precipitation, new research that correlates NovemberβJanuary sea surface temperature trends in the tropical Pacific with FebruaryβApril precipitation over the arable valleys and plains of western Morocco supports the likelihood that the terrible 1877β78 drought-famine was indeed part of the global El NiΓ±o configuration.
EUROPE
As its celebrity increases, ENSO tempts historians and archaeologists as a _deus ex machina_ , like the Victorian sunspot mania, that can be invoked to explain almost any drought or extreme weather pattern. Indeed, since ENSO is in a warm phase approximately 20 percent of the time, and because of the temporal "lead/lag" patterns in its teleconnections, nothing is easier than establishing a circumstantial correlation between a given historical event and an El NiΓ±o outbreak. Accordingly, we should be deeply wary of claims about El NiΓ±o causality where the putative teleconnection is not solidly grounded in theory or supported by a robust time series.
One historian, for example, generated newspaper headlines across the world in 1997 with his "discovery" that El NiΓ±o had been "behind" the French Revolution (or at least the agricultural dearth that preceded it) and the Irish Potato Famine. Certainly both events (unusually wet, cool summers ruinous of grain) coincided with contemporary El NiΓ±os, as did similar Irish and British crop failures in 1876β79, and thus may be legitimately treated as part of the same global agricultural conjuncture. But their meteorologies may have had only the most distant, if any, relationship. Despite vigorous investigation, there is yet little persuasive evidence of a significant ENSO teleconnection to Western European weather. Indeed a recent study found "no robust ENSO composite elements" out of thirty-four variables affecting Atlantic climate systems.
Recent research, on the contrary, has shown that agricultural output in northwestern Europe is powerfully orchestrated by the North Atlantic Oscillation. The NAO is most likely the principal source of the cold, wet summers that are associated (rather than drought) with crop failure and famine in European history. There may well be, of course, some atmospheric flywheel (perhaps the enigmatic and encompassing "Arctic Oscillation") that meshes the NAO and ENSO into a single planetary system, but according to a 1998 review, "no study has so far defined a clear-cut association between the NAO and ENSO." If the great El NiΓ±os of 1876-77 and 1982β83 were accompanied by a strengthened NAO that brought milder winters to Western Europe, other strong El NiΓ±os are perversely correlated with a weakened NAO and more severe winter weather.
There is more evidence that the tropical Pacific exercises some influence over precipitation in the western Mediterranean (in tandem with NAO) and southern Russia. Ropelewski and Halpert in the late 1980s, for example, identified a positive SO relationship with summer rainfall in North Africa, the Mediterranean and the southeastern Iberian Peninsula. Their correlations, however, lacked a clear physical explanation and did not cast light on whether there was a teleconnection in other seasons. In a 1998 study, Alfredo Rocha re-examined the Iberian data for the 1900β96 period. He found that El NiΓ±o was "associated with below-average spring and winter rainfall over the southeastern Iberian Peninsula, and above-average autumn rainfall in the Peninsula as a whole." The teleconnection, however, is "moody," having waxed and waned in strength over the course of the last century.
Any historian, meanwhile, must be considerably impressed by the synchronicity of drought and crop failure in south Russia (especially the Volga _gubernii_ of Samara, Saratov, Simbrisk and Penza) with worldwide ENSO events. Yet this apparent teleconnection linking drought on the Volga steppe with warming/cooling in the eastern tropical Pacific should be treated with great caution. At this writing, there is no literature in English that illuminates a plausible mechanism or tests the statistical significance of these correlations. The seasonal fit between El NiΓ±o events and Volga droughts is not consistent, and in some cases (1891, 1911 and 1972) warm events follow so quickly on the heels of cold events as to blur which ENSO phase is being correlated. Moreover, the putative Volga teleconnection does not reproduce itself in larger geographical units of analysis. When Meshcherskaya and Blazhevich in a 1997 article, for example, divided the basic cereals-producing area of the former Soviet Union into European and Asian halves, the most significant pattern they discovered was a dipole where drought in the west is accompanied by normal or excessive moisture in the east, and vice versa. Although like most Russian researchers they did not specifically probe an ENSO connection, their century-long data on drought magnitude (measured by surface area affected) correlates primarily to a cold event chronology. Thus the four largest droughts in the Asian part of the grainbelt (1955, 1965, 1951 and 1931, in that rank order) occurred in the year following a La NiΓ±a, while three out of the four droughts in the European half (1981, 1936 and 1975, but not 1979) coincided with the year of Pacific cold events. It is plausible, of course, that an El NiΓ±oβlinked drought climatology is confined to the Volga with teleconnections of a different sign elsewhere, but nothing in the current scientific literature resolves the issue. Yet if ENSO's precise role in Russian weather is still a rich mystery, it remains of obvious geopolitical consequence that Volga grain shortfalls and famines have repeatedly aligned themselves, through whatever causality, with global El NiΓ±o droughts.
**Table 8.7
ENSO and Drought in the Volga Breadbasket**
**Drought Crisis** | **ENSO Correlation**
---|---
1877 | 1876β77 La NiΓ±a
1890β91 | 1888β90 La NiΓ±a/
| 1891 El NiΓ±o
1896 | 1896β97 El NiΓ±o
1905 | 1905 El NiΓ±o
1911 | 1910 La NiΓ±a/
| 1911β12 El NiΓ±o
1920β21 | 1918β19 El NiΓ±o
1931 | 1930 El NiΓ±o
1972 | 1971 La NiΓ±a/
| 1972 El NiΓ±o
1982 | 1982β83 El NiΓ±o
1997 | 1997 El NiΓ±o
Source: See the description of the Volga drought-belt in Orlando Figes, _Peasant Russia, Civl War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917β21)_ , Oxford 1980, pp. 19β25. ENSO dates are from Quinn (1987) and Allan, Lindesay and Parker.
**An El NiΓ±o Chronology**
Since Bjerknes's original synthesis of oceanic and atmospheric interaction, three principal databases have been used to reconstruct the chronology and magnitude of historical ENSO events. Australian meteorologists, first of all, have fine-tuned Walker's original Southern Oscillation Index ("normalized monthly mean Tahiti minus Darwin sea-level pressure anomalies") as far back as January 1876 and the onset of the great droughts. Researchers using the UK Meteorological Office's records ("the richest archive of meteorological observations in the world"), meanwhile, have compiled a series of sea surface temperatures from the east-central equatorial Pacific (the "NiΓ±o-3" region) from January 1871 to December 1994. These pressure and temperature anomalies, in turn, have been interpreted and calibrated with the help of eyewitness accounts of El NiΓ±o events that the late William Quinn, an oceanographer at Oregon State University, spent decades excavating from South American archives as far back as the diaries of Pizarro's secretary, Francisco Xeres. Quinn used "canonical" El NiΓ±osβfor example, 1877 and 1982 (very strong), 1972 (strong), and 1907 (moderate)βto scale magnitudes since 1525. He roughly gauged "very strong" events as corresponding to 7Β°β12Β°C anomalies in coastal sea surface temperatures, while "strong" events equalled 3Β°β5Β°C warmings, and "moderate," 2Β°β3Β°C. He supplemented his Peruvian and Chilean records with presumed ENSO proxies like Nilometer readings (the world's oldest instrumental record of climate variability), drought data from historical archives, and tree-ring chronologies from India, China and Java. In Table 8.9, significant drought-famines since 1780 are correlated with the Quinn magnitudes of their corresponding El NiΓ±o events.
**Table 8.8
Major ENSO Events Since 1780**
**El NiΓ±o** | **Strength** | **Regions Affected by Drought/Famine**
---|---|---
1782β83 | s | China, India
1790β93 | vs | India
1803β04 | s+ | India, South Africa
1824β25 | m+ | China, India, South Africa
1828 | vs | South Africa
1837 | m+ | China, India
1844β46 | s | China, Brazil
1867β70 | m+ | China, India
1873β74 | m | India
1876β78 | vs | China, India, South Africa, Egypt, Java, Brazil
1887β89 | m+ | China, Ethiopia, Sudan, Sahel
1891 | vs | China, India, Brazil
1896β97 | m+ | India, Brazil
1899β1900 | vs | China, India, Brazil
1901β02 | m+ | China, South Africa
1911β13 | s | China, India, Brazil
1917β19 | s | China, India, Brazil, Morocco
1925β26 | vs | China (floods), India
1957β58 | s | China, Brazil
1965β66 | s | China, India
1972β73 | s | China, India, Ethiopia, Sahel, Brazil
1982β83 | vs | China, India, Indonesia, South Africa
1991β95 | s | South Africa, East Africa, Mexico
1997β98 | vs | China (+ floods), Indonesia, Brazil
Key: m=moderate; s=strong; vs=very strong.
**Table 8.9
Strongest La NiΓ±a Events**
(Ranked by Rainfall Anomalies)
Indonesia: 1910, 1955, 1893, 1975, 1924, 1988, 1954
---
India: 1961, 1917, 1892, 1956, 1922, 1878, 1874, 1894, 1975
Queensland: 1974, 1976, 1917, 1901, 1894, 1910, 1904, 1968
East Africa: 1898, 1917, 1899, 1892, 1990, 1943
South Africa: 1976, 1974, 1917, 1955, 1916, 1909, 1893, 1894, 1939
Source: IRI data; and D. Mooly and J. Shukla, "Variability and Forecasting of the Summer Monsoon Rainfall over India," in C.-P. Chang and T. Krishnamurti (eds.), _Monsoon Meteorology,_ Oxford 1987.
It should be re-emphasized, of course, that drought in some regions (like India) "leads" and in others (like north China and northeast Brazil) "lags," the canonical warming off the Peruvian coast, thus potentially stretching local duration of an ENSO event by a year on either side. Confidence that these droughts have high probabilities of ENSO causation thus requires a suite of diagnostic tests: First, a plausible temporal correlation with the Quinn series (the weakest and potentially most misleading test). Second, a theoretical model of teleconnection well-established in the scientific literature. Third, the "synchronicity test" as explained by Whetton and Rutherfurd (and alluded to in the previous chapter): "Although the rainfall of a region may show an ENSO signal, many extreme rainfall events in that region may not be associated with ENSO. However, where these extremes are also present in remote regions in a pattern characteristic of ENSO one can have increased confidence that they are ENSO-related." Fourth, corroboration of these patterns by the "El NiΓ±o phase composites and impact maps" (based on gridded fields of filtered monthly mean sea level pressures and sea surface temperatures [SST], 1871β1994) recently published by Australian researchers. In the absence of such reconstructed meteorologies, the evidence for the pre-1871 teleconnections is accordingly weaker.
Is there any structure in the Quinn chronology? The clustering of intense El NiΓ±o events and associated food crises again is suggestive of the existence of multidecadal "ENSO regimes." Thus from the American Revolution to the coronation of Queen Victoria, the ENSO cycle had a high amplitude and climate disasters were frequent. As African historians have already appreciated, there is a particularly robust El NiΓ±o signature in the drought-driven crisis in southern Bantu society in the early nineteenth century that culminated in the chaos of the Zulu _mfecane_. The environmentally turbulent Age of Revolution was followed by a long generation of relative calm in the Indo-Pacific latitudes that corresponds to Hobsbawm's Age of Capital. Subsistence farmers, as well as colonialists, across the tropics took this as a norm warranting an expansion of cultivation and population. In the Bombay Deccan, for example, this "was overall a long period of relatively favourable conditions. Rainfall, despite the large annual variations, never failed seriously in a major region of the Presidency. This comparative climatic stability itself shaped patterns of farming and the judgements required about them. Poor quality land newly brought under the plough, for example, was not necessarily 'marginal' in the context of a series of good seasons."
In the 1860s the ENSO cycle again intensified. The once-in-200-year global drought of 1876β77, however, is followed by a decade of mild, humid weather (1879β1888) that encourages a new wave of settlement in marginal belts and historical dust bowls. This expansion is halted almost universally by the thirty-five years of exceptional ENSO activity that begins in 1888β89. This period includes four "very strong" El NiΓ±os (1891, 1899, 1918 and 1925) and thirteen other moderateβstrong El NiΓ±o years, along with nine La NiΓ±a years, including the very strong events of 1898 and 1917. This astonishingly high ENSO event frequency of 70 percent then abruptly declines to 39 percent between 1926 and 1971, with no "very strong" El NiΓ±os again until 1982. Although this interregnum includes, of course, the contribution of the 1958 El NiΓ±o to the Great Leap Forward catastrophe, extreme climate events are otherwise relatively rare in most regions under strong ENSO influence. India, in particular, was granted an exemption from killing droughts for more than half a century.
The end of the twentieth century, by contrast, looks on first inspection like a photocopy of the late Victorian era. Both fin de siΓ¨cle periods culminate in unusual "serial" El NiΓ±os 1896β97/1899β1902 and 1990β95/1997β98. There are intriguing differences, however, that some researchers attribute to anthropogenic warming. In the late twentieth century, as we have seen, El NiΓ±os seem to have become uncoupled from the Indian monsoon. Some authorities also believe that the recent ENSO cycle has less impact on rainfall in the central US states than in the late Victorian period.
Quinn and his colleagues recognized that this apparent succession of low- and high-intensity ENSO regimes superficially conforms to the controversial "Bruckner cycle": a long-debated 33- to 37-year oscillation in world rainfall records. They cautioned, however, that the periodicity probably resulted from statistical smoothing and that "it is doubtful whether the Bruckner cycle has any reality." If recent work on the PDO and other low-frequency background oscillations in the Pacific strengthens the case for nonstochastic ENSO periodicity, there is little consensus about the physics or even the frequency of presumed multidecadal ENSO regime shifts. Moreover there is considerable scientific unrest over the lacunae and inconsistencies in the documentation of historical ENSO events.
All published chronologies, like Table 8.9, are incomplete in crucial regards. First of all, they catalogue only El NiΓ±o phases. Although "there is good evidence that Cold Events may be as important as [Warm] Events in terms of associated midlatitude teleconnections," there has been far less research charting the history of La NiΓ±as and their impact on ENSO-sensitive regions or attempting to estimate their relative magnitudes. Their importance is attested by disasters like the 1898 floods in the Yellow River plain or the 1988 drought in the Midwest that caused a 31 percent loss in US grain production. Table 8.9 shows the strongest instrumentally measured La NiΓ±as in five major teleconnected regions. Noteworthy is the global coherence of the 1893β94 and 1917 events, as well as the strength in Indonesia of the 1910 La NiΓ±a, which we have previously associated with revolutionary drought in northern Mexico.
La NiΓ±as are usually described as "mirror images" of El NiΓ±os, but this is not precisely true. Dying El NiΓ±os often turn into La NiΓ±as, but the pattern is unpredictable and the ratio of warm to cold events has fluctuated dramatically over time. During the last quarter-century, for example, El NiΓ±os have become more frequent while La NiΓ±as have become rarer, a phenomena that some researchers attribute to global warming. Likewise, while warm and cold phases have inverted equatorial Pacific sea temperature patterns, they are often less symmetrical in their far-flung effects. It has been suggested, for example, that in southern Africa La NiΓ±as have a more robust and predictable relationship to heavy rains than do El NiΓ±os to droughts.
Second, annual data "smear" or superimpose event durations that really should be dated seasonally or monthly. Because El NiΓ±os can so suddenly grow into La NiΓ±as, they often overlap in the same calendar year, thus obviating efforts to make primitive year-to-event correlations without an understanding of the underlying teleconnection. Even more confusingly, some ENSO events in the historical record are of the "compound type": either an event that has gained a second wind after a temporary relaxation, or two events of different intensities separated by a short relaxation. As Quinn and Neal note (with some anxiety), "There may be an incomplete or staggered relaxation after a large antiβEl NiΓ±o [La NiΓ±a] buildup; in some other cases there may be a secondary buildup to a higher level after an earlier premature relaxation; in still other cases there may just be two separate events with a one-year buildup between them" (like 1897/99). Researchers, for example, are still debating whether there was a single El NiΓ±o of unprecedented duration between 1990 and 1995, or two successive warm events.
Third, Quinn primarily characterized El NiΓ±os in terms of phenomena observed along the Pacific coast of South America, but these magnitudes do not always correspond to the severity of the global ENSO field. The 1891 event, for example, was more powerful than the 1897 El NiΓ±o in South America, but the relative magnitudes were reversed in South Asia and China. Likewise the 1918β19 El NiΓ±o was only weak to moderate in Peru but very strong in India and Africa. As Enfield and Cid cautioned in 1991: "The anecdotal, impact-related methods of QNA [Quinn] are better suited to the identification of historical El NiΓ±o events than to the determination of their climatic intensity over a large geographic domain. Even if the QNA scheme classifies perfectly the climatic response of El NiΓ±o in Peru, it has no way of estimating conditions elsewhere in the Pacific. We know that the relationship between ENSO and its regional manifestations is not perfectly one-to-one. Hence, the QNA intensity scale is probably not an accurate characterization of the severity continuum of the broader ENSO melange."
Finally, Quinn's "subjective" magnitudes also do not always agree with Southern Oscillation Index values, nor do all negative SO events produce classical South American El NiΓ±os. And there has been growing unease with the obvious circularity in using drought records (Quinn's analogues) to nail down El NiΓ±os, and then using the derived ENSO chronologies to establish causal correlations between the droughts and El NiΓ±o events. For these reasons, some leading researchers have recently advocated the abandonment of Quinn's heroic but outdated time series and index. "Regional statistics such as those derived from the Quinn et al. (1987) compilation of strong and very strong El NiΓ±o events in Peru," write Rasmusson, Wang and Ropelewski, "cannot be considered a reliable index of basin-scale ENSO-cycle variability." There has been an energetic hunt for an improved ENSO "Richter scale." In the beginning, investigators concentrated on sea surface temperatures in the strategic zone of the eastern Pacific ("NiΓ±o-3"), where warm events are incubated, but the nonlinear relationship between ENSO intensity and duration (as well as between the SO and sea surface temperature) has favored multivariate indices that synthesize different event features. Harrison and Larkin, for example, offer what they call the "Bjerknes ENSO Index," summed from "very robust elements" (including zonal and meridional wind anomalies) composited from ten postwar El NiΓ±os.
Unfortunately the instrumental record before 1957 is generally too poor to support such sophisticated indices. As a result, the modern El NiΓ±o chronology remains stratified into three classes of data: (1) recent events whose physics have been measured across a broad range of atmospheric and oceanographic variables; (2) events within the boundaries of instrumental times series (since 1875) where archival documentation is constrained by some understanding of associated sea surface pressure and temperature fields; and (3) pre-1875 events where Quinn's methodology, with all of its limitations, still remains the inevitable tool. Over the next decade, to be sure, paleoclimatologists are confident that high-resolution natural archives, like tree rings, isotope ratios in coral bands, and diatom abundances in varved seabed sediments, will permit reconstruction of an ENSO chronology for the entire Holocene. But these records are unlikely to offer much more than crude indices of magnitude. Thus historical documentation of impacts will continue to be an integral and indispensable part of ENSO research.
## PART IV
## **The Political Ecology of Famine**
##
## **The Origins of the Third World**
> Emaciated people, disease, ribs showing, shriveled bellies, corpses, children with fly-encircled eyes, with swollen stomachs, children dying in the streets, rivers choked with bodies, people; living, sleeping, lying, dying on the streets in misery, beggary, squalor, wretchedness, a mass of aboriginal humanity...
>
> β Harold Isaacs
What historians, then, have so often dismissed as "climatic accidents" turn out to be not so accidental after all. Although its syncopations are complex and quasi-periodic, ENSO has a coherent spatial and temporal logic. And, contrary to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's famous (Eurocentric?) conclusion in _Times of Feast, Times of Famine_ that climate change is a "slight, perhaps negligible" shaper of human affairs, ENSO is an episodically potent force in the history of tropical humanity. If, as Raymond Williams once observed, "Nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history," we are now learning that the inverse is equally true: there is an extraordinary amount of hitherto unnoticed environmental instability in modern history. The power of ENSO events indeed seems so overwhelming in some instances that it is tempting to assert that great famines, like those of the 1870s and 1890s (or, more recently, the Sahelian disaster of the 1970s), were "caused" by El NiΓ±o, or by El NiΓ±o acting upon traditional agrarian misery. This interpretation, of course, inadvertently echoes the official line of the British in Victorian India as recapitulated in every famine commission report and viceregal allocution: millions were killed by extreme weather, not imperialism. Was this true?
**'Bad Climate' versus 'Bad System'**
At this point it would be immensely useful to have some strategy for sorting out what the Chinese pithily contrast as "bad climate" versus "bad system." Y. Kueh, as we have seen, has attempted to parameterize the respective influences of drought and policy upon agricultural output during the Great Leap Forward famine of 1958β61. The derivation of his "weather index," however, involved fifteen years of arduous research and the resolution of "a series of complicated methodological and technical problems" including a necessary comparative regression to the 1930s. Although his work is methodologically rich, his crucial indices depend upon comprehensive meteorological and econometric data that are simply not available for the nineteenth century. A direct statistical assault on the tangled causal web of the 1876β77 and 1896β1902 famines thus seems precluded.
An alternative is to construct a "natural experiment." As Jared Diamond has advocated in a recent sermon to historians, such an experiment should compare systems "differing in the presence or absence (or in the strong or weak effect) of some putative causative factor." We ideally need, in other words, an analogue for the late Victorian famines in which the natural parameters are constant but the social variables significantly differ. An excellent candidate for which we possess unusually detailed documentation is the El NiΓ±o event of 1743β44 (described as "exceptional" by Whetton and Rutherfurd) in its impact on the north China plain. Although not as geographically far-reaching as the great ENSO droughts of 1876β78 or 1899β1900, it otherwise prefigured their intensities. The spring monsoon failed two years in a row, devastating winter wheat in Hebei (Zhili) and northern Shandong. Scorching winds withered crops and farmers dropped dead in their fields from sunstroke. Provincial grain supplies were utterly inadequate to the scale of need. Yet unlike the late nineteenth century, there was no mass mortality from either starvation or disease. Why not?
Pierre-Etienne Will has carefully reconstructed the fascinating history of the 1743β44 relief campaign from contemporary records. Under the skilled Confucian administration of Fang Guancheng, the agricultural and hydraulic expert who directed relief operations in Zhili, the renowned "ever-normal granaries" in each county immediately began to issue rations (without any labor test) to peasants in the officially designated disaster counties. (Local gentry had already organized soup kitchens to ensure the survival of the poorest residents until state distributions began.) When local supplies proved insufficient, Guancheng shifted millet and rice from the great store of tribute grain at Tongcang at the terminus of the Grand Canal, then used the Canal to move vast quantities of rice from the south. Two million peasants were maintained for eight months, until the return of the monsoon made agriculture again possible. Ultimately 85 percent of the relief grain was borrowed from tribute depots or granaries outside the radius of the drought.
As Will emphasizes, this was famine defense in depth, the "last word in technology at the time." No contemporary European society guaranteed subsistence as a human right to its peasantry ( _ming-sheng_ is the Chinese term), nor, as the Physiocrats later marveled, could any emulate "the perfect timing of [Guancheng's] operations: the action taken always kept up with developments and even anticipated them." Indeed, while the Qing were honoring their social contract with the peasantry, contemporary Europeans were dying in the millions from famine and hunger-related diseases following arctic winters and summer droughts in 1740β43. "The mortality peak of the early 1740s," emphasizes an authority, "is an outstanding fact of European demographic history." In Europe's Age of Reason, in other words, the "starving masses" were French, Irish and Calabrian, not Chinese.
Moreover "the intervention carried out in Zhili in 1743 and 1744 was not the only one of its kind in the eighteenth century, nor even the most extensive." Indeed, as Table 9.1 indicates, the Yellow River flooding of the previous year (1742/43) involved much larger expenditures over a much broader region. (In addition to the ENSO-correlated droughts and floods shown in the table, Will has also documented seven other flood disasters that involved massive relief mobilization.) Although comparable figures are unavailable, Beijing also acted aggressively to aid Shandong officials in preventing famine during the series of El NiΓ±o droughts that afflicted that province (and much of the tropics) between 1778 and 1787. The contrast with the chaotic late-Qing relief efforts in 1877 and 1899 (or, for that matter, Mao's monstrous mishandling of the 1958β61 drought) could not be more striking. State capacity in eighteenth-century China, as Will and his collaborators emphasize, was deeply impressive: a cadre of skilled administrators and trouble-shooters, a unique national system of grain price stabilization, large crop surpluses, well-managed granaries storing more than a million bushels of grain in each of twelve provinces, and incomparable hydraulic infrastructures.
**Table 9.1
ENSO Disasters Relieved by the Qing**
| Quinn Intensity | Provinces | Amount of Relief
---|---|---|---
1720/21 | Very strong | Shaanxi | Unknown
1742/43 | (Flooding) | Jiangsu/Anhui | 17 million taels; 2.3 million shi
1743/44 | Moderate+ | Hebei | .87 million taels; 1 million shi
1778 | Strong | Henan | 1.6 million taels; .3 million shi
1779/80 | La NiΓ±a | Henan | same
1785 | ? | Henan | 2.8 million taels
Source: Constructed from Table VII, Whetton and Rutherford, p. 244; Table 20, Will, _Bureaucracy and Famine,_ pp. 298β9.
The capstone of Golden Age food security was the invigilation of grain prices and supply trends by the emperor himself. Although ever-normal granaries were an ancient tradition, price monitoring was a chief innovation of the Qing. "Great care was exercised by the eighteenth-century Emperors in looking over the memorials and price lists in search of inconsistencies." On the fifth of every month _hsien_ magistrates forwarded detailed price reports to the prefectures, who summarized them for the provincial governors who, in turn, reported their content in memorials to the central government. Carefully studied and annotated by the emperors, these "vermillion rescripts" testify to an extraordinary engagement with the administration of food security and rural well-being. "In the 1720s and 1730s," R. Bin Wong writes, "the Yongzheng emperor personally scrutinized granary operations, as he did all other bureaucratic behavior; his intense interest in official efforts and his readiness to berate officials for what he considered failures partially explain the development of granary operations beyond the levels achieved in the late Kangxi period." Yongzheng also severely sanctioned speculation by the "rich households [who] in their quest for profit habitually remove grain by the full thousand or full myriad bushels."
His successor, Qianlong, ordered the prefects to send the county-level price reports directly to the Bureau of Revenue in Beijing so he could study them firsthand. The emperors' intense personal involvement ensured a high standard of accuracy in price reporting and, as Endymion Wilkinson demonstrates, frequently led to significant reform. This was another _differentia specifica_ of Qing absolutism. It is hard to imagine a Louis XVI spending his evenings scrupulously poring over the minutiae of grain prices from Limoges or the Auvergne, although the effort might have ultimately saved his head from the guillotine.
Nor can we easily picture a European monarch intimately involved in the esoterica of public works to the same degree that the Qing routinely immersed themselves in the details of the Grand Canal grain transport system. "The Manchu emperors," Jane Leonard points out, "had since the early reigns involved themselves deeply in Canal management, not just in broad questions of policy, but in the control and supervision of lower-level administrative tasks." When, for example, flooding in 1824 destroyed sections of the Grand Canal at the critical HuaiβYellow River junction, the Tao-kuang emperor personally assumed command of reconstruction efforts.
In contrast, moreover, to later Western stereotypes of a passive Chinese state, government during the high Qing era was proactively involved in famine prevention through a broad program of investment in agricultural improvement, irrigation and waterborne transportation. As in other things, Joseph Needham points out, the eighteenth century was a golden age for theoretical and historical work on flood control and canal construction. Civil engineers were canonized and had temples erected in their honor. Confucian activists like Guancheng, with a deep commitment to agricultural intensification, "tended to give top priority to investments in infrastructure and to consider the organization of food relief merely a makeshift." Guancheng also wrote a famous manual (the source of much of Will's account) that codified historically tested principles of disaster planning and relief management: something else that has little precedent in backward European tradition.
Finally, there is plentiful evidence that the northern China peasantry during the high Qing was more nutritionally self-reliant and less vulnerable to climate stress than their descendants a century later. In the eighteenth century, after the Kangxi emperor permanently froze land revenue at the 1712 level, China experienced "the mildest agrarian taxation it had ever known in the whole of its history." Dwight Perkins estimates that the formal land tax was a mere 5 to 6 percent of the harvest and that a large portion was expended locally by hsien and provincial governments. Likewise, the exchange ratio between silver and copper coinage, which turned so disastrously against the poor peasantry in the nineteenth century, was stabilized by the booming output of the Yunnan copper mines (replacing Japanese imports) and the great inflow of Mexican bullion earned by China's huge trade surplus. Unlike their contemporary French counterparts, the farmers of the Yellow River plain (the vast majority of whom owned their land) were neither crushed by exorbitant taxes nor ground down by feudal rents. North China, in particular, was unprecedentedly prosperous by historical standards, and Will estimates that the percentage of the rural population ordinarily living near the edge of starvationβdepending, for example, on husks and wild vegetables for a substantial part of their dietβwas less than 2 percent. As a result, epidemic disease, unlike in Europe, was held in check for most of the "Golden Age."
Still, could even Fang Guancheng have coped with drought disasters engulfing the larger part of north China on the scale of 1876 or even 1899? It is important to weigh this question carefully, since drought-famines were more localized in the eighteenth century, and because the 1876 drought, as we have seen, may have been a 200-year or even 500-year frequency event. Moreover, the late Victorian droughts reached particular intensity in the loess highlands of Shanxi and Shaanxi, where transport costs were highest and bottlenecks unavoidable. It is reasonable, therefore, to concede that a drought of 1876 magnitude in 1743 would inevitably have involved tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of deaths in more remote villages.
Such a drought, however, would have been unlikely, as in the late nineteenth century, to grow into a veritable holocaust that consumed the greater part of the populations of whole prefectures and counties. In contrast to the situation in 1876β77, when granaries were depleted or looted and prices soared out of control, eighteenth-century administrators could count on a large imperial budget surplus and well-stocked local granaries backed up by a huge surplus of rice in the south. Large stockpiles of tribute grain at strategic transportation nodes in Henan and along the ShanxiβShaanxi border were specially designated for the relief of the loess provinces, and an abundance of water sources guaranteed the Grand Canal's navigability year-round. Whereas in 1876 the Chinese stateβenfeebled and demoralized after the failure of the Tongzhi Restoration's domestic reformsβwas reduced to desultory cash relief augmented by private donations and humiliating foreign charity, in the eighteenth century it had both the technology and political will to shift grain massively between regions and, thus, relieve hunger on a larger scale than any previous polity in world history.
**'Laws of Leather' versus 'Laws of Iron'**
What about famine in pre-British India? Again, there is little evidence that rural India had ever experienced subsistence crises on the scale of the Bengal catastrophe of 1770 under East India Company rule or the long siege by disease and hunger between 1875 and 1920 that slowed population growth almost to a standstill. The Moguls, to be sure, did not dispose of anything like the resources of the centralized Qing state at its eighteenth-century zenith, nor was their administrative history as well documented. As Sanjay Sharma has pointed out, "The problems of intervening in the complex network of caste-based local markets and transport bottlenecks rendered an effective state intervention quite difficult."
On the other hand, benefiting perhaps from a milder ENSO cycle, Mogul India was generally free of famine until the 1770s. There is considerable evidence, moreover, that in pre-British India before the creation of a railroad-girded national market in grain, village-level food reserves were larger, patrimonial welfare more widespread, and grain prices in surplus areas better insulated against speculation. (As we have seen, the perverse consequence of a unitary market was to export famine, via price inflation, to the rural poor in grain-surplus districts.) The British, of course, had a vested interest in claiming that they had liberated the populace from a dark age of Mogul despotism: "One of the foundations of Crown Rule was the belief that... India's past was full of depravity." But, as Bose and Jalal point out, "The picture of an emaciated and oppressed peasantry, mercilessly exploited by the emperor and his nobility, is being seriously altered in the light of new interpretations of the evidence." Recent research by Ashok Desai indicates that "the mean standard of food consumption in Akbar's empire was appreciably higher than in the India of the early 1960s."
The Mogul state, moreover, "regarded the protection of the peasant as an essential obligation," and there are numerous examples of humane if sporadic relief operations. Like their Chinese contemporaries, the Mogul rulers Akbar, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb relied on a quartet of fundamental policiesβembargos on food exports, antispeculative price regulation, tax relief and distribution of free food without a forced-labor counterpartβthat were an anathema to later British Utilitarians. They also zealously policed the grain trade in the public interest. As one horrified British writer discovered, these "oriental despots" punished traders who shortchanged peasants during famines by amputating an equivalent weight of merchant flesh.
In contrast to the Raj's punitive taxation of irrigation and its neglect of traditional wells and reservoirs, the Moguls used tax subsidies to promote water conservation. As David Hardiman explains in the case of Gujarat: "Local officials had considerable discretion over tax assessment, and it seems to have been their practice to encourage well-construction by granting tax concessions. In the Ahmedabad region, for example, it was common to waive the tax on a 'rabi' crop raised through irrigation from a recently constructed well. The concession continued until the tax exemptions were held to have equalled the cost of construction."
Occasionally, the British paid appropriate tribute to the policies of their "despotic" predecessors. The first Famine Commission Report in 1880, for example, cited Aurangzeb's extraordinary relief campaign during the (El NiΓ±o?) drought-famine of 1661: "The Emperor opened his treasury and granted money without stint. He gave every encouragement to the importation of corn and either sold it at reduced prices, or distributed it gratuitously amongst those who were too poor to pay. He also promptly acknowledged the necessity of remitting the rents of the cultivators and relieved them for the time being of other taxes. The vernacular chronicles of the period attribute the salvation of millions of lives and the preservation of many provinces to his strenuous exertions."
Food security was also probably better in the Deccan during the period of Maratha rule. As Mountstuart Elphinstone admitted retrospectively after the British conquest, "The Mahratta country flourished, and the people seem to have been exempt from some of the evils which exist under our more perfect Government." His contemporary, Sir John Malcolm, "claimed that between 1770 and 1820 there had been only three very bad seasons in the Maratha lands and, though some years had been 'indifferent,' none had been as 'bad as to occasion any particular distress.'" D. E. U. Baker cites a later British administrative report from the Central Provinces that contrasted the desultory relief efforts of the East India Company during the droughts of the 1820s and 1830s ("a few thousand rupees") with the earlier and highly effective Maratha policy of forcing local elites to feed the poor ("enforced charity of hundreds of rich men"). Indeed the resilient Maratha social order was founded on a militarized free peasantry and "very few landless laborers existed." In contrast to the British-imposed _raiyatwari_ system, occupancy rights in the Maratha Deccan were not tied to revenue payment, taxes varied according to the actual harvest, common lands and resources were accessible to the poor, and the rulers subsidized local irrigation improvements with cheap _taqavi_ (or _tagai_ ) loans. In addition, Elphinstone observed, the "sober, frugal, industrious" Maratha farmers lived in generally tolerant coexistence with the Bhils and other tribal peoples. Ecological and economic synergies balanced the diverse claims of plains agriculture, pastoralism and foothill swidden.
In contrast to the rigidity and dogmatism of British land-and-revenue settlements, both the Moguls and Marathas flexibly tailored their rule to take account of the crucial ecological relationships and unpredictable climate fluctuations of the subcontinent's drought-prone regions. The Moguls had "laws of leather," wrote journalist Vaughan Nash during the famine of 1899, in contrast to the British "laws of iron." Moreover, traditional Indian elites, like the great Bengali _zamindars_ , seldom shared Utilitarian obsessions with welfare cheating and labor discipline. "Requiring the poor to work for relief, a practice begun in 1866 in Bengal under the influence of the Victorian Poor Law, was in flat contradiction to the Bengali premise that food should be given ungrudgingly, as a father gives food to his children." Although the British insisted that they had rescued India from "timeless hunger," more than one official was jolted when Indian nationalists quoted from an 1878 study published in the prestigious _Journal of the Statistical Society_ that contrasted thirty-one serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia.
India and China, in other words, did not enter modern history as the helpless "lands of famine" so universally enshrined in the Western imagination. Certainly the intensity of the ENSO cycle in the late nineteenth century, perhaps only equaled on three or four other occasions in the last millennium, must loom large in any explanation of the catastrophes of the 1870s and 1890s. But it is scarcely the only independent variable. Equal causal weight, or more, must be accorded to the growing social vulnerability to climate variability that became so evident in south Asia, north China, northeast Brazil and southern Africa in late Victorian times. As Michael Watts has eloquently argued in his history of the "silent violence" of drought-famine in colonial Nigeria: "Climate risk... is not given by nature but... by 'negotiated settlement' since each society has institutional, social, and technical means for coping with risk... Famines [thus] are social crises that represent the failures of particular economic and political systems."
**Perspectives on Vulnerability**
Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionariesβeven sometimes creole elites, as in Brazilβperceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism.
From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to regional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world."
First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security. Recent scholarship confirms that it was _subsistence adversity_ (high taxes, chronic indebtedness, inadequate acreage, loss of subsidiary employment opportunities, enclosure of common resources, dissolution of patrimonial obligations, and so on), not entrepreneurial opportunity, that typically promoted the turn to cash-crop cultivation. Rural capital, in turn, tended to be parasitic rather than productivist as rich landowners redeployed fortunes that they built during export booms into usury, rack-renting and crop brokerage. "Marginal subsistence producers," Hans Medick points out, "... did not benefit from the market under these circumstances; they were devoured by it." Medick, writing about the analogous predicament of marginal smallholders in "proto-industrial" Europe, provides an exemplary description of the dilemma of millions of Indian and Chinese poor peasants in the late nineteenth century:
For them [even] rising agrarian prices did not necessarily mean increasing incomes. Since their marginal productivity was low and production fluctuated, rising agrarian prices tended to be a source of indebtedness rather than affording them the opportunity to accumulate surpluses. The "anomaly of the agrarian markets" forced the marginal subsistence producers into an unequal exchange relationship through the market... Instead of profiting from exchange, they were forced by the market into the progressive deterioration of their conditions of production, i.e. the loss of their property titles. Especially in years of bad harvests, and high prices, the petty producers were compelled to buy additional grain, and, worse, to go into debt. Then, in good harvest years when cereal prices were low, they found it hard to extricate themselves from the previously accumulated debts; owing to the low productivity of their holdings they could not produce sufficient quantities for sale.
As a result, the position of small rural producers in the international economic hierarchy equated with downward mobility, or, at best, stagnation. There is consistent evidence from north China as well as India and northeast Brazil of falling household wealth and increased fragmentation or alienation of land. Whether farmers were directly engaged by foreign capital, like the Berari _khatedars_ and Cearan _parceiros_ who fed the mills of Lancashire during the Cotton Famine, or were simply producing for domestic markets subject to international competition like the cotton-spinning peasants of the Boxer _hsiens_ in western Shandong, commercialization went hand in hand with pauperization without any silver lining of technical change or agrarian capitalism.
Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade. Peasants' lack of market power vis-Γ -vis crop merchants and creditors was redoubled by their commodities' falling international purchasing power. The famous Kondratief downswing of 1873β97 made dramatic geographical discriminations. As W. Arthur Lewis suggests, comparative productivity or transport costs alone cannot explain an emergent structure of global unequal exchange that valued the products of tropical agriculture so differently from those of temperate farming. "With the exception of sugar, all the commodities whose price was lower in 1913 than in 1883 were commodities produced almost wholly in the tropics. All the commodities whose prices rose over this thirty-year period were commodities in which the temperate countries produced a substantial part of total supplies. The fall in ocean freight rates affected tropical more than temperate prices, but this should not make a difference of more than five percentage points."
Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responsesβespecially investments in water conservancy and irrigationβthat might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks. As Curzon once famously complained to the House of Lords, tariffs "were decided in London, not in India; in England's interests, not in India's." Moreover, as we shall see in the next chapter, any grassroots benefit from British railroad and canal construction was largely canceled by official neglect of local irrigation and the brutal enclosures of forest and pasture resources. Export earnings, in other words, not only failed to return to smallholders as increments in household income, but also as usable social capital or state investment.
In China, the "normalization" of grain prices and the ecological stabilization of agriculture in the Yellow River plain were undermined by an interaction of endogenous crises and the loss of sovereignty over foreign trade in the aftermath of the two Opium Wars. As disconnected from world market perturbations as the starving loess provinces might have seemed in 1877, the catastrophic fate of their populations was indirectly determined by Western intervention and the consequent decline in state capacity to ensure traditional welfare. Similarly the depletion of "ever-normal" granaries may have resulted from a vicious circle of multiple interacting causes over a fifty-year span, but the coup de grace was certainly the structural recession and permanent fiscal crisis engineered by Palmerston's aggressions against China in the 1850s. As foreign pressure intensified in later decades, the embattled Qing, as Kenneth Pomeranz has shown, were forced to abandon both their traditional mandates: abandoning both hydraulic control and grain stockpiling in the Yellow River provinces in order to concentrate on defending their endangered commercial littoral.
British control over Brazil's foreign debt and thus its fiscal capacity likewise helps explain the failure of either the empire or its successor republic to launch any antidrought developmental effort in the _sertΓ£o_. The zero-sum economic conflicts between Brazil's rising and declining regions took place in a structural context where London banks, above all the Rothschilds, ultimately owned the money-supply. In common with the India and China, the inability to politically regulate interaction with the world market at the very time when mass subsistence increasingly depended upon food entitlements acquired in international trade became a sinister syllogism for famine. Moreover in the three cases of the Deccan, the Yellow River basin and the Nordeste, former "core" regions of eighteenth-century subcontinental power systems were successively transformed into famished peripheries of a London-centered world economy.
The elaboration of these theses, as always in geo-historical explanation, invites closer analysis at different magnifications. Before considering case-studies of rural immiseration in key regions devastated by the 1870s and 1890s El NiΓ±o events or looking at the relationships among imperialism, state capacity and ecological crisis at the village level, it is necessary to briefly discuss how the structural positions of Indians and Chinese (the big battalions of the future Third World) in the world economy changed over the course of the nineteenth century. Understanding how tropical humanity lost so much economic ground to western Europeans after 1850 goes a long way toward explaining why famine was able to reap such hecatombs in El NiΓ±o years. As a baseline for understanding the origins of modern global inequality (and that is the key question), the herculean statistical labors of Paul Bairoch and Angus Maddison over the last thirty years have been complemented by recent comparative case-studies of European and Asian standards of living.
**The Defeat of Asia**
Bairoch's famous claim, corroborated by Maddison, is that differences in income and wealth between the great civilizations of the eighteenth century were relatively slight: "It is very likely that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the average standard of living in Europe was a little bit lower than that of the rest of the world." When the _sans culottes_ stormed the Bastille, the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still the Yangzi Delta and Bengal, with Lingan (modern Guangdong and Guangxi) and coastal Madras not far behind. India alone produced one-quarter of world manufactures, and while its "pre-capitalist agrarian labour productivity was probably less than the Japanese-Chinese level, its commercial capital surpassed that of the Chinese."
As Prasannan Parthasarathi has recently shown, the stereotype of the Indian laborer as a half-starved wretch in a loincloth collapses in the face of new data about comparative standards of living. "Indeed, there is compelling evidence that South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the eighteenth century and lived lives of greater financial security." Because the productivity of land was higher in South India, weavers and other artisans enjoyed better diets than average Europeans. More importantly, their unemployment rates tended to be lower because they possessed superior rights of contract and exercised more economic power. But even outcaste agricultural laborers in Madras earned more in real terms than English farm laborers. (By 1900, in contrast, Romesh Chunder Dutt estimated that the average British household income was 21 times higher.)
New research by Chinese historians also challenges traditional conceptions of comparative economic growth. Referring to the pathbreaking work of Li Bozhong, Philip Huang notes that "the outstanding representative of this new academic tendency has even argued the overall economic development of the Yangzi Delta in the Qing exceeded that of 'early modern' England." Similarly, Bin Wong has recently emphasized that the "specific conditions associated with European proto-industrializationβexpansion of seasonal crafts, shrinking farm size, and good marketing systemsβmay have been even more widespread in China [and India] than in Europe." "Basic functional literacy," adds F. Mote, "was more widespread than in Western countries at that time, including among women at all social levels."
**Table 9.2**
**Shares of World GDP**
(Percent)
| 1700 | 1820 | 1890 | 1952
---|---|---|---|---
China | 23.1 | 32.4 | 13.2 | 5.2
India | 22.6 | 15.7 | 11.0 | 3.8
Europe | 23.3 | 26.6 | 40.3 | 29.7
Source: Angus Maddison, _Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run,_ Paris 1998, p. 40.
Moreover, in the recent forum "Re-thinking 18th Century China," Kenneth Pomeranz points to evidence that ordinary Chinese enjoyed a higher standard of consumption than eighteenth-century Europeans:
Chinese life expectancy (and thus nutrition) was at roughly English levels (and so above Continental ones) even in the late 1700s. (Chinese fertility was actually lower than Europe's between 1550 and 1850, while its population grew faster; thus mortality must have been low.) Moreover, my estimates of "non-essential" consumption come out surprisingly high. Sugar consumption works out to between 4.3 and 5.0 pounds per capita ca. 1750βand much higher in some regionsβcompared with barely 2 pounds per capita for Europe. China circa 1750 seems to have produced 6β8 lbs. of cotton cloth per capita; its richest area, the Yangzi Delta (population roughly 31 million), probably produced between 12 and 15 lbs. per capita. The UK, even in 1800, produced roughly 13 lbs. of cotton, linen and wool cloth combined per resident, and Continental output was probably below China's.
Pomeranz has also calculated that "the Lower Yangzi appears to have produced roughly as much cotton cloth per capita in 1750 as the UK did cotton, wool, linen and silk cloth combined in 1800βplus an enormous quantity of silk." In addition, as Maddison demonstrates, Chinese GDP in absolute terms grew faster than that of Europe throughout the eighteenth century, dramatically enlarging China's share of world income by 1820.
The usual stereotype of nineteenth-century economic history is that Asia stood still while the Industrial Revolution propelled Britain, followed by the United States and eventually the rest of Western Europe, down the path of high-speed GNP growth. In a superficial sense, of course, this is true, although the data gathered by Bairoch and Maddison show that Asia lost its preeminence in the world economy later than most of us perhaps imagine. The future Third World, dominated by the highly developed commercial and handicraft economies of India and China, surrendered ground very grudgingly until 1850 (when it still generated 65 percent of global GNP), but then declined with increasing rapidity through the rest of the nineteenth century (only 38 percent of world GNP in 1900 and 22 percent in 1960).
The deindustrialization of Asia via the substitution of Lancashire cotton imports for locally manufactured textiles reached its climax only in the decades after the construction of the Crystal Palace. "Until 1831," Albert Feuerwerker points out, "Britain purchased more 'nankeens' (cloth manufactured in Nanking and other places in the lower Yangzi region) each year than she sold British-manufactured cloth to China." Britain exported 51 million yards of cloth to Asia in 1831; 995 million in 1871; 1413 million in 1879; and 2,000 million in 1887.
But why did Asia stand in place? The rote answer is because it was weighted down with the chains of tradition and Malthusian demography, although this did not prevent Qing China, whose rate of population increase was about the same as Europe's, from experiencing extraordinary economic growth throughout the eighteenth century. As Jack Goldstone recently argued, China's "stasis" is an "anachronistic illusion that come[s] from reading history backwards." The relevant question is not so much why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in England, Scotland and Belgium, but why other advanced regions of the eighteenth-century world economy failed to adapt their handicraft manufactures to the new conditions of production and competition in the nineteenth century.
**Table 9.3**
**Shares of World Manufacturing Output, 1750β1900**
| 1750 | 1800 | 1830 | 1860 | 1880 | 1900
---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Europe | 23.1 | 28.0 | 34.1 | 53.6 | 62.0 | 63.0
UK | 1.9 | 4.3 | 9.5 | 19.9 | 22.9 | 18.5
Tropics | 76.8 | 71.2 | 63.3 | 39.2 | 23.3 | 13.4
China | 32.8 | 33.3 | 29.8 | 19.7 | 12.5 | 6.2
India | 24.5 | 19.7 | 17.6 | 8.6 | 2.8 | 1.7
Source: Derived from B. R. Tomlinson, "Economics: The Periphery," in Andrew Porter (ed.), _The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century,_ Oxford 1990, p. 69 (Table 3.8).
**Table 9.4
Standing in Place: China vs. Europe**
(Dollars per Capita GDP/(Population in Millions)
| **Western Europe** | **China**
---|---|---
1400 | 430 | (43) | 500 | (74)
1820 | 1034 | (122) | 500 | (342)
1950 | 4902 | (412) | 454 | (547)
Source: Lu Aiguo, _China and the Global Economy Since 1840,_ Helsinki 2000, p. 56 (Table 4.1 as derived from Maddison).
As Marx liked to point out, the Whig view of history deletes a great deal of very bloody business. The looms of India and China were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs. (Already by 1850, imposed Indian opium imports had siphoned 11 percent of China's money supply and 13 percent of its silver stock out of the country.) Whatever the internal brakes on rapid economic growth in Asia, Latin America or Africa, it is indisputable that from about 1780 or 1800 onward, every serious attempt by a non-Western society to move over into a fast lane of development or to regulate its terms of trade was met by a military as well as an economic response from London or a competing imperial capital. Japan, prodded by Perry's black ships, is the exception that proves the rule.
The use of force to configure a "liberal" world economy (as Marx and later Rosa Luxemburg argued) is what Pax Britannica was really about. Palmerston paved the way for Cobden. The Victorians, according to Brian Bond's calculations, resorted to gunboats on at least seventy-five different occasions. The simultaneous British triumphs in the Mutiny and the "Arrow" War in 1858, along with Japan's yielding to Perry in the same year, were the epochal victories over Asian economic autonomy that made a Cobdenite world of free trade possible in the second half of the nineteenth century. (Thailand had already conceded a 3 percent tariff in 1855.) The Taiping Revolutionβ"more revolutionary in its aims than the Meiji Restoration, insisting on gender equality and democratizing literacy"βwas a gigantic attempt to revise that verdict, and was, of course, defeated only thanks to the resources and mercenaries that Britain supplied to the embattled Qing.
**Figure 9.1 World System of Settlements, 1910 (Β£ Millions)**
Source: S. Saul, _Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870β1914_ , Liverpool 1960, p. 58.
This is not to claim that the Industrial Revolution necessarily depended upon the colonial conquest or economic subjugation of Asia; on the contrary, the slave trade and the plantations of the New World were much more strategic streams of liquid capital and natural resources in boosting the industrial take-off in Britain, France and the United States. Although Ralph Davis has argued that the spoils of Plessy contributed decisively to the stability of the Georgian order in an Age of Revolution, the East India Company's turnover was small change compared to the great trans-Atlantic flow of goods and capital. Only the Netherlands, it would appear, depended crucially upon Asian tributeβthe profits of its brutal _cultuurstelsel_ βin financing its economic recovery and incipient industrialization between 1830 and 1850.
Paradoxically, monsoon Asia's most important "moment" in the Victorian world economy was not at the beginning of the epoch, but towards its end. "The full value of British rule, the return on political investments first made in the eighteenth century," write Cain and Hopkins in their influential history of British imperialism, "was not realised until the second half of the nineteenth century, when India became a vital market for Lancashire's cotton goods and when other specialised interests, such as jute manufacturers in Dundee and steel producers in Sheffield, also greatly increased their stake in the sub-continent." The coerced levies of wealth from India and China were not essential to the rise of British hegemony, but they were absolutely crucial in postponing its decline.
**The Late Victorian World Economy**
During the protracted period of stop-and-go growth from 1873 to 1896 (what economic historians misleadingly used to call the "Great Depression"), the rate of capital formation and the growth of productivity of both labor and capital in Britain began a dramatic slowdown. She remained tied to old products and technologies while behind their tariff barriers Germany and the United States forged leadership in cutting-edge oil, chemical and electrical industries. Since British imports and overseas investment still dynamized local growth from Australia to Denmark, the potential "scissors" between UK productivity and consumption threatened the entire structure of world trade. It was in this conjuncture that the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries were wheeled in as unlikely saviors. For a generation they braced the entire system of international settlements, allowing England's continued financial supremacy to temporarily coexist with its relative industrial decline. As Giovanni Arrighi emphasizes, "The large surplus in the Indian balance of payments became the pivot of the enlarged reproduction of Britain's world-scale processes of capital accumulation and of the City's mastery of world finance."
The operation of this crucial circuit was simple and ingenious. Britain earned huge annual surpluses in her transactions with India and China that allowed her to sustain equally large deficits with the United States, Germany and the white Dominions. True, Britain also enjoyed invisible earnings from shipping, insurance, banking and foreign investment, but without Asia, which generated 73 percent of British trade credit in 1910, Anthony Latham argues, Britain "presumably would have been forced to abandon free trade," while her trading partners would have been forced to slow their own rates of industrialization. The liberal world economy might otherwise have fragmented into autarkic trading blocs, as it did later during the 1930s:
The United States and industrial Europe, in particular Germany, were able to continue their policy of tariff protection only because of Britain's surplus with Asia. Without that Asian surplus, Britain would no longer have been able to subsidise their growth. So what emerges is that Asia in general, but India and China in particular, far from being peripheral to the evolution of the international economy at this time, were in fact crucial. Without the surpluses which Britain was able to earn there, the whole pattern of international economic development would have been severely constrained.
India, of course, was the greatest captive market in world history, rising from third to first place among consumers of British exports in the quarter century after 1870. "British rulers," writes Marcello de Cecco in his study of the Victorian gold standard system, "deliberately prevented Indians from becoming skilled mechanics, refused contracts to Indian firms which produced materials that could be got from England, and generally hindered the formation of an autonomous industrial structure in India." Thanks to a "government stores policy that reserved most government purchases to British products and by the monopoly of British agency houses in organizing the import-export trade," India was forced to absorb Britain's surplus of increasingly obsolescent and noncompetitive industrial exports. By 1910 this included two-fifths of the UK's finished cotton goods and three-fifths of its exports of electrical products, railway equipment, books and pharmaceuticals. As a result, observes de Cecco, Britain avoided "having to restructure her industry and was able to invest her capital in the countries where it gave the highest return." Thanks to India, "British financiers were not compelled to 'tie' their loans to British exports because the Imperial outlet was always available for British products."
The subcontinent was equally important to the rentier strata. The climate-detonated crisis of English agriculture in the late 1870s and the subsequent decline of farm output produced a sharp fall in agricultural rents in England and Wales from Β£53 million in 1876 to only Β£37 million in 1910. Indian army and civil service sinecures were accordingly famous for rescuing the fortunes of Britain's landed aristocracy. But, as Cain and Hopkins have argued in making their case for a hegemonic "gentlemanly capitalism," even bigger spoils were returned to the middle classes of London and the Home Counties as government-guaranteed interest on railroad debentures and Indian bonds. "This constituency of southern investors, and its institutional representatives in banking and shipping, fell in readily behind the flag of empire and gave full support to policies of free trade and sound money. If British rule in India was helpful to British industry, it was vital to British investment." As Hobsbawm points out, "not even the free-traders wished to see this goldmine escape from British control."
But how, in an age of famine, could the subcontinent afford to subsidize its conqueror's suddenly precarious commercial supremacy? In a word, it couldn't, and India was forced-marched into the world market, as we shall see, by revenue and irrigation policies that compelled farmers to produce for foreign consumption at the price of their own food security. This export drive was the hallmark of the new public finance strategy introduced by James Wilsonβfounder of the _Economist_ and finance member of the Council of Indiaβin the first years of direct rule. The opening of the Suez Canal and the growth of steam shipping drastically reduced the transport costs of bulk commodity export from the subcontinent. As a result India's seaborne foreign trade increased more than eightfold between 1840 and 1886. In addition to opium cultivation in Bengal, new export monocultures of indigo, cotton, wheat and rice supplanted millions of acres of subsistence crops. Part of this production, of course, was designed to assure low grain prices in the metropolis after the debacle of English agriculture in the 1870s. Between 1875 and 1900, years that included the worst famines in Indian history, annual grain exports increased from 3 million to 10 million tons: a quantity that, as Romesh Dutt pointed out, was equivalent to the annual nutrition of 25 million people. By the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britain's wheat consumption as well as allowing London grain merchants to speculate during shortages on the Continent.
But Indian agriculture's even more decisive contribution to the imperial system, from the East India Company's first illegal shipment of opium to Canton, was the income it earned in the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere. Especially in the 1880s and 1890s, the subcontinent's permanent trade and current account imbalances with Britain were financed by its trade surpluses of opium, rice and cotton thread vis-Γ -vis the rest of Asia. Indeed England's systematic exploitation of India depended in large part upon India's commercial exploitation of China. This triangular trade between India, China and Britain had a strategic economic importance in the Victorian world system that transcended other far larger flows of commerce. If China generated only a tiny 1.3 percent of the total volume of world trade in the late nineteenth century, it was nonetheless immensely valuable to the British Empire, which monopolized fully 80 percent of China's foreign trade in the 1860s and 60 percent as late as 1899. (British firms, which controlled two-thirds of coastal shipping, also took an important slice of China's domestic commerce.)
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the East India Company had relied on opium exports from Bengal to Canton (which in 1832 earned a net profit "at least fourteen times the prime cost") to finance the growing deficits generated by its expensive military operations on the subcontinent. By forcibly enlarging the Chinese demand for the narcotic and, thus, the taxes collected on its export, the two Opium Wars (1839β42 and 1856β58) and the punitive Treaty of Tianjin (1858) revolutionized the revenue base of British India. "Opium," says John Wong, "serviced the cost of imperial expansion in India." Opium shipments from India reached a peak of 87,000 chests in 1879, the biggest drug transaction in world history.
This extraordinarily one-sided tradeβin 1868 India supplied over 35 percent of China's imports but bought less than 1 percent of its exportsβalso subsidized the imports of US cotton that fueled the industrial revolution in Lancashire. "The sale of Bengal opium to China," Latham explains, "was a great link in the chain of commerce with which Britain had surrounded the world. The chain worked like this: The United Kingdom paid the United States for cotton by bills upon the Bank of England. The Americans took some of those bills to Canton and swapped them for tea. The Chinese exchanged the bills for Indian opium. Some of the bills were remitted to England as profit; others were taken to India to buy additional commodities, as well as to furnish the money remittance of private fortunes in India and the funds for carrying on the Indian government at home."
When, after 1880, the Chinese unofficially resorted to domestic cultivation of opium (an early example of "import-substitution") to reduce their trade deficit, British India found a lucrative new advantage in the export of factory-spun cotton yarn, which, as we shall see, had a devastating impact on Chinese folk textiles. Moreover, in the later nineteenth century Britain herself started earning a substantial surplus in the China trade for the first time. The Second Opium Warβor "Arrow" Warβwhich increased British exports to China tenfold in a single decade was the turning point. Britain's dominant role in Chinese foreign trade, built by Victorian _narcotraficantes_ with gunboats, thus leveraged the whole free-trade imperium. "China," summarizes Latham, "directly through Britain and indirectly through India, enabled Britain to sustain her deficits with the United States and Europe on which those countries depended for export stimulus and, in the case of the United States, capital inflow to some degree."
Moreover, China was forced at bayonet point to cede control over tariffs to the British inspector-general of the Imperial Maritime Customs Administration, a de facto imperial proconsul who "came to enjoy more influence with the Foreign Office than did the British Minister in Peking." China's growing trade deficit became intractable by 1884. "Not a single year [in the rest of the nineteenth century] showed a surplus; the average annual deficit rose to 26.6 million taelsβroughly about 10 percent of the yearly total trade, but over 20 percent of the annual imports or just under 30 percent of the annual exports." Among its traditional monopolies, tea was undercut in the world market by Indian production while Japanese silk competed with the famous brands of southern China. Unlike India, China was unable to finance any of its "consistent and growing overall deficit" via trade surpluses with a third party, nor could it siphon compensatory incomes, like Britain, from its overseas colonies. As a result, the Qing became increasingly dependent upon foreign exchange remittances from 5 million Chinese emigrants in southeast Asia, Oceania, Peru, the Caribbean and the United States. Although the government publicly expressed its disgust with the coolie trade, it had little alternative but to collaborate in its expansion. The so-called "yellow peril" that English writers would help to popularize was thus a direct consequence of Asia's increasing subsidization of faltering British hegemony. Emigrant Chinese plantation workers and railroad laborers, like Indian ryots, balanced England's accounts on their bent backs.
**Militarism and the Gold Standard**
In addition to being at the losing end of the imperialism of free trade, the Indian and Chinese economies were also throttled by military expenditures and the gold standard. In the Victorian era, no other major countries were forced to devote such excessive portions of their national income to war. India, already saddled with a huge public debt that included reimbursing the stockholders of the East India Company and paying the costs of the 1857 revolt, also had to finance British military supremacy in Asia. In addition to incessant proxy warfare with Russia on the Afghan frontier, ordinary Indians also paid for such far-flung adventures of the Indian Army as the sacking of Beijing (1860), the invasion of Ethiopia (1868), the occupation of Egypt (1882), and the conquest of the Sudan (1896β98). As a result, military expenditures were never less than 25 percent (or 34 percent including police) of India's annual budget, and viceroys were constantly searching for creative ways to purloin monies for the army from other parts of the budget, even from the Famine Fund. Victorian England, on the other hand, never expended more than 3 percent of its net national product on its army and navy, a serendipitous situation that considerably diminished domestic tensions over imperialism.
The Chinese case, of course, was even more extreme. From 1850 to 1873 China was aflame with social and ethnic conflict on a scale that utterly dwarfed the contemporary US War Between the States. As most historians have recognized, this carnage was largely rooted in the structural recession and increasing insecurity of existence that followed the First Opium War. The fiscal effects of epic civil war, in turn, were enormous. The Taiping revolutionaries and their Triad allies for several years cut off Beijing from the revenues of half a dozen southern provinces. Nian rebels simultaneously disrupted administration in large parts of four northern provinces, while a Muslim revolt in Gansu and Shaanxi grew into a nightmarish and immensely expensive war of ethnic extermination. In the worst years, 75 percent of the imperial budget was expended on the maintenance of vast field armies (without, however, leading to real military modernization.) The staggering costs of their survival forced the Qing, in Pomeranz's phrase, to "triage" state expenditure between regions. They ultimately chose to favor the coastal cities, where customs revenues were soaring but sovereignty was most under threat, over the vast subsistence economy of inland north China. As we shall see later, their abandonment of imperial mandates for flood control and canal navigation, essential to the ecological security of the Yellow River plain, had predictably catastrophic consequences when the ENSO cycle intensified in the later nineteenth century.
The two great nations of Asia were also victimized by the new international monetary system established in the 1870s. Although Britain adopted the gold standard in 1821, the rest of the world clung to either a silver standard or a bimetallic system. Supply and demand for both metals were relatively stable with only minor fluctuations in their exchange ratio. After defeating France in 1871, however, Germany shifted to gold and was soon followed by the United States, the rest of Europe and eventually Japan. Vast quantities of demonetarized silver flooded the world market, depreciating the currency of India and China, the major nations outside the hegemonic gold bloc. (India began to move to the gold standard after 1893.)
As John McGuire has shown, the London-based Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, which financed much of the Indian trade, had the same kind of quasi-state influence over Indian monetary policy as the Manchester Chamber of Commerce enjoyed over Indian agriculture. Keeping the rupee tied to silver had obvious advantages for Britain, since the value of its exports (denominated in gold) to India increased in value while its imports (denominated in silver) declined in value. "From 1873 to 1895 the value of the rupee fell from an index value in gold of 100 to an index value of 64." Since India's "home charges"β the annual payments to London for pensions, border wars, public debt, the secretary of state's office, and so onβwere fixed in gold, the devaluation of the silver rupee cost Indians an additional Β£105 million between 1874 and 1894.
Likewise it is estimated that the gold standard stole one-quarter of the purchasing power of the silver ornaments that constituted the savings of the common people. While the gold-denominated export price of Indian grains remained stable to the benefit of British consumers, their domestic cost in rupees was sharply inflated to the detriment of the Indian poor. As Sir William Wedderburn pointed out: "Indian peasants in general had three safeguards against famine: (a) domestic hoards of grain; (b) family ornaments; and (c) credit with the village moneylender, who was also the grain dealer. But towards the close of the nineteenth century all were lost by the peasants."
Economic historians celebrate the irony of impoverished Indians providing a flow of cheap credit to Britain. While "at every harvest season," De Cecco writes, "Indian interest rates would shoot up to unbearable levels," British-owned Presidency banks "received deposits from the government and from other public bodies without paying on them one anna of interest." In addition, "The reserves on which the Indian monetary system was based provided a large _masse de manoeuvre_ which British monetary authorities could use to supplement their own reserves and to keep London the centre of the international monetary system." Krishnendu Ray expands this point: "By preventing India from transforming its annual surpluses into gold reserves the India Office contributed towards keeping British interest rates low. English banks were able to borrow from the India Office at 2 per cent and reinvest on the London market at 3 per cent." Even more importantly, monetary policy was used, in Dieter Rothermund's phrase, "to flush out India's produce." Until fiscal exigencies forced a partial demonetarization of silver in 1893, inflation greatly abetted the British campaign to recruit peasants to the production of export crops like wheat, indigo, opium and jute that helped balance the Empire's accounts:
At an earlier time the Dutch had adopted a deliberate method of extracting cash crops from Java by circulating a large amount of worthless copper coins. In India the British did not have to do this deliberately because by simply keeping the mints open to the free flow of depreciating silver they got practically the same result. The management of credit facilitated the extraction of cash crops. By advancing money to the peasants who grew cash crops for export the British and their agents preempted the productive capacity of India's agriculture. The area under cash crops expanded even at times when food grain for home consumption would have fetched a better price. What was grown for export has to be rated as a cash crop in this context. The depreciation of the currency and the preemption of the productive capacity of vast parts of the country combined so as to achieve the miracle that India could export produce at "stable" export prices even at a time when severe famines tormented the country. By absorbing silver and exporting wheat at the lowest price India served as the buffer at the base of the world economy of the late nineteenth century.
In China's case, the shock of the gold standard in the late 1870s compounded the monetary chaos inherited from the civil wars of the 1850s and 1860s. Powerless to stop the drain of silver that the British had engineered with the imposition of the opium trade, the Qing had also lost control of their domestic copper supply in the 1860s when Muslim rebels seized the famous Yunnan mines. Accordingly, Beijing had to finance its struggle for survival by issuing worthless paper money and systematically reminting copper cash into higher denominations. The debasement of cash relative to silver created particular havoc in the Yellow River provinces where an estimated 99 percent of exchanges were in copper (versus only 30 percent in the Yangzi Delta). Since land revenues were still assessed in silver, the continuing high price of the metalβas Mary Wright has emphasizedβundercut the subsequent attempt of the Tongzhi restorationists in the late 1860s to reclaim the loyalty of the peasantry through an amelioration of the tax burden.
The conversion of world trade to the universal gold standard aggravated both China's external and internal exchange crises. First of all, the international price of silver plummeted: "Within a generation, the tael had lost nearly two-thirds of its exchange value." Some mercantile elites may have benefited from the advantage that cheaper international prices gave their exports, particularly tea and Shanghai cotton goods. But "imports from gold-standard countries became more expensive, which was particularly serious for railway development. Foreign investment in China was also discouraged, for fear of repayment in a depreciated standard."
Yet precisely because China's growing commercial debt was financed by the outflow or "dehoarding" of silver, silver's internal value actually rose vis-Γ -vis the copper coinage that circulated in village economies. The country's shortage of gold in international trade (partly compensated, as we have seen, by the reluctant export of coolie labor) was mirrored by the continuing depreciation of cash, especially in the north. There the common people were also outraged that in order to pay their taxes they had to convert their copper to silver at much higher exchange rates than the privileged gentry. A principal grievance of the Taipings in 1851, monetary instability also helped fuel the Boxer Rebellion nearly a half-century later.
**The Myth of 'Malthusia'**
Forcibly imposed trade deficits, export drives that diminished food security, overtaxation and predatory merchant capital, foreign control of key revenues and developmental resources, chronic imperial and civil warfare, a gold standard that picked the pockets of Asian peasants: these were key modalities through which the burden of "structural adjustment" in the late Victorian world economy was shifted from Europe and North America to agriculturalists in newly minted "peripheries." But surely we must also concede that demographyβespecially in India and China where partible systems of inheritance were the ruleβplayed a major role in undermining food security in the nineteenth century.
Malthus is still a potent figure among at least the older generation of economic historians. Princeton's W. Arthur Lewis, one of the leading authorities on the nineteenth-century world economy, assumed as a matter of course in an influential 1978 study that the underlying cause of famine in Victorian India was not the "drain of wealth" to England as alleged by contemporary critics, but "a large population that continued to live at subsistence level on inadequately watered marginal lands, without a profitable cash crop." Similarly, the historiography of late imperial China has been haunted by the spectre of "agricultural involution" and the so-called "high-level equilibrium trap"βboth euphemisms for how the presumed population explosion of the eighteenth century squeezed arable land to the threshold of chronic famine.
Recent scholarship offers a more complex picture of the relationship between demography and subsistence in Asia. (Malthus is not an issue in the cases of Brazil and Africa where land/population ratios were high and labor shortages chronic until at least the middle of the twentieth century.) As Charlesworth points out, "It is indisputable that land was, in absolute terms, hardly under great pressure from population in the Deccan of the early British period." Through the 1840s, at least, "only about half of the cultivable land in most Deccan districts, according to formal British estimates, was being tilled." Although population grew rapidly in the 1850s and 1860s, partly as a result of the cotton boom, the demographic momentum came to an abrupt halt with the catastrophe of 1876. In India as a whole during the half-century between 1870 and 1920 there was only a single decade (1880s) of significant population growth. (South Asia's percentage of world population declined from 1750 to 1900 from 23 percent to 20 percent) while Europe was rising from 17 percent to 21 percent.
Modern case-studies corroborate the position of nationalist critics of the Raj like G. V. Josh, who in 1890 argued that "the problem of India lies not so much in the fact of an alleged overpopulation as in the admitted and patent evil of underproduction." (Josh estimated that fully half of the net savings of India was confiscated as revenue.) If cultivators in the Deccan and other drought-prone regions were relentlessly pushed onto marginal lands where productivity was low and crop failures were inevitable, the culprit was less likely overpopulation than the "British land revenue system itself." This is certainly the finding of Bagchi, who, after a careful inquisition of colonial agricultural statistics, argues that the revenue collectors' inflexible claims on a high "average" harvest "compelled the peasants to cultivate marginal lands, and also forced them to 'mine' their land in a situation where most of them had few investible resources left to improve its productivity."
Likewise contemporary scholars are dramatically revising the traditional image of late imperial China as a "demographic profligate": the hopeless "Malthusia" depicted by generations of economic theorists and demographers. Until recently, most scholars have accepted fragmentary evidence for an eighteenth-century population explosion that doubled or even tripled China's 1700 population. Demographic reductionists, however, have always had difficulty explaining how population growth that was clearly so "Boserupian" in the eighteenth century (promoting a dynamic expansion of productive forces) could abruptly become so grimly Malthusian in the nineteenth (blocking all advances in productivity). (Esther Boserup, of course, inverted Malthus in a famous 1965 study to argue that population increase was really the motor, not the brake, of economic and social progress.) Moreover, there is little evidence for any increase in demographic pressure after the end of the Qing Golden Age. As Maddison points out, China's population was no higher in 1890 than in 1820 while per capita income was significantly lower.
Pomeranz, who has examined this issue in the context of north China, agrees that population pressures alone "do not explain why ecological problems greatly worsened after the mid-nineteenth century." His study area, the Huang-Yun (comprising parts of Shandong, Zhili and Henan around the intersection of the Grand Canal and the Yellow River), "after the wars, floods and droughts of the 1850β80 period... did not significantly exceed its 1840s population until after 1949" Moreover, the vast human losses of the Taiping revolution created a demographic vacuum in the middle and lower Yangzi that was refilled after 1864 by millions of immigrants from congested provinces, including Honan and Kiangsu. Thereafter famine and epidemic, followed by war and revolution, kept population growth in north China at a minimum until 1948.
Recently some experts on Qing China, led by Princeton's F. W. Mote and Martin Heijdra, have frontally challenged the orthodox view of a population doubling or even tripling during the eighteenth century. They advance compelling arguments for a late Ming population of 250 to 275 million, rather than the 150 million conventionally adopted as a baseline circa 1700 for Qing demography. This implies an annual growth rate of 0.3 percent (the same as India and less than the world average) rather than the 0.6 to 0.9 percent claimed in most histories. Moderate, rather than exponential, population growth during the Golden Age would perforce revise neo-Malthusian explanations of China's subsequent nineteenth-century crises. As Mote carefully explains:
A major implication of the proposed outline of Qing population growth is that it discredits what usually has been taken as the most significant demographic fact about Qing: the idea of a "population explosion" in the eighteenth century. That supposed phenomenon is given high explanatory value in relation to many social and political contexts. If, however, the population did _not_ suddenly increase during that century, but started from a higher plateau and grew moderately, many social issues must then be otherwise explained. For example, calculations using those earlier population figures in conjunction with equally suspect Ming and Qing figures for land in cultivation show a disastrous fall in the ratio of cultivated land to consuming population; the implicit crisis in that ratio of productive land to population must be reexamined. Related views about the "optimum population" of China, perhaps in itself a suspect notion, also must be reconsidered...
Rejecting demographic determinism, of course, does not mean that population regimes played no role in China's nineteenth-century crisis. On the contrary, it is clear that the very success of agricultural intensification in the Golden Age encouraged excessive subdivision of land in many regions as well as ecologically destructive reclamations of previously uncultivated highlands and wetlands. Moreover, population growth often seems to have been concentrated in the poorest and most environmentally vulnerable areas. _Local_ populationβresource relationships will thus figure prominently in subsequent discussions of subsistence crisis and disaster vulnerability in north China. But population growth was hardly the self-acting, archimedean lever of history imagined by so many economic historians.
**The Irrigation Deficit**
As Pomeranz points out, Europe faced even more severe demographic and ecological pressures at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but was able to resolve them with the help of New World natural resources, massive colonial emigration and, eventually, urban industrialization. The relevant question, in other words, is less population pressure per se than why Western Europe was able to escape its incipient "high-level equilibrium trap" and Qing China wasn't.
In addition to the factors already highlighted, there is another variable that is frequently missing from historical discussions of "underdevelopment." If (according to Pomeranz) the chief "ecological bottleneck" to economic growth in Atlantic Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the inelastic supply of fiber crops and timber, in both India and China it was water. As Patrick O'Brien observes, "up to half of the populations of Asia, Africa, and South America may have subsisted on land where water supply constituted the key constraint upon increasing agricultural output." This was, of course, common sense to "Oriental despots," and a major achievement of the Qing Golden Age, as well as of the Mogul zenith, had been the high sustained levels of state and village-level investment in flood control and irrigation. As we shall see in detail, however, the nineteenth century was characterized by the near-collapse of hydraulic improvement.
"Traditional water-harvesting systems," emphasizes David Hardiman, "disintegrated and disappeared in large parts of India during the early colonial period [and] high rates of land-tax left no surplus for the effective maintenance of irrigation systems." Despite the later development of the celebrated canal colonies of the Punjab, irrigation in British India lagged behind expansion of agriculture until Independence. In China, meanwhile, "irrigation, water storage and control, and grain storage facilities were not extended or improved beyond their eighteenth-century levels." Indeed irrigated acreage shrank from its Qing high point of 29.4 percent of the arable in 1820 to only 18.5 percent of the arable in 1952. In Brazil's drought-stricken Nordeste, there was no state support whatsoever for irrigation.
This _irrigation deficit_ undergirded the Malthusian illusion of helpless "involution" in China and elsewhere. Whether as a result of population pressure or displacement by export crops, subsistence in all three lands was pushed onto drier, often less productive soils, highly vulnerable to ENSO cycles, without parallel improvements in irrigation, drainage or reforestation to ensure sustainability. Modern irrigation-based revolutions in agricultural productivity in northern India and north China (since 1960), as well as in the Nordeste (since 1980), only dramatize the centrality of water resources and the political capacities to ensure their development to any discussion of "carrying capacity" or "demographic ceilings."
More broadly, it is clear that any attempt to elucidate the social origins of late Victorian subsistence crises must integrally incorporate the relevant histories of common property resources (watersheds, aquifers, forests and pastures) and social overhead capital (irrigation and flood control systems, granaries, canals and roads). In the case-study chapters that follow, I argue that _ecological poverty_ βdefined as the depletion or loss of entitlement to the natural resource base of traditional agricultureβconstituted a causal triangle with increasing _household poverty_ and _state decapacitation_ in explaining both the emergence of a "third world" and its vulnerability to extreme climate events.
## **10**
## **India: The Modernization of Poverty**
> Let us go to the root of the matter. Let us, or those of us who can do so, mark the condition of the Indian cultivator in his home, and find out what causes impoverish him and make him unable to save. The reason is not a want of frugality, or of sobriety, or of prudence. The Indian peasant is the most sober, the most frugal, and the most prudent peasant on the face of the earth.
>
> β Romesh Chunder Dutt
If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947. Indeed, in the last half of the nineteenth century, income probably declined by more than 50 percent. There was no economic development at all in the usual sense of the term. "Static overall yield figures," Tomlinson adds, "do not mean that output everywhere was stagnant, but rather that progressive forces were always cancelled out by regressive ones, and that periods of dynamism were interspersed with periods of enervation." Celebrated cash-crop booms went hand in hand with declining agrarian productivity and food security. In much of the cotton-growing southern Deccan, for instance, per acre yields of food crops at the end of the Raj had fallen to only two-thirds to one-half the average level of 1870. Moreover in the age of Kipling, that "glorious imperial half century" from 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent, a deterioration in human health probably without precedent in the subcontinent's long history of war and invasion.
These dismal trends vindicate the often derided claim of nineteenth-century nationalists that British "Progress" was Indian ruin. Yet India's economic stagnation under the Raj has puzzling aspects. Where were the fruits of modernization, of the thousands of miles of railroad track and canal? And where were the profits of the great export booms that transformed the subcontinent's agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century? Here, if anywhere in rural Asia, integration into the world market should have resulted in significant local increases in agricultural productivity and profitability. Apart from the plantation crops of tea and indigo, most export productionβopium, wheat, rice and cottonβremained in native hands under a regime of modern property rights. British commissions and surveys, moreover, were forever applauding the saplings of Indian peasant capitalism.
Yet, as macroeconomic statistics demonstrate, such prosperity was usually ephemeral and quickly reabsorbed into the huge inertia of rural poverty. Peasant agriculture, even in the most dynamic cash crop sectors, remained radically undercapitalized. Only moneylenders, absentee landlords, urban merchants and a handful of indigenous industrialists seemed to have benefited consistently from India's renewed importance in world trade. "Modernization" and commercialization were accompanied by pauperization. Why this should be so is revealed by recent research (beginning with Laxman Satya's important case-study of Berar) on the cotton- and wheat-producing regions that were both dynamos of India's late-Victorian export economy and epicenters of mass mortality in the famines of the 1870s and 1890s.
**Cotton's Naked Misery**
Prised away from Hyderabad in 1853, the Marathi province of Berar, together with the adjoining district of Nagpore, had been selected by the Cotton Supply Associationβan arm of the Manchester Chamber of Commerceβas platforms for specialized cotton monoculture. The Association wielded extraordinary power over the reshaping of the Indian economy in the wake of the Mutiny and the imposition of Free Trade. In the 1870s the "millocracy" (as Karl Marx called it) even won formal institutional recognition in the government of India with the appointment of Sir Louis Malletβ"a doctrinaire free trader who served as Cobden's assistant at the Board of Trade"βas permanent under-secretary at the Indian Office "to represent Lancashire's interests."
Indeed to ordinary Indians trying to decipher codes of power within the Raj, it sometimes seemed as if their real sovereigns ruled from Manchester's Royal Exchange rather than Buckingham Palace. "The most blatant example," Stanley Wolpert points out, "of such imperial favoritism occurred in 1879, when Viceroy Lytton actually overruled his entire council to accommodate Lancashire's lobby [the Association] by removing all import duties on British-made cotton, despite India's desperate need for more revenue in a year of widespread famine and tragic loss of life throughout Maharashtra."
In the case of Berar, the Association encouraged the administrative dismantling of the _balutedari_ system through which dominant local clans or castes had exercised managerial control over a complex network of social production including communal irrigation and cotton weaving. The essence of the old order was that the upper castes had claims on agricultural produce but did not own the land itself. After purging the "disloyal" leading families, the British spent seventeen years (1861β77) reorganizing the vast peasant universe of Berar (7,000 villages and 10.5 million acres of cultivatable land) into the so-called _khatedari_ system. A variant of the _ryotwari_ model that had been imposed on most of southern and western India, it was heralded as establishing the _khatedars_ as sturdy Berari versions of the English yeomanry. In reality the government became the supreme landlord with peasant tenure, unlike Tudor England, strictly conditional upon punctual payment of revenue.
The complicated reciprocities of the old _balutedari_ system, Satya explains, gave way to brutal and unilateral relations of exploitation. Diversity and mobilityβ"the characteristic feature[s] of precolonial Berar"βwere replaced by coercive "standardization and sedentarization." The collection of taxes as well as the local marketing of the cotton crop ended up in the hands of moneylender/grain merchants who became the crucial intermediaries controlling almost all transactions between the village world, Calcutta and Manchester. Meanwhile punitive taxes on local woven goods and a flood of cheap English imports in the wake of the arrival of the Great India Peninsular Railway destroyed domestic manufacture and forced ruined artisans into the fields as propertyless laborers. The railroad inflicted the same fate on most of the _banjaras_ , the colorful and ethnically diverse stratum of traditional porters and carters.
From a British perspective, the reengineering of Berari society was a stunning success. By 1867 Berar alone was sending as much cotton to Manchester as all of Egypt, and cultivated acreage probably doubled by 1890. But the _khatedars_ and their tenants had no way to participate in the profits of the boom. Precisely as the Cotton Supply Association had intended, Beraris were captives of Lancashire's lopsided monopsony. As one agent of the Association explained in 1869, "Speaking generally, the cultivator who produces and sells the cotton cannot in any way regulate the market price. For this he is dependent on the home market and many causes which combine to raise and lower the price in Liverpool." Berari cotton exports had been nurtured in the first place during the 1850s to buffer fluctuations in the premium American cotton supply and ensure price stability for Lancashire mills. "In short," Charlesworth explains, "British industry wanted Indian raw cotton as a sort of permanent twelfth man, always ready in the pavilion but only occasionally brought on to the field of play. This role hardly produced the consistency of demand necessary to promote a more extensive commercial agriculture."
The _khatedars_ , in other words, were a contingent workforce for the Association, which had no intention of ever allowing them to wield any autonomous bargaining power within the international cotton market. Instead, they were sucked into a vortex of high taxes, chronic debt and subsistence instability. The _khatedars_ with more resources attempted to escape from the debt trap by becoming micro-exploiters themselves, and by the 1870s holdings were being fragmented into smaller parcels and worked by subtenants known as _bhagindars_. Satya estimates that the _bhagindars_ paid rack-rents three- or four-fold greater than revenue demands imposed on the khatedars. By the great droughts of the 1890s, the stratum of authentically independent cultivators had been reduced to a minority, and at least 70 percent of the population were either impoverished _bhagindars_ or landless laborers whose fates hung on the capricious dance of cotton prices in far-away exchanges.
This layering of exploitation had a devastating impact on overall welfare in Berar. A society formerly celebrated for its rich cotton fabrics was virtually unclothed by poverty as per capita textile consumption plummeted in inverse ratio to soaring exports of raw cotton. "Most Berari children went naked, most Berari men were half-clad, and a majority of the Berari women clothed themselves in rags." Although massive sums of capital were sunk into the Association's export infrastructure, including railroad spurs, cotton yards, and metaled feeder roads, none of it percolated to the village level where degraded sanitary conditions, especially the contamination of drinking water by human waste, spread cholera and gastrointestinal disease as well as tuberculosis. Similarly, local food security was eroded by the advance not only of cotton production (which doubled its acreage in the last quarter of the century) but of grain exports as well. During the famine of 1899β1900, when 143,000 Beraris died directly from starvation, the province exported not only tens of thousands of bales of cotton but an incredible 747,000 bushels of grain. Despite heavy labor immigration into Berar in the 1890s, the population fell by 5 percent and "life expectation at birth" twice dipped into the 15 years range before finally falling to less than 10 years during the "extremely bad year" of 1900.
Berar was not unique. Food security was also sacrificed to cotton export throughout the Deccan. Writing about the Bellary district, one of the epicenters of the 1877 Madras famine, David Washbrook observes that commercial cotton cultivation was "associated not with a broadening prosperity, but with a progressive crisis in agricultural production and social reproduction." Although its heavy black volcanic soil was ideal for short staple cotton, Bellary was one of the driest cultivated districts in India and, without irrigation, a family required 15β20 acres of average-quality land to produce its subsistence (in millet) and pay taxes. By the 1870s, however, most ryots were lucky to farm 7 acres, and only an elite of several thousand rich _inamdars_ (an emergent "magnate class" whom Washbrook argues were almost entirely "made" by the colonial state) could afford the heavy metal ploughs pulled by up to a dozen bullocks that were required for deep ploughing. Before British direct rule, small farmers traditionally mitigated their harvest shortfalls with additional family income from stockraising and seasonal soldiering. Pax Victoria excluded the mercenary option while the expansion of commercial agriculture devoured pasture.
Thus caught in a tightening vise between their undersized farms and rising debt, small producers made the apparently surprising choice of substituting cotton for millet, raising and selling the former in order to purchase the latter from grain merchants. Moreover they made the switch in face of declining or stagnant cotton prices. "In straightforward terms," Washbrook writes, "this 'decision' would seem to make no sense as a subsistence strategy. It meant producing a crop whose relative value against grain halved across this period. It also involved its producers in a three-sided structure of risk: from the climate, from the oscillation of grain prices and the oscillation in cotton prices which, being internationally determined, were scarcely calculable in Bellary itself."
The decisive advantage of cottonβas we shall see again in the case of north Chinaβwas that "for land-short peasants, [its] higher returns per acre provided a better chance of approaching subsistence targets than did grain cultivation itselfβeven if, at 9.5 necessary acres, the majority of small farmers would still not have been able to quite reach it." Cotton output was also more responsive to labor intensity than millet: desperate peasants (ignorant of marginal economics) could hope to increase their harvest incrementally by the application of massive quantities of unpaid family labor. But at all times, cotton-growing was a survival strategy wagered against the unknown variables of weather and the world market where the price of cotton from the US South generally determined demand for other varieties.
The peasantry's creditors, however, were eager to oblige the gamble. As small farmersβ"more [in] response to economic adversity than to market opportunity"βturned towards cotton (which increased its percentage of the Deccan arable from 4 percent in the 1870s to nearly 12 percent in 1911), the "magnates," who had dominated production during the bonanza years of the "cotton famine" in the 1860s, abandoned cotton cultivation. In a parodic rebuke to British hopes of an "improving yeomanry," they aggressively switched their assets in the opposite direction from that predicted by Ricardian theory: from cultivation to usury and cotton-factoring. As Washbrook points out, it was simply easier for them to expropriate the agrarian surplus through the credit system and the monopsony of the grain market than to bear the risks involved in the direct organization of production:
The entire shift of cotton production from large to small farms can be seen as a mechanism whereby, through the application of usury and "service" capital, magnate-creditors sought to respond to the conditions of depression in the cotton market and to continue to squeeze a healthy profit out of the crop. By acting as its major financiers and advancing it the factors of production which it lacked, magnate farmers were able to draw returns from small farming's one supposed advantage β unpaid family labour. The family now laboured longer and harder and passed most of the profits of its work to the magnates in interest payments and rents. Not only did the new economic system "rationalize" the deployment of labor, most critically it cheapened itβin this case, literally, to the price of nothing.
**The Wheat Boom's Hunger**
The producing classes, to be sure, fared little better in the other leading sectors of Indian commercial agriculture. As D. E. U. Baker has shown in another revealing study, the famous wheat boom in the Central Provinces' Narmada Valley (today part of Madhya Pradesh) from 1861 to 1890, officially heralded as a reign of "almost unbroken agricultural prosperity," was in reality subsidized by destructive soil mining and crushing household debt. In the decade following the Mutiny, the "impetuous and authoritarian" administration of Sir Richard Temple had aggressively pushed landowners ( _malguzars_ ) into commercial production of cotton and especially wheat. Celebrated local handicrafts had been ruined by the cheap Lancashire cloth that flooded north-central India after the completion of the BombayβCalcutta railroad, and farmers were encouraged to save themselves by using the railroad to export the soft wheat that British millers preferred. Bombay-based exporters and their local _malguzar_ agents went door-to-door offering villagers cash advances if they would grow wheat rather than millet and gram.
Narmada wheat, which began to reach Liverpool via the Suez Canal in 1871, arrived in English grain exchanges just in time to buffer the decline of Russian exports in the wake of the emancipation of the serfs (1873 was the last year that Russia was Britain's main grain supplier). It stabilized the price of flour in the season when other imported grains were scarce and provided a reserve for lucrative re-export during grain shortages on the Continent. Demand grew steadily through the good rainfall years of the 1880s, reaching a peak in 1890β91 after the disastrous crop failures in Russia. Proud British officials boasted that "the smallest cultivator can now sell his produce direct to the agent of a European firm at the price current in the world's market." Meanwhile "traders in grains speculated wildly" and land prices skyrocketed. In the main export districts, like Saugor, wheat occupied two-thirds of the acreage once devoted to subsistence grains.
**Figure 10.1 The Underside of the Wheat Boom**
Behind the facade of prosperity, however, official policies had inexorably laid a "basis for an agrarian crisis between 1891 and 1901 that created famine, wrecked the wheat economy, and exposed the Central Provinces to bankruptcy." Once again the inflexible revenue demands of the government drained capital from the countryside and put tenants at the mercy of a top stratum of _malguzars_ who, no longer bound by any of the patrimonial obligations of the pre-British village system, ruthlessly combined the functions of moneylender and grain merchant. As smaller landowners defaulted, moreover, this elite acquired direct ownership of a vast swathe of the Narmada wheat belt. Baker estimates that "by 1889 more than half the malguzari area transferred in the Central Provinces since settlement had passed to moneylending castes, and 47 percent of the revenue on land sold since settlement was being paid by moneylenders."
The wealth generated by usury and rack-renting was almost entirely parasitic, with negligible productive reinvestment in cattle, irrigation or farm equipment. Indeed, "absentee landlords did not normally visit their villages, and were thus not in touch with their tenants, who were no more important to them than the man who rented their shops in the bazaar." As in Berar, fabled profits were accompanied by a progressive deterioration in the social condition of the direct producers. As early as Temple's commissionership there was concern over the depletion of local grain stocks by the high levels of exports and district officers reported growing immiseration among the tenantry.
Even more than in the cotton districts, the Narmada wheat boom was built upon precarious climatic and ecological foundations. As T. Raghavan has emphasized, the soaring export demand of the 1880s had been accommodated by the expansion of cultivation into areas of inferior soil, traditionally devoted to hardy millets, where harvests were strictly dependent upon the unusual cycle of good monsoons from 1884 to 1894. Moreover, commercialization was accompanied by ecological crisis as the railroad ravaged the forests of the Satpuras for lumber, and commercial wheat acreage absorbed pasture lands that traditionally fed Narmada's cattle. "By 1883β84 the price of grass had risen enormously" and bullocks were becoming too expensive for many cultivators to maintain. The subsequent manure shortage (aggravated by the rising cost of charcoal and the necessary resort to cattle droppings as fuel) increased the pace of soil exhaustion and further reduced productivity. Finally, using the excuses that Narmada was "not subject to famine" and that local topography made dams and canals too expensive to build, the government neglected irrigation works that might have safeguarded the rural population in the event of drought.
Mass vulnerability to disaster as a result was becoming acute in 1887 when the government undertook a drastic resettlement of the Central Provinces' revenues. Taxes (and, by automatic adjustment, rents) were reassessed on the basis of speculative land values inflated by the boom: in some cases this amounted to a 50 percent increase. Believing that "the brisk export trade would last forever," moneylenders accommodated the _malguzars'_ pleas for more credit. Then, as Narmada exports reached an all-time height in 1891β92, their British buyers suddenly switched to more attractive sources: a deluge of cheap grain from the Argentine pampas together with high-quality wheat from the canal colonies of the Punjab and the western United Provinces. (Argentine wheat exports surged from 4.1 million bushels in 1889 to 28 million in the early 1890s.) The impact on local producersβespecially the heavily indebted tenants cultivating inferior soilsβwas nothing short of catastrophic: by the eve of the great drought of 1896, Narmada's "export of wheat, gram and millets had become insignificant." Saddled with huge debts, carrying the burden of exorbitant revenues, and now locked out of the world market, the peasantry of the Central Provinces was already in a free fall when the rains stopped. Just as the Berari cotton growers ended up naked, the famous wheat farmers of Narmada were living off imported millet and rice by the beginning of the twentieth century.
**Table 10.1**
**Wheat Exports from the Central Provinces**
(Millions of Rupees)
1871β76 | 3.4
---|---
1876β81 | 7.2
1881β86 | 14.9
1886β91 | 16.6
1891β96 | 4.3
Source: From Hanretty, _Imperialism and Free Trade,_ p. 347 (Table 4).
Famine, as Navtej Singh and others have shown, was also the underside of the export boom in the wheat-growing regions of northern India. Although the "irrigation revolution" in the Victorian Punjab (predecessor to the "green revolution" a century later) is usually cited as the Raj's most unqualified success in sponsoring indigenous agrarian capitalism, the reality was considerably grimmer. Certainly some of the big landlords in the canal colonies spectacularly enriched themselves through the wheat exports, but their capital was quickly diverted into usury and grain-trading. "The object of the merchant-moneylender," points out Neeladri Bhattacharya in a discussion of debt in the Punjab countryside, "was not to earn interest as such, but to control prices of purchase and sale, and ensure regular channels for the supply and disposal of commodities." Like the elite _malguzars_ in Narmada, they discovered that it was more profitable to become _shahukars_ or middlemen than to act the role of improving farmers as prescribed by British political economists. Meanwhile, the majority of small _zamindars_ and their laborers faced radical new insecurity: "the commercialization of agriculture merely increased their indebtedness and consequent poverty."
They were generally indebted to the shahukars who compelled them to throw their produce at a low market price and thus acted as compulsory middlemen. In many cases, the shahukars financed the cultivation of these crops and carried them away from the zamindars' threshing floors as soon as the harvesting was done. The peasants were robbed not only because of low prices but of false weightments by these shahukar-traders. It may also be noted that the shahukars financed agriculture in order to have control on the process of fixation of prices of the agricultural commodities. The conditions in the south-east of the province were the worst because this area came under colonial control long back in 1809 and was comparatively more marked in drought and poverty environs.
As in the Central Provinces, the cultivators who put bread on English tables could not guarantee their own families' subsistence. "The enormous [market] demands and the prospect of government purchases led to speculative hoarding, creating shortages and pushing prices to famine levels. Depletion of stocks as an outcome of exports increased the vulnerability of the exporting areas to famines both in normal times and harvest failures."
Starvation also quickly followed on the heels of the celebrated indigo boom in Bihar. Here the reluctant peasantry was forcibly married to the world market, through the so-called _assamiwar_ system, by British compulsion. "The planters were hated throughout eastern India because of their racial arrogance and their contempt for the law. They maintained small private armies of strong men, whom they would use to coerce the peasantry, forcing them to grow indigo." As early as 1866, peasants in the drought-stricken rice lands had organized a common front against the indigo planters whom they blamed for displacing subsistence agriculture. "In short the paddy and bhit land in which the ryots had a right of cultivation have been converted into indigo lands. Thus there has been less grain producing land, a decrease in the quantity of grain has been the result which for the last few years has caused scarcity and famine, and thousands of human lives..." As an official report later corroborated, the 220,000 acres under indigoβa net loss of 150,000 acres of grainβin north Bihar represented the margin between survival and famine in a bad year "This also explains," Colin Fisher points out, "why the most spectacular indigo agitations occurred in rice growing lowlands like Bettiah, Sitamurhi, and Madhuban, areas which were peculiarly liable to famine."
Nor, finally, did India's most notorious export cropβopiumβguarantee full bellies to its producers. Any profit to the cultivator was again intercepted by khatadars who purchased the poppy harvest on behalf of the government (who "rarely made less than 100% net profit") at a fixed price, then loaned money for tax payments and household consumption at usurious rates. Binay Chaudhuri summarizes the three evils which weighed on the Bengali peasantry: "the lowness of the price paid for crude opium; the increasing rigour of the Government in collecting arrears resulting from crop failures; [and] the uncontrolled exactions by the khatadars and zamindars." Although Bengal was spared the cataclysm of drought in 1876β77, the failure of the poppy crop in 1878 and the refusal of Calcutta to remit taxes nonetheless brought famine to many doorsteps.
Peasants in other export sectors, including ground nuts, oilseeds and tobacco, could tell similar stories; only the special cases of jute cultivation in Bengal and some of the deltaic paddy-growing districts seemed to have offered small farmers any opportunity to exploit price trends or draw a profit from world markets. Far more commonly, cash cropping, especially in the drier interior regions, went hand in hand with rural immiseration and the decline of food security. As Raghavan shows in another case-study of the Narmada Valley, financial entanglements in export markets tended to reinforce "'traditional' causes of peasant differentiation: rainfall, local price fluctuations, and the structure of landholding in terms of the quality of the soil held."
The situation was little different with commodities primarily grown for the domestic market. Although native crude sugar ( _gur_ ) was famously lucrative, small-scale cultivators in the eastern United Provinces were caught in a seasonal trapβa coincidence of labor and revenue demandsβthat forced them to hypothecate their crops (and potential profits from market fluctuations) to merchants and rich-peasant traders. "Far from leading to surplus accumulation, sugarcane cultivation in Gorakhpur [district] barely enabled the majority of the peasants to reproduce their conditions of economic existence on a year to year basis. It was the importance of sugarcane as a cash-raising and debt-servicing crop, rather than its value as a surplus accumulator, that imbued it with a special role in the small-peasant economy of Gorakhpur in the late nineteenth century."
In the absence of urban employment alternatives or productivity-raising inputs to agriculture, cultivators across India were increasingly caught in a pincers between high land values and interest rates on one side, and low crop prices on the other. In his influential overview of the history of the Raj, Sumit Sarkar finds that the commercialization of Indian agriculture "emerges on analysis to have been often an artificial and forced process which led to differentiation without genuine growth... [The] built-in tendency of the entire system [was] against significant advances in productive technology and organization." Indeed, adds Bipan Chandra, the British merely "skimmed cash crops off the surface of an immobilized society."
**The Colonial State**
It was the state itself, as Naoroji and Dutt had argued in their pioneering critiques, that ultimately ensured that no productivity-raising benefit could flow from export booms to direct producers. On the expenditure side, a colonial budget largely financed by taxes on farm land returned less than 2 percent to agriculture and education, and barely 4 percent to public works of all kinds, while devoting a full third to the army and police. "When all is said and done," observe two of the "new economic historians," "[British] India spent on public works at a lower rate than the underdeveloped countries, and at a level similar to the Princely States. Moreover, unlike the other sectors, where expenditures rose over time, in India they peaked in the early 1880s and declined thereafter." Compared to a progressive and independent Asian nation like Siam, which spent two shillings per capita on education, famine relief and public health, the Raj's investment in "human capital" (one penny per person or 4 percent of all expenditures) was a miserable pittance. Even more to the point, Vasant Kaiwar cites what he considers to be the typical example of a village in the late nineteenth-century Bombay Deccan where the government collected nearly 19,000 rupees annually in taxes but returned only 2,000 rupees in expenditure, largely on official salaries and a rundown school.
**Figure 10.2 "Gods in the Countryside"**
On the extractive side, Ricardian principles glossed the relentless fiscal erosion of producers' subsistence. In theory designed to transform ryots and zamindars into modernizing market-oriented farmers on the English model, the revenue settlements instead subjugated the peasantry to the local despotism of money-lenders and nouveaux riches landowners. "The gap between British legal theory and Indian local practice was immense." By making the revenue demands too high and inflexibly fixing them to the estimated average produce of the land with scant regard for climate variation, the British "made it certain that a number of the designated revenue-payers would lose their titles every year." "The creditor-debtor relationship," Bagchi continues, "was easily transformed into one in which the debtor delivered up whatever surplus produce he had to the creditor. The creditor became his landlord, and de facto the master of his whole family." British rule, which replaced traditional patrimonial obligations with the inflexible enforcement of debt laws, provided massive institutional support for this systematic pillage of the direct producers. "The colonial state was fully aware," writes Kaiwar, "that this kind of relationship was inimical to development, [but] did little to bring capital into a productive relationship with landed property. The colonial state [thus] came to resemble a classic agrarian bureaucracy rather than a capitalist state." Guilty post facto initiatives to prevent the total expropriation of the peasantry (like the famous Deccan Act, which followed the anti- _bania_ riots of 1875) typically went hand in hand with revenue settlements and court decisions that bolstered the power of the very same creditors.
In the late-nineteenth-century Bombay Deccan, for example, the annual process of revenue collection began with the impounding of grain in village stockyards. In order to eat from their own harvest, the ryots had to immediately borrow money to pay off the taxes. Typically the moneylenders bought the crop at half of the current market value but lent money at a usurious 38 percent interest. If the peasant was unable to promptly repay the principle, the exorbitant rates of interest ballooned to astronomical dimensions. "I remember one case which came before me," wrote a former district officer, "in which a cultivator was sued for 900 rupees, principal and interest, the original debt being only ten rupees worth of grain, borrowed a few years previously."
When _ryots_ balked at payment, Indian courts applied English civil law against them with the deadly efficiency of a Maxim gun. (Indeed, as Lytton's critic, Lt.-Col. Osborne, emphasized in 1879, British rule in India was "so hard and mechanical in its character" that "to the great mass of the people, the English official is simply an enigma... a piece of machinery possessing powers to kill and tax and imprison.") Lord Elgin's land transfer investigation in 1895 revealed that fully a fifth of the land in the Bombay Deccan was held by "non-agriculturalist moneylenders": both indigenous brahmins and Marwaris from Rajasthan. As the Famine Commission of 1901 itself admitted, while the authors of the Bombay revenue system "expected the accumulation of agricultural capital," in operation "their plans did not promote thrift, nor did they conduce to the independence of the ryot. They looked for the capitalist cultivator; and [instead] we find the sowkar's serf."
Mercantile exploitation of the small cultivator was a ubiquitous relation of production, and Baker's characterization of Tamilnadu undoubtedly can be applied to most of late-Victorian India: "Virtually everyone who realized a surplus from agriculture tried his hand at trade and moneylending, and thus there were many apprentice despots." As we have seen, the moneylenders (at least 500,000 by the 1870s) and wealthy landowners were profoundly anti-developmental for eminently neoclassical reasons. As Washbrook points out, "It became progressively more 'economically rational' to sustain accumulation through coercion and the 'natural' decline in the share of the social product accorded to labour rather than to put valuable capital at risk by investment." Likewise, Baker adds, "creditors gave out 'loans' in order to be able to secure dependents and it would have been foolish to make 'loans' which, by improving the productivity of the debtor's land, helped him to become more independent."
Although the British regularly denounced the "parasitism" of the moneylenders and grain speculators, they were both father and mother to the system. The vast majority of smallholders could neither make production decisions independent of lenders nor take any advantage of market trends. "In these circumstances [not surprisingly] peasant agriculture had no chance of developing into capitalist farming." As Kaiwar reminds us, it was not so much the rich peasant, zamindar or khatedar who failed to play the prescribed theoretical role of an "improving landlord" as the colonial state itself.
**Victorian Enclosures**
Village economy in India, as elsewhere in monsoonal Asia, augmented crops and handicrafts with stores of free goods from common lands: dry grass for fodder, shrub grass for rope, wood and dung for fuel, dung, leaves and forest debris for fertilizer, clay for plastering houses, and, above all, clean water. All classes utilized these common property resources, but for poorer households they constituted the very margin of survival. In an outstanding study of a contemporary Gujarati village struggling with seasonality and drought, Martha Chen has shown how decisive nonmarket resources and entitlements remain for laborers and small farmers. "Standard definitions of work, worker and income," she writes, "do not capture how poor households generate livelihoods." In the village of Maatisar (which she visited during the severe drought of 1985β87) fully 70 percent of the fuel and 55 percent of the fodder requirements of the poor are provided from free sources. The forest and pasture commons, which altogether generate thirty-five different useful products, "not only serve as a buffer against seasonal shortages, but also contribute to rural equity."
The British consolidated their rule in India by transferring control of these strategic resources from the village community to the state. "Among all the interventions into village society that nurtured the Anglo-Indian empire," David Ludden argues, "dividing public from private land stands out as the most important." Common landsβor "waste" in the symptomatic vocabulary of the Rajβwere either transformed into taxable private property or state monopolies. Free goods, in consequence, became either commodities or contraband. Even cow dung was turned into a revenue source for Queen Victoria.
As in Britain itself (so famously described by Marx in Volume One of _Capital_ ), the enclosure of common resources deeply undermined traditional household ecology. As angry Berar farmers told the Famine Commission in 1881: "The cultivator is now put to expenses which in former times he did not know... He now pays more for his cattle than he did yore, and he can no longer fell a tree from any place he likes to provide him with a shaft for his plough, or a yoke for his oxen. He has now to practically expend coin where before he needed only to labour, and the grass with which he annually thatches his hut has now to be bought, not merely cut and carried as it used to be."
Until 1870 all forests (20 percent of India's land area) had been communally managed; by the end of the decade, they were completely enclosed by armed agents of the state. For plough agriculturalists the forests were not only essential for wood, but also for leaf manure and grass and leaf fodder. Although the British had been concerned since the late eighteenth century that deforestation might be making the climate more arid, their overriding interest, as Hardiman reminds us, was "to assure a continuing supply of wood for imperial needs": shipbuilding, urban construction and, above all, the railroads which by the 1860s already consumed a million ties a year for track, as well as vast quantities of wood for fuel. The second Indian Forest Act of 1878 "allowed the authorities to take unoccupied or waste lands belonging to villages into the reserved forests, effectively depriving villagers throughout India of their common lands." The consequence for millions of villagers was an acute wood famine. Indeed in Berar, lumber had become so scarce by the 1870s that khatedars ingeniously designed their carts and ploughs so they could be assembled from the same pieces of wood according to the season.
The cash-crop boom greatly increased the demand for forest resources, yet, as Christopher Baker points out in his study of Tamilnad, the British "aimed to develop the remaining areas of major forest as economic resources in their own right, and thus tried to separate them off from the plains agrarian economy." This was the "great running sore of Madras administration," and "only the richer cultivators, the 'big men,' could afford to bribe the forest officials." Although the government had looked the other way when the Madras Railways in the late 1860s had deforested the future famine districts of Salem, Cuddapah and North Arcot, illegally cutting down hundreds of thousands of trees, the Forest Act of 1878 (crafted by B. Baden-Powell to remove all ambiguity about the "absolute proprietary right of the state") was ruthlessly wielded against the survival economy of the poor.
Even in the midst of the most terrible famines, as in 1899, the foresters prevented local residents from gathering fodder for their dying cattle or firewood to heat their homes. Vaughan Nash, the _Guardian_ 's famine correspondent, castigated the forest guardians for the fodder famine that destroyed the Deccan's plough oxen and cattle. "The Forest Department has a pretty long queue of sins waiting at its door for the day of reckoning, and so have the Indian railway companies [who refused to haul fodder], and the two of them may now apportion the responsibility as best they may for the catastrophe which has robbed India of her cattle."
The British also cut off communal access to grassland resources and dissolved the ancient ecological interdependence of pastoralists and farmers. While the fundamental agricultural division in China lies between the northern wheat belt and the southern rice lands, India is divided roughly along the eightieth meridian between the humid, rice-growing east and the dry western interior where wheat and millet are the staples. Here extensive agriculture, some of it shifting and semi-nomadic, interacted for centuries with a vast pastoral economy linked to Central Asia. Great margins of uncultivated grassland buffered intercultural contact and invited physical mobility. "The labour force moved constantly over short and long distance in the everyday conduct of subsistence, to work land, trade, fight, tend animals, flee drought, seek water, open and defend territory." Far from a backland, Rajasthan and the western Deccan were the hearth of the warrior elites, both Hindu and Muslim, who created a series of formidable empires from the twelfth century onward. Indeed, Jos Gommans has recently claimed, "it was... the inner frontier of the Arid Zone that molded South Asian history."
After 1857, however, the British pursued a relentless campaign, especially in the Deccan, against nomads and shifting cultivators whom they labeled as "criminal tribes." Although the agroecology of the Deccan for centuries had been dependent upon the symbiosis of peasant and nomad, valley agriculture and hillslope pastoralism, the colonial state's voracious appetite for new revenue generated irresistible pressure on the ryots to convert "waste" into taxable agriculture. Punitive grazing taxes (which tripled between 1870 and 1920) drove pastoralists off the land, while cultivators were lured into the pastoral margins with special leases, even patelships. "Landed tenures," Neeladri Bhattacharya writes, "provided the frame through which the pastoral tenurial structure was conceived. Within this regime of property, all rights to land were segregated, fragmented, classified and fixed. Within it the rights claimed by nomadic pastoralists appeared unintelligible and illegitimate."
Radical changes in social relations were accompanied by equally sweeping ecological transformations. The traditional Deccan practices of extensive crop rotation and long fallow, which required large farm acreages and plentiful manuring, became difficult to maintain as the land became more congested and cattle less numerous. "More than any single asset, in the dry-crop regions of Bombay, the use of agricultural bullocks was vital to efficient farming operations." Between 1850 and 1930 the ratio of plough cattle to cultivated land in the Deccan steadily declined, making it almost impossible, according to Charlesworth, to raise per capita agricultural output. At the same time, the quality of bullocks also deteriorated as expert nomad cattlebreeders were deliberately squeezed out of the economy. Similarly, the government did little to sponsor the planting of drought-resistant fodder crops. Kaiwar estimates that between 1843 and 1873 cattle numbers in the Deccan fell by almost 5 million. The 1876β78 drought killed off several million more, with cattle populations plummeting by nearly 60 percent in some districts. After comparable destruction during the 1896β97 drought, "women were seen to be pulling the plough" in districts like Hissar in the southeast Punjab.
**Figure 10.3 "Women pulled ploughs after the cattle died..."**
The decline in labor productivity entailed by fewer and less powerful plough-cattle was matched by a corresponding fall in soil fertility because of the growing shortage of fertilizer. Irrigation water alone was of little value if the soil was depleted of nitrogen. Thus Indians, for the first time, had to confront the dilemma that had vexed the Chinese in the Yellow River plain for centuries: should scarce cattle dung be used as fertilizer or fuel? By the 1860s, moreover, cotton and other export crops were displacing cereal agriculture from the fertile soils of the Deccan valleys. In most cases the light soils converted from pasture could produce only one-third of the average _jowar_ (millet) yield of the heavier, valley soils. These poorer quality soils eroded rapidly and soon became useless for agriculture or even grazing. By the end of the colonial period, no less than 38 percent of the soil in the Deccan was estimated to be "highly eroded." "Commercialised agriculture, in tandem with a largely subsistence-oriented cultivation of foodgrains," observes Kaiwar, "produced a particularly intensive regime of soil depletion and erosion." Eroded soils, of course, retained less runoff and thus increased vulnerability to drought. It is not surprising, then, that food security was most tenuous in districts like Poona and Sholapur where the largest acreages of land formerly classified as "uncultivable" had been reclaimed for grain in compensation for cotton production on the good soils. Both districts were epicenters of famine and resistance in 1876 and again in 1899.
In the cotton districts, overcultivation in the face of declining soil productivity was a structural problem over which peasants had scant control. "The poverty in Berar," Satya says, was "directly related to the fate of culturable waste lands under survey." Cotton cultivation is, of course, notorious all over the world for its rapid depletion of soil nutrients and its insatiable demand for virgin soil. Everywhere in the Deccan, moreover, cotton supplanted nitrogen-fixing legumes (like _gram_ ) in crop rotation, a strategy, dictated by revenue demands and debt, that maximized short-term income at the cost of longer-term soil fertility. The khatedar, crushed between growing debts and revenue obligations, had little choice, as one district official explained, except "to exhaust his land, by repeating his cotton crop too often or to grow it over too large a surface to the almost entire exclusion of cereals." As a result, cotton or displaced food grains took over not only pasture but even the traditional public spaces reserved for threshing and winnowing. Counting every square inch as potential tax base, the British privatized and auctioned off village common land. Villagers even had to beg government permission to build homes, which "was seldom given for the fear that the buildings cut into agricultural land and jeopardized the government revenue."
Finally, in most of India water had always been a communally managed common resource. "Generally, there was no notion of selling titles to land and its water resources." In British common law as witlessly applied to India, however, water rights went along with land titles as private property. "In effect," as David Hardiman emphasizes, "this meant that only those who owned land had a right to the water on it. In this way, all those who did not hold colonial land-deeds were excluded from access to water... [leading to] the collapse of traditional water management structures." Tanks and wells were also privatized, with the consequence (as Satya points out in the case of Berar) that "for the first time... water scarcity became a problem and this caused enormous hardship to the people and cattle alike." The refusal of the state, in turn, to support local irrigation became a smoldering grievance, not only in Berar, but everywhere in interior India.
**The Decline of Indigenous Irrigation**
British rule in India, according to Sir Richard and General Sir John Strachey, was the most extraordinary act of charity in world history. "India has obtained, to a degree unheard of and unthought of before, protection for life and property... The country has been covered with roads, her almost impassable rivers have been bridged, 9,000 miles of railway and 20,000 miles of telegraphs have been constructed... [I]t is not the least remarkable part of the story that the accomplishment of all this work, and the expenditure of all this money, which have increased to an extent absolutely incalculable the wealth and comfort of the people of India, have added nothing to the actual burden of taxation." Although he would have scoffed at the Stracheys' claims about Indians' "wealth and comfort," even Marx was impressed by the scale of railroad construction and the speed with which India was being integrated into the world economy.
For liberal and nationalist critics of the Raj, on the other hand, the railroads β a captive, publicly subsidized market for English steelmakers and locomotive buildersβwere the chief symbol of Calcutta's misplaced priorities. Public works in post-Mutiny India were driven first by the exigencies of military control and, second, by the demands of export agriculture. On the eve of the 1876 famine, 29 percent of Indian public-works capital was invested in military installations in contrast to only 21 percent for irrigation, canals and drainage. ("Our soldiers' barracks," boasted the Stracheys, "are beyond comparison the finest in the world.") The railroad system, meanwhile, consumed (to 1880) thirteen times as much investment as all hydraulic works. As the pro-irrigation lobby led by Sir Arthur Cotton and Florence Nightingale protested during the 1876β77 famine: "Now we have before our eyes the sad and humiliating scene of magnificent Works [railroads] that have cost poor India 160 millions, which are so utterly worthless in the respect of the first want of India, that millions are dying by the side of them." (Gandhi, echoing this critique, would later denounce the railroads that "depleted the countryside of its [food] stocks and killed the handicrafts" as an underlying cause of famine.)
The irrigationists eventually succeeded in lobbying Parliament to appoint a select committee to investigate their claims that the Indian government's exorbitant promotion of railroads was partially to blame for the recent famine, but the committee rejected their analysis as well as their proposal for a comprehensive canal system. Instead, the Secretary of State for India, Lord Salisbury, reaffirmed that railroads were the best safeguard against hunger and would continue to receive the lion's share of public investment. As a result, only about a fifth of public works expenditure in the 1880β95 period found its way to major irrigation projects, 90 percent of which were concentrated in the Punjab and the North-West Provinces (later, United Provinces), where canals watered commercial crops like cotton, opium, sugar cane and wheat and financial returns to the government were therefore highest. As puny as they might have been in comparison to the vast capital sunk in the railroad network (only 11 percent of the cropped area of India was irrigated in 1921), the canals that tapped the Ganges and Jumna Rivers to water the fertile soils of the Doab plain were nonetheless the pride of Victorian hydraulic engineering, a model for emulation in Australia, Palestine and the American West. They have also been the subject of much controversy amongst experts on Indian agricultural history.
For his part, Ian Stone has claimed that, despite some serious deficiencies, the canals brought relative prosperity and immeasurably greater food security to millions of northern farmers. Elizabeth Whitcombe, on the other hand, has argued the canals which replaced well irrigation in the Doab were little short of an ecological disaster. They might have produced short-term bonanzas in wheat and cane, but at huge, unforeseen social costs. Without proper underground drainage, for example, the capillary action of irrigation brought toxic alkali salts to the surface, leading to such extensive saline efflorescence (locally called _reh_ ) that the superintendent of the Geological Survey warned in 1877 that once-fertile plains were on the verge of becoming a "howling wilderness." Indeed, fifteen years later, it was estimated that somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 square miles of farmlandβan immense areaβwas blighted by salinity "with 'valuable' crops isolated in clumps upon its surface."
In addition, wherever flush irrigation was practiced side by side with traditional well irrigation, the new system undermined the old. In some places, rising water tables or lateral seepage from irrigated fields led to well collapses; in other cases, the water tables fell and wells became brackish and unpotable. As Stone concedes, peasants' efforts to save their wells from collapse by lining them with brick were opposed by landownersβmany of them moneylendersβwho feared any improvement that might make tenants more economically independent. "This was especially so in Bulandshahr, where the Settlement Officer noted that the proprietors 'not only failed to improve their property, but their policy had been directly and actively designed to prevent and obstruct improvements. It is almost universal practice for landlords to prevent their tenants from making masonry and half-masonry or, in extreme cases, earthen wells.'"
Canal embankments, moreover, by blocking natural drainage and pooling water in swamps, created ideal breeding environments for anopheline mosquitos. The canal districts, consequently, became notorious for their extraordinary incidences of malaria, India's most deadly epidemic disease. There is little doubt that death and debilitation were greatly abetted by the British reluctance to devote resources to rural public health and, after vector theory was firmly established, to mosquito eradication.
Whitcombe's principal criticism, however, is that (contra Stone) export-oriented canal agriculture, by accelerating the marginalization of _kharif_ crops, actually made producers more vulnerable to famine. "Generally speaking, canal irrigation did, and could do, little to decrease the ravages of scarcity by expanding the sources of staple food supply; indeed its effect seemed to be the reverse, to contract themβa process which tended to worsen with the stimulus of the export trade in grains, particularly wheat, beginning in the late 1870s." Similarly, canal construction was based less on long-term developmental objectives like food security than upon expectations of quick returns from a state-controlled monopoly. "Canals may not protect against famines," Sir Thomas Higham, chief irrigation engineer for the Punjab told the 1901 Irrigation Commission, "but they may give an enormous return on your money."
"Revenues," declared an early government report, "should be the end and aim of all canal administration." (In House of Commons hearings after the 1877 disaster, Sir Arthur Cotton complained that the secretary of state always treated the question of life-saving irrigation as if he "were a shopkeeper in London or a merchant in Manchester who was considering whether he should open another shop or another mercantile house.") But, as Whitcombe emphasizes, "where works were most urgently required, viz. in the Central Provinces and in the Deccan tracts of Bombay and Madras, any expectation of profitability was frankly out of the question." The 420,000 square miles devastated by the 1899β1900 drought, mostly in the Bombay Presidency and the Central Provinces, contrasted with the less than 100,000 acres of canal-irrigated farmland in the same area.
Farmers meanwhile railed against exorbitant water rates, and their protests were echoed by dissident members of the civil service. "There is nothing more urgently needed," wrote the veteran administrator C. J. O'Donnell, "than a scientific water supply in a country so often stricken by drought as India, but 'Imperialist' wisdom, lost in dreams of 'broadening the basis of taxation,' makes irrigation hateful to the very persons who ought to be most interested in its success." The exorbitant revenue rate on irrigated land, ten to fifteen times the assessment of dry farmland, discouraged peasants from using irrigation for anything but cash crops. Alternately, as Kaiwar points out, "villagers found it best to abandon the irrigated fields [altogether] and concentrate on lower-taxed unirrigated fields." As a result of perverse water-pricing disincentives, "there were in 1875, three major irrigation works [in the whole Bombay Deccan] capable of supplying water to 41,150 acres, but only 457 acres were actually being irrigated!"
If, then, "even the best channel-watered villages had few signs of wealth," and "most of the people were forced to seek the moneylender's help and were in debt," the situation was much worse in British-ruled areas that still relied on traditional well and tank irrigation. In stark contrast to the practice of the native states as well as the old Mogul tradition of subsidizing well construction, ryots in British India who sank wells at their own expense on their own land were punitively taxed 12 rupees per year. Indeed, the British enthusiasm for revenue-generating irrigation in the Doab and the Punjab was counterbalanced by their disregard for the small-scale, peasant-managed irrigation systems that had been the hydraulic backbone of agriculture in western and southern India since the early medieval period. The Raj, Hardiman observes, "placed a low value on any irrigation system which the peasantry themselves were responsible for."
Yet modern studies of "industrial" versus "indigenous" irrigation in India and elsewhere in monsoon Asia have shown an inverse relationship between the scale of the system, on one hand, and productivity (output per unit of land over time) and efficiency (output per unit of energy), on the other. Indigenous irrigation systems, according to many modern developmental economists, avoid the problems of salinization and mosquito-borne disease associated with the big canal complexes and are generally "(1) more efficient in the use of energy, capital, and natural resources; (2) have more stable yields over the long term; and (3) are more equitable in terms of opportunities, benefits, and risks." (Indeed, it was "minor irrigation"βespecially deep tube wellsβthat "played a pivotal role in ushering the Green Revolution, particularly in Punjab, Haryana and Western U.P." in the mid 1960s.)
Although such founts of ignorance about India as _The Times_ sometimes portrayed native irrigation as nonexistent, British Army engineers generally marveled at the skill with which previous generations had configured water conservation to the needs of semi-arid India:
In no other part of the world has so much been done by ancient native rulers for the development of the resources of the country. The further south one goes, and the further the old Hindoo polity was removed from the disturbing influence of foreign conquest, the more complete and elaborate was the system of agriculture and irrigation works connected with it... Every available source of supply was utilised, and works in advance of supply have been executed, for tanks [reservoirs] have been very generally constructed, not only for general rainfall, but for exceptional rainfall... Irrigation from rivers and channels, or by these and combined, was also carried on.
The neglect of this magnificent legacy, moreover, was the subject of perennial complaint by both Indian and English critics of the government in Calcutta. As far back as 1785, Edmund Burke had indicted the East India Company for allowing native irrigation to fall into decay, thereby ensuring higher famine mortality during droughts. As Richard Grove has shown, Burke's line of criticism was expanded by William Roxburgh, the East India Company surgeon and pioneer tropical meteorologist who observed the Madras drought-famine of 1789β92 at close hand. In his official report on the famine, he praised precolonial irrigation systems and openly worried that India was becoming more arid and drought-prone as a result of their deterioration. In the 1850s, Cotton, perhaps the greatest connoisseur of indigenous engineering, resumed the critique of this "most unaccountable neglect." In up-country Salem district (an epicenter of mortality in 1877) he enumerated the scale of abandonment with characteristic precision: "8,864 wells, 218 dams, 164 small channels and 1017 small tanks." In Madras as a whole, he estimated that 1,262,906 acres of once-irrigated land had reverted into uncultivated waste. In 1865 the Madras government rejected the advice of Cotton's friend William Wedderburn to continue "the system put into place by the native rulers in the Ceded Districts which granted a reduction in the land-tax rate to induce the ryots to undertake the repairs themselves."
In the Bombay Deccan, meanwhile, a century of warfare had already done much damage to the tens of thousands of wells and tanks (small reservoirs), but British negligence was worse. As Bagchi has shown, the Bombay government completely abdicated public expenditure on irrigation during the first quarter-century of direct rule. In the famine year 1877β78, government loans for local irrigation improvements "hardly exceeded a thousand pounds for the whole Presidency of Bombay." Radical MP Henry Fawcett complained in _The Times_ : "How is it that there are so many ruined tanks and disused canals in a country which has often to depend on them not only for the crops but for the cattle? A sad misgiving has often suggested itself that the former rulers of India, if not so great or so powerful, yet had more of that simple craft and homely benevolence which show themselves in storing the rain and diverting the torrent to the first necessities of man."
On the eve of the great famine, the government's archives were bulging with ignored correspondence on the irrigation crisis. Some of the most knowledgeable observers, disagreeing with Cotton's emphasis on major projects, advocated the subsidization of traditional, bullock-powered well irrigation with its intensive focus on careful watering and manuring. In a prescient 1874 report, Sir Allan Octavian Hume (later the founder of the Indian National Congress) urged the government, as an alternative to costly canals that did not benefit poor peasants, to undertake a crash program of "innumerable small works, tanks and reservoirs... as a reserve against drought." But Calcutta ignored Hume's plan as well as all subsequent pleas (like H. M. Hyndman's and John Dacosta's in separate contemporary pamphlets) after the 1876β78 catastrophe to shift the focus from big canal projects to the repair of traditional wells and reservoirs. It also disdained the appeals of Romesh Dutt and other moderate nationalists who wanted the newly established Famine Fund to support local irrigation: "During the period of 1877β78 to 1896β7 there is no evidence that such works were constructed out of that part of the Fund which was allocated for protective public works."
Yet at the same time, as Baker points out in the case of Tamilnad, one commission after another churned out largely unimplemented schemes for repair of the rapidly deteriorating local irrigation infrastructure. "The commission that reported on the great famine of 1877β78... spent a lot of its time commenting on the urgent need for irrigation in the region, and particularly on the plains. It recommended a reform of the law on kudimaramat, and a concerted scheme to improve the condition of the tanks. The main result of this was the Tank Restoration Scheme. Although the Irrigation Commission in 1901β03 fulsomely approved the Scheme, and urged that it be intensified, it was never properly equipped with men and funds, was always vulnerable to government retrenchment, and had already been abolished and reconstituted twice by 1935."
Conditions were no different in the Madras dry farming zones where, according to the research of Ludden, the decay of tank irrigation was well advanced by mid-century and hardly any new wells were dug between 1870 and 1900. As the _Hindu_ (Madras) editorialized during the 1900 drought: "The tanks and lakes to be found in the country are too few, and for want of occasional digging up and cleansing are often found silted up and too shallow to hold any large quantities of water. Nor is any attention paid to improving the facilities for gathering rain water falling over large areas of land into existing tanks and reservoirs. Owing to this state of things, the occurrence of famine in years when monsoons fail is almost inevitable." Likewise, in the late Victorian Punjab, as Singh has shown, the neglect of small-scale irrigation improvements in the non-canal districts brought about increased dependence upon rainfall and thus greater vulnerability to drought. And in Berar, Satya argues that the government's failure to keep up "the small-scale irrigation systems of dams and reservoirs traditionally constructed and maintained by local rulers, patrons and magnates" was a symptom of their larger unwillingness or inability to "coordinate the supply of public goods at the village level."
The British constantly complained about the 'inertia' of India, but when it came to potentially life-saving local public works, they themselves were the embodiment of decisive inaction. This is anecdotally illustrated by one district officer's frustrated attempts over more than a decade to persuade his superiors to finance a small reservoir dam to check floods and store water for droughts:
The engineering question was referred to the engineer at Bhaugulpore, an eminent authority on hydraulics, who began by picking to pieces the plans and calculations of my engineer, not an eminent authority; putting conundrums, calling for statistics, and demanding a thorough survey of the whole catchment basin. Years passed. He went away, leaving the question unsettled; and his successor refused to give an opinion until he had seen the place. He in his turn left, without having seen the site. The next man went to the spot without letting us know, and utterly condemned the project. I could not understand why, and persuaded him to go again with me. I walked him all over my site, and he then said he must have been shown the wrong place. This was quite a good project. He promised to put his revised opinion on record, but retired from the service soon after without doing so. About this time I came to the conclusion that the next famine would be on us before I should have dragged an opinion on my pattern from our professional experts, and I reluctantly abandoned this form of relief work...
In addition to their failure to finance the upkeep or expansion of small-scale irrigation, the British also typically destroyed the social mechanisms that had allowed villages to undertake irrigation works by themselves. "Settling the land revenue with individual ryots," Kaiwar emphasizes, "broke down the supra-individual authority needed to direct the working of the co-operative system that provided the structural underpinning for building and maintaining the bandharas and regulating water use. In this way, the British methods of taxing agriculture supervened to create a system in which an absolute decline in the technical base of agriculture (e.g., cattle, fodder, manure, tools, and so on) went hand in hand with ecological breakdown (e.g., soil erosion, nutrient depletion, falling or polluted water tables, waterlogging, and so on)."
Indeed, the sahibs themselves often conceded that the devaluation of communal institutions had been a disaster. "In the name of liberty," Nash told readers of the Manchester Guardian, "we have made the individual a bond slave; and we have destroyed the corporate lifeβthat seemingly imperishable thing which the bloody tumults of Mogul and Mahratta left untouched, and which neither famine nor pestilence disturbed." Unlike the rice-growing deltas of Bengal and eastern India, where colonialism forged alliances with zamindars to jointly exploit agricultural labor, British rule in the dry lands led to the displacement of traditional warrior elites and the rapid disintegration of communitarian institutions. In the Bombay Deccan, Kaiwar adds, "within a half a century of the British conquest the village communities were divested of their cohesion and vitality, and they were fragmented into discrete, indeed, antagonistic social groups which had formerly enjoyed an intimate relationship of interdependence." Likewise in the districts of the Madras Deccan, the "development of private property rights and the dissolution of landowning collectivities... destroyed the investment capacity of mirasidar assemblies altogether." "British rule, in various ways, emancipated local political chiefs and big men from the obligation to invest in community resources and public institutions such as tank systems. The shortfall was not made good by the government's own public works."
As David Hardiman suggests, British policies, however Smithian in intention, were usually Hobbesian in practice. In the case of Gujarat, which he cites, the new property forms freed village caste-elites from traditional reciprocities and encouraged them to exploit irrigation resources to their selfish advantage. "This two-fold process created a situation in which dominant communities exchanged water amongst themselves on strictly controlled terms, and supplied water to subordinate groups in highly exploitative ways, normally involving sharecropping arrangements." The entitlement to water thus openly became a relation of inequality and a means of exploitation.
## **11**
## **China: Mandates Revoked**
> When the wealthy vie with each other in splendor and display while the poor squeeze each other to death; when the poor do not enjoy a moment's rest while the rich are comfortable; when poor lose more and more while the rich keep piling up treasures... all of this will finally congeal in an ominous vapor which will fill the space between heaven and earth with its darkness.
>
> β Gong Zizhen
The kaleidoscopic variation of rural social patterns in Victorian India was only partly mirrored in late imperial China. Amid vast ecological and cultural diversity there was also a fundamental geo-economic polarity that had no real counterpart in the subcontinent. The reality of "two Chinas" predated the Cold War by almost a millennium. Every foreign traveler in Qing China was struck by the dramatic contrasts between the bustling mercantilism of the Yangzi Valley and the seemingly frozen subsistence economy of the Yellow River basin.
The silk and cotton monocultures of the lower Yangzi, supported by rice imports from the middle river provinces, generated impressive prosperity during the Qing Golden Age of the eighteenth century at the cost of deepening social divisions between absentee landlords, lease-holding tenants, and landless semi-proletarians. The great recession of the nineteenth century, induced by opium imports, silver outflows and ecological decline, culminated in the anti-Confucian Taiping Revolution, whose millenarian, leveling impulses threatened landlord as well as mandarin power. The immense destruction of the Taiping wars, especially in the middle Yangzi, sapped decades of economic growth and bankrupted the Qings, while leaving intact the hegemony of the lower Yangzi merchant elites and the European allies upon whom they increasingly depended.
North China, by contrast, was a world apart. The largest economy of independent peasants on earth, its historical gentry had been decimated, first by the Mongol invasions, and then by the rebellions that had brought the Ming to power. The Qing, in turn, supported smallholder agriculture as the preferred fiscal base for their centralized state while freeing the peasantry from the heavy burdens of forced labor imposed by the Ming. In contrast to the later fiasco of the _ryotwari_ system in British India, Qing policiesβlike the freezing of corvΓ©e revenues in 1713 and state-insured protection against drought and flood, as well as the appreciation of copper currency in the mid 1700sβgreatly benefited the freehold peasant majority. As even Wittfogel in his famous disquisition on "Oriental despotism" was forced to concede, peasant landownership in northern China was a massive historical fact.
Landlordism, of course, was far from extinct, but it remained a subordinate relation of production in the Yellow River provinces, preponderant only in pockets or within the periphery of cities. In contrast to the late-nineteenth-century Yangzi Delta, where Philip Huang estimates that 45 to 100 percent of the cultivated land (depending on the hsien) was leased from landlords, only 18 percent of the cropland in the Yellow River plain was rented. In Shaanxi or Hebei at the end of the Qing dynasty four out of every five males worked primarily on their own family farm; in the southern province of Jiangxi, on the other hand, the ratio of tenants to freeholders was exactly the inverse. Instead of urban absentees, "managerial farmers," employing hired hands in addition to family labor, tended to be the agricultural elite in the north. (At the time of the Boxer Rebellion only 4.2 percent of the northern population lived in large cities, one of the lowest rates of urbanization in the world.) Because wealthier peasants supported larger households, however, per capita income differentials tended to be small, while diet (40 percent sweet potatoes, 31 percent vegetables and 28 percent grain), as Sidney Gamble discovered in his famous 1920s study of Ting hsien in Hebei, differed little except in quantity between most rural income groups.
Although these farms are often described as the first shoots of rural capitalism, Huang has shown that northern managerial farms "resembled capitalist enterprises only in their use of wage labor: they clearly failed to generate any real advances in labor productivity, whether through economies of scale, increased capital use, or technological improvement." Likewise, the elite kinship networks so central to the highly commercialized economies of the lower Yangzi or the Pearl River deltas were peripheral in the more egalitarian north.
Huang argues that the harsher northern environment and relatively greater frequency of natural disasters were crucial factors in differentiating its social structures and land-tenure patterns from the south. In a climate zone where, as we have seen, annual rainfall variability exceeded 30 percent and irrigation was the exception rather than the rule, average rates of return on agriculture were generally too marginal to attract substantial merchant capital. But the environmental instability of agriculture was counterbalanced by the deeply anchored monolithic character of the smallholder social order supported by a towering imperial state.
If to most foreigners the cultural and ecological landscapes of the north epitomized China's inability to modernize, to others they represented the very essence of China's epochal achievement as a civilization. Francis Nichols, the American journalist who, as we saw earlier, traveled to Zian in 1901 to report on famine relief and the Boxer aftermath for the Christian Herald, discovered Jeffersonian as well as Confucian virtues in the Shaanxi yeomanry. Although the peasants were poor, "there is a complete absence of that condition that we call 'poverty.'... By Shensi roadsides one finds some professional beggars, most of whom are opium-victims, but here are very few 'unemployed,' except as the result of a universal calamity like a famine or a flood. Shensi farms seldom contain more than 3 or 4 acres, but they often remain in the possession of one family for generations. No one ever seems to desire more land or hold it solely for the purpose of selling it again." Moreover, Nichols discovered that Qing despotism, supposedly embodied in the mandarin suppression of all free speech, was belied by a rambunctious civil culture of irreverent political gossip and scalding public criticism.
In "hidden Shensi," where he temporarily swelled the foreign population, Nichols was overwhelmed by the cultural and agronomic continuity of contemporary peasant life with ancient Han civilization. As a courageous critic of imperialist calumnies against the Chinese, he is easily forgiven for romanticizing peasant traditionalism as well as for failing to recognize the changed relations of production that were partly responsible for hideous starvation during the 1899β1901 drought. Everywhere in Shaanxi, the declining economic and ecological viability of smallholder agriculture over the course of the nineteenth century was expressed by increased peasant dependence upon cash crops like opium and cotton. Nichols's admirable farmers were almost universally entrapped in a hopeless system of petty commodity production on subminimal plots that annually wagered household survival on fickle market prices and rainfall patterns. At the same time, vital rural handicrafts were under siege from manufactured imports. Although the only indications of overseas trade (as opposed to traditional inter-Asian trade) that Nichols could find in the markets of Zian were imported cotton thread and some cotton fabrics (marked "Fall River, Massachusetts"), these were potent enough symbols of the destabilizing impact of the world market upon inland China.
**The Commercialization of Subsistence**
The so-called "single whip" reforms under Zhang Juzheng in the late sixteenth century, which transmuted corvΓ©es and revenues-in-kind into cash taxes, had inexorably monetarized subsistence production. As immigration and high fertility rates supported by Qing antifamine policies began to rebuild populations in the provinces devastated by late Ming warfare (especially Henan, Shaanxi and Shanxi, where as much as one-third of the cultivated land had been depopulated) to their historical maximums, the customs of partible inheritance generated growing pressure on farmland. In the absence of the European alternatives of rapidly growing cities and overseas colonies to absorb supernumerary agricultural labor, Qing China struggled to sustain its standard of living within traditional parameters of land use and agricultural technique.
Initially, there was stunning success. In her recent study of Shaanxi's densely populated Wei River Valleyβthe site of terrible mortality in 1877β78 and again in 1899β1901βLaura Murray confirms the role of new world crops (especially sweet potatoes and maize) and marginal land reclamation in accommodating population growth at constant levels of per capita output through the mid eighteenth century. By the 1780s, however, the Wei Valley peasantry was caught in what Murray (borrowing from Mark Elvin) characterizes as a "high-level equilibrium trap" in which increasing labor inputs realized diminishing returns in crop yield. With average cultivated land per capita reduced to three-quarters of an acre, even the most intense efforts by Wei farmers could barely produce the caloric minimum of grain to maintain their continued labor. In this context, cash crops' higher value per unit of land made them irresistibly attractive to the poorest strata of the peasantry.
Commercialization on these terms was usually more "a gamble for survival" than an exercise in optimal resource utilization, and cash crops were immediately sold to purchase food and pay taxes, not used to accumulate capital or land. As Murray emphasizes, "land use tended to shift from grain crops to cash crops when population density reached the point that average holdings were too small to supply adequate subsistence grains... Many families [were only] able to survive on plots too small for subsistence farming because of the higher value of cash crops. Most counties with a high level of commercialization also had grain deficits, and their residents depended on complex trade networks."
The Wei Valley case was probably typical of the logic of subsistence cash-cropping throughout north China. "From their differing perspectives, Chao Kang, Philip Huang, and Ramon Myers have all shown that faced with diminishing farm size, the vast majority of peasants were able to sustain their livelihoods only by the ability to intensify, to turn to subsidiary occupations, and to switch to cash crops." Huang, in particular, cautions against the common assumption of development theorists that such peasants, simply because of their dependence on commodity networks, were suddenly transformed into the competitive, incipient capitalist subjects of neoclassical economics. "This kind of market involvement should not be mistaken for entrepreneurial marketing, nor should such peasant behavior be mistaken for profit-maximizing rationality. Theirs was the rationality of survival, not of profit maximization." Moreover, Huang offers a useful distinction between the "survival-driven commercialization" so common in north China and the "extraction-driven commercialization" in the more class-stratified Yangzi Delta, where peasants were forced into the market primarily to earn rent payments to landlords and interest payments to moneylenders.
North China peasants, within the limits of a relatively uniform ecology, embraced several alternative systems of cash crop subsistence. Throughout the Yellow River plain, for example, villages commonly sold wheat to the cities or distilleries (like those around Linqing on the Grand Canal) and used the cash to buy coarse grainsβmillet, sorghum and buckwheatβfor their own diet. Likewise in Shandong, along the route of the JiaozhouβJinan railroad, tobacco monoculture supplanted grain production on much of the best farmland. Peanuts were commercially important by the eve of the Boxer uprising in southern Hebei as well as in the semi-arid foothills just north of the Great Wall.
Opium cultivation, meanwhile, was a primitive form of import substitution, embraced, despite its theoretical illegality, by magistrates and merchants throughout northwest and southwest China. In Shanxi the governor had sponsored opium cultivation as early as 1852 in a desperate attempt to bolster revenues and peasant incomes. Poppies quickly supplanted so much grain acreage that missionaries, like the American Presbyterian Dr. Elkins, blamed the extreme famine mortality of 1877β78 on the opium boom. In the Wei Valley, opium got a later start, becoming a major commercial crop only after 1870, when fiscally strapped county governments began to encourage its export to other parts of northern China. Once established, however, its growth was dramatic. By 1890, opium had become the livelihood of a majority of the peasantry in the eastern counties of the valley.
For marginal peasants everywhere in China, however, the most important cash crop was cotton. It had two principal virtues. In the first place, there was huge, relatively stable internal demand. Second, peasants could add value by processing cotton as spun yarn and woven fabric. Moreover, from the merchant standpoint, rural surplus labor was more rationally exploited at home than in the workshop. "Once the marginal product of labor fell below the subsistence wage," Madeleine Zelin explains, "it became more economical for merchants to contract or purchase goods from household producers than to produce them themselves using hired labor. Surplus labor was thus retained at home, where the peasant and his family, wishing to garner whatever they could from their residual productivity, were willing to work for less than subsistence wages. The system was possible because the equipment needed to produce yarn, cloth, and other handicraft items was relatively cheap, and problems of marketing were solved by the dense network of rural markets in place by the early Qing."
Originally, the north China plain had been simply a periphery to the lower Yangzi textile revolution, exchanging raw cotton for cotton cloth. The northern winters, however, gave peasant households a long slack time in which they could concentrate on spinning and weaving for household use and sale. In Arthur Smith's famous account of Village Life in China (1899), the Shandong-based missionary marveled at the grim dedication of north China's peasants-cum-handloom weavers: "In some regions every family owns a loom (one of the clumsy machines exiled from the West a century ago) and it is not uncommon for the members of a family to take turns, the husband weaving until midnight, when the wife takes up the task till daylight (often in cellars two-thirds underground, damp, unventilated, and unwholesome)."
**Figure 11.1 Home Cotton Spinning**
Spinning cotton yarn was often the margin of survival on undersized farm plots.
As in pre-industrial Europe, a vast system of cotton handicrafts emerged, centered on the Yellow River Delta, which, in turn, stimulated the further conversion of cereal acreage to cotton in counties as far away as the loess plateaux. Simultaneously, new world crops like maize and sweet potatoes, which demanded less labor for higher yields, allowed producers to devote more land and labor to all phases of cotton production. Thus by the middle of the eighteenth century, north China was second only to the lower Yangzi in cotton cultivation, which "replacing grain, occupied an estimated 20β30% of all agricultural land." It was not rare to find counties near river or canal transport, as in southern and central Hebei, where 80 to 90 percent of the population derived its principal subsistence from trading cotton cloth (sold as far away as Korea) for millet. Indeed for poorer peasants forced to lease land, "there was often no choice at all: once rental terms on land that could grow cotton came to be set according to the market potential of that crop, no tenant could really afford to grow cereals."
In good years, therefore, cash cropping allowed basically "sub-subsistence" farms to survive in great numbers. Although cotton required twice as much labor per mu as sorghum or millet, this was not a problem in an "involuted" economy where labor was abundant and land was scarce. But cotton cultivation in north China "cut both ways," as Huang has emphasized in his study of the Hebeiβnorthwest Shandong region. "The smallholder found that, though his returns became higher, so too did his expenses. The risks from natural or man-made disaster were thus correspondingly greater." Whereas millet and sorghum depend upon the late summer monsoon, cotton requires ample rainfall or irrigation in the spring: "a relatively dry season at best, with only 10β15 percent of the total annual precipitation." To the extent that households derived increasing subsistence from the sale of cotton or cotton handicrafts, their survival was mortgaged more precariously than before against ENSO fluctuations. "Drought in the spring could bring total disaster to a household completely dependent on cotton."
The boomβbust cycle of cotton production also reinforced social stratification, enlarging the ranks of poor peasants or laborers dependent upon seasonal or permanent wage labor. Since partible inheritance dissolved most village-level concentrations of wealth after a generation or two, the growth of a rich peasant class in north China in the Victorian era was less dramatic than the accumulation of mendicancy and instability below. Unlike the Yangzi Delta, agrarian immiseration in the North was not counterbalanced by the consolidation of big mercantile or agrarian capital. In drought-ravaged northern Shaanxi, where survivors of the Long March would regroup in 1935, "it could be said that socioeconomic differences within the region were really a matter of varying depths of poverty." Reliance on the market only exacerbated the radical nakedness of these pauper layers in face of the threats of drought and flood. Huang cites the apprehensions of a mid-nineteenth-century magistrate in a Shandong county where most of the sown land was dedicated to cotton. "The rich do not store grain, and the poor rely entirely on hiring out and the board that comes with wage labour. Once confronted with natural disaster and bad harvests, they are at a complete loss."
Micro-commercialization in addition added new exposures to such man-made disasters (often interacting with the natural) as commodity cycles, price inflation and monetary speculation. The diversion of so much cultivable acreage from grain production made tens of millions of formerly autonomous peasants directly dependent upon the grain trade and the price ratio between cash crops and subsistence cereals. Folk textiles, meanwhile, faced the competition after 1880 of factory-produced imports from India and Japan. Handspun yarn declined from 98 percent of China's consumption in 1876 to little more than 40 percent in 1900, and cotton merchants were transformed from peddlers of domestic production into salesmen of foreign yarn. India's export to Asia, principally China, meanwhile increased from 21.3 million pounds in 1878 to nearly 300 million pounds in 1905. The most spectacular surge in yarn importsβ40 percent in value in a single yearβoccurred, ominously enough, between 1898 and 1899.
"A peasant spinner," Huang emphasizes, "simply could not overcome the overwhelming advantage of a technology by which, according to one estimate, he could be outproduced by as much as 8,000 percent by a worker using a power spindle. The result was a product so cheap it sometimes sold close to the cost of raw cotton." It was not surprising that rural Chinese were baffled by the origin of such cheap thread. Thus a Shaanxi spinner whom Francis Nichols interviewed in 1901 "accounted for [the cheapness of American cotton thread] by the theory that the United States was an island not far from China. When I told him that the country from which the thread came was 18,000 li from the plain of Sian, he shook his head dubiously. 'The thread would cost more,' he said, 'if it had to be brought such a long distance.'" Although handloom weaving, which benefited from better factory-made yarn, would struggle on against machine competition for another generation, the collapse of cotton spinning in the 1890s had profound repercussions for the poorest strata of north China peasants.
Esherick in his study of the social origins of the Boxer movement, as we have seen, argues that western Shandong became the seedbed of revolt in the late 1890s precisely because of its combined vulnerability to natural disaster and foreign textile imports. The changed course of the Yellow River after 1855 and the consequent silting up of the Grand Canal, combined with an increased frequency of flood and drought, had made the depressed regions along the ShandongβHebei and ShandongβJiangsuβHenan borders ever more dependent on cotton handicrafts for sheer survival. "Too isolated and too lacking in alternative resources to enjoy any of the stimulative effects that the treaty port economies sometimes generated in their more immediate hinterlands," western Shandong was economically devastated in the 1890s by the loss of its traditional markets to factory-made Indian cotton yarn and cloth. The imports were the dragons' teeth, sown by the world market, that eventually grew into peasant insurrection.
**Depletion of the Granaries**
The commercialization of subsistence in north China was only weakly supported by long-distance grain trading. The raw cotton and cotton handicrafts, wheat, tobacco and opium grown by poor peasants were principally exchanged within "cellular" local markets usually coinciding with county boundaries or, more rarely, with the north China regional system. There was an insufficient two-way flow of goods between the periodically grain-deficit north and the surplus-producing Yangzi Valley to protect against harvest shortfalls on a large scale. As late as 1900, the inter-regional trade of farm products was only 7 percent of total empire-wide production. Regular long-distance grain trading was confined to eastβwest corridors within southern Chinaβfor example, from Sichuan and Hunan down the Yangzi River, or from Guangxi to Guangdongβwhere economic specialization was most developed. By contrast, the flow of grain from south to north, frequently against the gravity of market prices, required the heavy lifting of the imperial tribute system. Ironically, as northern peasants increasingly staked their survival on cash crops, they became, if anything, more dependent on the state's capacity to ensure the inter-regional redistribution of grain outside of market mechanisms. And this depended, in the first place, on the empire's fiscal health.
"The eighteenth century," Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski emphasize, "was a period of surplus revenues for the Qing state: bulging treasuries and a fat Privy Purse, the product not only of peace and prosperity but also of the successful tightening of control over tax remittances from the provinces under Yongzheng [emperor]." On the eve of the French Revolution, the Qing treasury still had a surplus of 70 million taels, but this was rapidly expended in costly military campaigns or squandered by corrupt courtiers. By the time that the Jiaqing emperor took the throne in 1796, the Golden Age had ended and fiscal crisis was becoming chronic. The turning point was a millenarian peasant uprising in the disaster-prone border region of western Shandong ("repeatedly afflicted by either drought or flooding of the Huai and Yellow Rivers"). The ensuing decade-long war (1796β1804) against the White Lotus rebelsβ"the first major human calamity (renhuo) in about 120 years"βsapped both the treasury and tribute grain reserves. "The food supply priorities of the state shifted to provisioning large numbers of troops": a diversion that would become almost total during the later Taiping, Nian and Muslim civil wars.
Immensely costly flood catastrophes, which had no equivalent in the eighteenth century, also conspired to push the late Qing state deep into insolvency. There were no less than seventeen consecutive years of flooding between 1839 and the final Yellow River cataclysm of 1855. "The cost to the state in social disruption, lost agricultural income, and relief and repair funds was immense. Combined with the expense of the Opium War and the state's already weakened fiscal conditions, these floods left the state treasury barren." Even greater calamities, of course, followed in the 1850s when the rain-swollen Yellow River hijacked the course of the Daqing River (one of its ancestral channels) to switch deltas from the Yellow Sea to the Gulf of Bohai just as the Taiping revolution was cutting off Beijing's all-important revenues and grain tributes from the Yangzi Valley.
The Qing fiscal system, as we saw earlier, was additionally undermined by price inflation rooted in China's opium-generated trade deficits as well as the exchange perturbations that followed the Great Powers' adoption of the gold standard in the 1870s. Despite desperate efforts to insulate taxes from monetary erosion by maintaining a favorable copper/silver ratio, Wang Yeh-chien has estimated that the real value of land revenues declined by almost two-thirds from the Golden Age of the 1750s to the Boxer uprising. From the mid nineteenth century the Qing had mixed success in using commercial taxes, special surcharges and customs revenue to arrest the erosion of their traditional agrarian tax-base. Their increasing reliance on tax farmers to collect old and new revenues only increased the illegal "leakage." At the end of day, however, the fiscal crisis came to weigh most heavily upon provincial and county governments, which depended even more than Beijing on land revenue yet were increasingly expected to shoulder additional responsibilities for self-defense, flood control, irrigation and famine relief.
Fiscal crisis directly translated into reduced administrative capacity and indirectly into diminished peasant food security, at least in areas poorly served by the inter-regional rice trade. The ever-normal and charity granary systems which stored as much as 48 million shih of reserve rice, wheat and millet in the high Qing were rapidly depleted. "Even in the early eighteenth century, when the population of China was not much more than half of its 1840 (or 1930) level, this amount probably represented little more than 3 or 4 per cent of the nation's grain output." Will cites an edict of 1799 complaining that only one-quarter of the ever-normal granaries had stored their full quotas. Reduced to these levels, the imperial granaries were no longer able to act as an economic flywheel "normalizing" grain prices. By the 1820s, according to R. Bin Wong, the empire-wide grain reserves had fallen below 30 million shih; by the 1850s, they were under 20 million. Twenty years later, at the onset of famine in 1876, there was probably less than 10 million shih left in the entire system.
At a local level, this was often equivalent to complete collapse. Even in the Golden Age, the ever normal mechanism of restocking granaries with autumn purchases had broken down in much of the northwest. Granaries in Shaanxi and Gansu were forced to distribute grain more frequently than they could afford by their own account, and the ensuring deficit had to be financed by Beijing. From the calamitous watershed of the White Lotus Rebellion, the regional disequilibrium between annual harvest and minimum consumption was exacerbated by a vicious circle of declining agricultural productivity, ethno-religious warfare and government insolvency. Gentry-managed community and charity granaries, which took up some of the burden of food security elsewhere (Hunan and Sichuan, for example), were ineffective in braking the decline of state granaries in the impoverished loess areas. As a result, granary inventories in some counties of Shaanxi had fallen to less than 10 percent of their quotas by the early 1870s. On the eve of the great drought, in other words, northwest China was ripe for catastrophe.
The empire-wide rundown in ever-normal granary inventories was also accompanied by an increasing diversion of tribute grain flows from the inland north China plain. Although, as Dwight Perkins points out, the "amount of grain going north to Peking was trivial in comparison to total national output (0.2β0.3 per cent)," it represented about 15 percent of the revenues of the central government, and, as we saw in the case of the 1743 drought, constituted a strategic famine reserve close at hand in north China. Most of the tribute was supplied by four provinces (Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Anhui and northern Zhejiang), and there was intense lobbying by the Jiangnan elites to substitute the maritime route for the Grand Canal. "Beginning in the 1870s, the coastal steamer rapidly replaced grain-tribute junks on the Grand Canal. By the 1890s, the only substantial amounts of grain carried by canal junk were the shipments of millet from Shantung." Beijing's port of Tianjin (Tientsin) boomed as a result, while the older Canal entrepΓ΄ts with their large workforces of bargemen and laborers (key constituencies of the Boxer uprising) declined into permanent depression. Although the imperial granaries at Tongzhou, near Beijing, were still theoretically available for relief campaigns, Will shows that by the end of the Jiaqing reign in 1820 tribute grain had ceased to play a major role in combating famine.
As the state infrastructure deteriorated, the Empire increasingly relied on a combination of cash handouts and local philanthropy to relieve famines. In 1831, the Daoguang emperor, noting "the wretched condition" of the imperial granaries, "remarked that 'for this reason, when a province is hit by calamity, [the local authorities] rarely ask that [the victims] be aided with ever-normal grain; in general, they content themselves with applying for silver from the provincial treasury and converting it into copper cash to be distributed [to the population].'" Although the Tongzhi reformers temporarily returned to a vigorous hands-on approach to famine relief when the region around the capital was successively baked by drought and drowned by flood in 1867β68, it was a last hurrah for Confucian statecraft in the heroic mode of Fang Guancheng. Henceforth Beijing's principal response to weather disasters was the tardy donation of cash. As we have seen in the accounts of the 1877 and 1899 famines, the resort to monetary relief had fatal flaws.
The market, for example, was frequently unable to accommodate emergency demand. Either the explosion in grain prices quickly exceeded the minimal survival value of cash relief, or, as in the extreme case of Shanxi, there was simply not enough grain locally available at any price. Attempts to purchase and transport large amounts of grain at one time into the loess highlands only produced catastrophic traffic pile-ups like that at Guguan Pass in 1877. Unlike the Yangzi Valley, where water transport of rice remained cheap and efficient, grain commerce in the drier northern provinces, especially during droughts, suffered from the paucity of navigable waterways. In John Lossing Buck's epic study, Land Utilization in China, only two out of fifty-one northern villages had access to water transport in contrast to twenty-three out of eighty in the south. From the perspective of a society dependent on commercial grain for survival during famine, overland transport was staggeringly expensive and inefficient. Summarizing the Royal Asiatic Society's extensive 1893β94 investigations of inland communications in China, T. Kingsmill marveled that a civilization so brilliant in its development of water transport could entirely abdicate road construction. "Probably no country in the world," he wrote, "has paid so little attention to roads," especially in the north where "neglect culminates."
**Table 11.1
Transport in the North China Plain: Comparative Efficiency**
| Tonnage | Cost Index
---|---|---
River junks | 40β100 tons | 1.0
Carts | 1 ton | 3.3
Pack mules | .125 ton | 8.2
Coolies | .09 ton | 8.6
Source: Data from George Cressey, _China's Geographic Foundations,_ New York 1934, p. 179.
Mary Wright long ago suggested that deliberate neglect of inland arteries of transport was rational policy from Beijing's point of view. State-power in imperial China was frequently equated with immobilization of the peasantry and their isolation from disruptive ideological or economic influences. The Qing, in this interpretation, were no more eager to encourage the peasantry to move around the country than they were to invite foreign powers to use railroads to bring troops and cheap factory goods into the interior. Even the reformers of the 1860s "were interested in improved communications only in so far as they might affect maritime defense and the food supply of the capital." This neglect, however, would over time grow into a principal popular grievance. The Communists in Shaanbei and other northern base areas in the late 1930s won great popularity for making road-building a top priority of their rural reconstruction program.
**Corruption and Devolution**
The monetarization of relief also made it even easier for venal officials to pilfer funds. The rampant practice in the nineteenth century of selling local offices to generate relief funds dramatically expanded the number of lower-level fiscal predators. The ever-normal granaries and the grain-tribute administration were especially lush targets for corrupt officials in the Rasputin-like mold of Heshen, the notorious late-eighteenth-century minister of revenue with whom the Qianlong emperor probably had a homosexual liaison. As Will points out, everyone in late Qing China, from the emperor to secret societies, believed that honesty and efficiency in local government had declined dramatically from the 1790s:
As early as 1801, the year the Jiaqing emperor closely supervised the special measures carried out in Zhili in the wake of severe flooding, he was struck by the troubling thought that the skyrocketing cost of relief in other provinces was perhaps better explained by the profits made by the "clerks and runners" than by the number of ruined peasants pure and simple; and later in the reign, various memorials spoke of the extortions exacted by investigators and subbureaucrats, unauthorized deductions from provincial funds, registers of disaster victims drawn up without verification of any kind, distribution centers established with attention to actual needs, gruel containing sand, fraudulent exchange rates in converting silver to copper, and other abuses.
By the coronation of the unhappy Xiangong emperor a half-century later, these abuses, seemingly magnified by the Qings' inability to defend Chinese sovereignty, had become core revolutionary grievances. As prolonged drought turned into famine through much of Guangxi and Guangdong in 1848β49, "corrupt local magistrates connived with local grain merchants to manipulate distributions from the local granaries so as to drive the already exorbitant rice price higher." When, ultimately, rice became "as high as the price of pearls," starving peasants attempted to open granaries and were slaughtered by the magistrates' troops. As a direct result, countless thousands flocked to the angry millenarian banner of "God's Chinese Son," Hong Xiuquan. Later, in the summer of 1852, when the Taiping kings paused in Daozhou (southern Hunan) to issue their famous proclamations against the Qing, they accused their rulers of "withholding public relief from victims of flood, famine and other natural calamities in order to decrease the Chinese population." The benevolent eighteenth-century welfare state of the Yongzheng emperor was not even a distant memory. "Whenever floods and droughts occur, [the Manchus] do not show the slightest compassion; they sit and watch the starving people wander by until the bleached bones grow like wild weeds."
The Tongzhi Restoration did little to restore popular confidence in local government's ability to provide protection against disaster. Despite the reformers' rhetorical exaltation of the social compact between the Qing and the peasantry, one of their most significant initiatives (in the name of rewarding the loyal elites who had fought the Taiping) was a vast sale of Confucian merit that increased the caste of degree-holders from 1.1 million to 1.45 million. The venal appetite of this enlarged gentry explains why peasants were groaning under new fiscal oppressions while Beijing was simultaneously complaining that it was broke. Granary administration, in particular, was treated as a spoils system by local collusions of corrupt officials and grain merchants. By 1893, when the first Western study of Chinese finances was completed, more than half of the north's tribute grain was estimated as lost to pilferage.
The officials in charge of the granaries juggle with the rice, and every few years a great scandal occurs; old and decayed rice is paid out in the place of new rice, weights and measures are falsified, the Manchu soldiery are found to be selling their nominal rights for what they will fetch, and to be actually buying eatable rice in the market, and so on. Peking, in short, is like a filthy colony of rats, each official living in a hole of his own, and preying, when he can and where he can, upon the public storehouse.
Although honest local officials still struggled heroically to restock the granaries, their efforts were everywhere undercut by corrupt subordinates. Murray cites the example of a magistrate in Shaanxi's Han-ch'eng countyβwhich in the early 1890s had not yet recovered from the 1877β78 disasterβwho conscientiously bought up grain surpluses during good years to fill twenty local granaries. When drought destroyed the harvest in 1900, he turned confidently to his reserves only to find that the granary administrators had secretly sold off two-thirds of the inventory. As a result, the county was almost depopulated by famine. (When the empress-mother arrived in Zian at the end of the famine, she ordered a thorough review of the famine-relief accounts "that ended in cutting off the heads of three of the most prominent mandarins of the province.")
In face of such obdurate corruption and overwhelmed by fiscal exigencies, the imperial government disengaged itself even further from direct administration of food security. As Mary Rankin, Mark Elvin and others have emphasized, the formidable state capacities of the eighteenth century were gradually devolved to the non-office-holding gentry during the long nineteenth-century siege by imperialism and domestic rebellion. Nouveaux riches merchants and landowners increasingly coordinated tax collection, local law-and-order, flood control and famine relief. When the resources of the locally managed zhenju (relief bureaus) and their privately stocked charity granaries were inadequate to the task, the late Qing state turned to the wealthy Jiangnan elites, who donated rice and cash, provided assistance with transportation, and opened their city gates to famine refugees from the north. But this makeshift system, which failed so catastrophically in 1877 and 1899, was never a real alternative to the vertically integrated state infrastructure of the previous century with its abilities to maintain local ever-normal granaries as well as to carry out the inter-regional transfers that "alone made large-scale and long-lasting famine relief possible."
The reconstruction of the granary system and restoration of peasant food security, accordingly, became central demands of all anti-Qing revolutionaries. Long before Mao's "Yenan Way," the Taipings in their utopian manifesto, _The Land System of the Heavenly Dynasty_ , had envisioned a more directly "communist" system for redistributing the entire agricultural surplus through new state granaries.
All land under heaven will be cultivated in common by all who live under heaven... [The produce from] all land under heaven will circulate to equalize abundance and scarcity. The produce of one locality where the harvest is good will be transported to give relief to another place where famine occurs... At harvest time the _liang-ssu-ma_ [headmen of twenty-five households] will supervise the _wu-chang_ [headmen of five households] and will, after deducting [quantities of grain] sufficient for food for each of the persons belonging to the twenty-five households until the next harvest, [collect] the surplus and send it to the state granaries.
**Paying the Bill for the Golden Age**
North China's history has been shaped by its paradoxical position within the larger spatial economy of the Empire: economically peripheral, it remained the administrative core. The geographical separation of economic and political power in Chinaβequivalent to the distance between London and Berlinβhas been unique for a land-based state. Since the early Sung Dynasty, the greater part of the economic surplus had been produced in the lower Yangzi Valley, but the largest center of surplus consumption usually has been in the north (Chang'an, Dadu, Kaifeng and Beijing) on the edge of the steppe, close to the nomadic sources of Jurchen, Mongol and Manchu military hegemony.
The extraordinary transportation infrastructureβcomprising the Grand Canal, its feeder waterways and storage depotsβused to move surplus wealth from south to north also made it possible for the Qings to ecologically stabilize northern agriculture with vital imports of rice, fuel, timber and stone. In the mid eighteenth century, as we have seen, the imperial bureaucracy could mobilize famine relief more effectively than any European polity. Yet a century later, Beijing seemed almost powerless to intervene in one of the most deadly chain reactions of civil war, foreign intervention, climate disaster, disease and famine in history. This collapse in state capacity to control the natural as well as social environments has long vexed historians of modern China. "Why did ecological degradation," asks Kenneth Pomeranz in a recent forum, "which up until the mid-eighteenth century was arguably under better control than in Europe or Japan assume crisis proportions thereafter?"
Recent scholarship suggests the necessary distinction between two discrete, if ultimately convergent, environmental crises, developing at separate tempos and levels in the social formation. In the first case, peasant land clearances in the mountainous watersheds of the Yellow, Wei and Huai Rivers accelerated the erosion cycle with inevitably devastating consequences for the plains below. In the second case, the mid-Victorian fiscal crisis of the Qing state, which coincided with skyrocketing costs of flood control arising from increased sedimentation, led to the gradual devolution of hydraulic management to a pauperized peasantry and unwilling gentry. North Chinese agriculture was thus exposed to the most severe climate stress in 200 years (the extreme ENSO cycles of the 1870s and 1890s) precisely when the state was in full retreat from its traditional ecological mandates.
The Qing Golden Age in the eighteenth century, Robert Marks reminds us, was based on a "massive remaking" of Chinese environmental space. Population growth under a system of partible inheritance between 1750 and 1850, at least partly induced by the rising "protoindustrial" demand for family labor in rural handicraft production, put increasing stress on agro-ecological carrying capacity. Unlike Europe, this population explosion was not absorbed through the parallel growth of urban centers or emigration to overseas colonies. Indeed, according to Maddison, "by 1820 the Chinese degree of urbanisation was not much greater than it had been a thousand years earlier," and actually declined from the early Qing (6.8 percent of population) to the late Qing (5.9 percent). As in India, the long economic recession in the first half of the nineteenth centuryβdue in China's case to the negative balance of trade and silver outflows caused by opium importsβcaused widespread urban unemployment and pushed many workers into the countryside.
Instead, the eighteenth-century population boom (estimates, as we have seen, range wildly from a 33 percent to a 200 percent increase) was largely accommodated by ecologically unsustainable settlement in formerly uncultivated mountains, foothills and wet lowlands. Peasant pioneers and improving landowners brought nearly 25,000 square kilometers of new land under the plough during the eighteenth centuryβmost of it hilly or periodically inundated. The immediate advantages were great. Legendary profits were made clear-cutting the forests that still protected the watersheds of China's great rivers. Worrisome congestion in the fertile valleys and plains was temporarily relieved by mass emigration into foothill and mountain peripheries where New World crops like maize and sweet potatoes allowed cultivators to wrest a living from sandy, unfertilized soils previously regarded as untillable. At the same time, land-hungry peasants and urban speculators built dikes to reclaim hundreds of thousands of acres of rich marsh and bottom land for commercial agriculture.
By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, however, the marginal returns from forestry and land conversion were near the vanishing point. Manchuria aside, Rhoads Murphey estimates that Chinese forests "were already largely gone by 1820, almost wholly by 1860." Too many peasants clung to eroding hillsides or struggled to drain malarial wetlands. Overflow basins that managed flood waters, as well as reservoirs that stored water for irrigation in dry spells, had been ill-advisedly turned into fields, with predictably disastrous results. Thus the great clearances that had subsidized the Golden Age became root causes of intractable ecological crisis during the century that followed. This previously little-understood environmental history of Qing population growth has been admirably explored in recent case-studies of the Pearl River watershed (Marks) and the Dongting Lake region in the middle Yangzi Valley (Perdue). In both regions, the early windfalls of virgin soil cultivation were inevitably followed by environmental degradation and increased vulnerability to natural hazards. Nature collected the bill for eighteenth-century prosperity in deferred payments of drought, flood and famine.
**The Denudation of North China**
The greatest downstream tragedies, however, took place in the system of the Yellow River and its major tributaries. Shaanxi's Wei River Valley, studied by several authors, is a sobering example. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the foothills of the Chinling Mountains, which formed the valley's southern border, were still heavily wooded. During the early and mid-Qing, however, huge "timber factories" mobilizing armies of 3,000 to 5,000 woodcutters and laborers systematically denuded the forests. Subsequently, thousands of poor peasants from congested counties as far away as Szechwan and Hupei were officially encouraged by tax exemptions and other subsidies to emigrate to the region. (Edward Vermeer stresses the perverse role of Qing tax policies that often rewarded the exploitation of marginal lands while penalizing farmers for improvements on existing, high-quality plots.) New World crops allowed cultivation on soils that were "too sandy, too acidic, too infertile and drought-prone to have supported settled populations in any numbers in the past." Maize and potatoes, especially, could be cultivated on sloping, unterraced hillsides with thin soil layers otherwise unsuitable for rice or wheat. However, the price of this cheap subsistence was increased erosion that eventually became catastrophic.
**Figure 11.2 Hillside Farms in Shaanxi**
As farming deforested hillsides the erosion rate increased exponentially.
Within a few generations, geomorphological forces had crossed a dynamic threshold and gullies grew with alarming speed, deepening sometimes by several hundred feet within the span of a single human lifetime. "By the mid-nineteenth century," writes Murray, "the mountains became barren and the rivers were blocked up." The first modern European visitors, like Baron von Richthofen in 1870, gave vivid accounts of the silting up of the famous Qing irrigation systems, particularly the magnificent complex that had made the Wei plain a hearth of civilization. Similarly, many of the areas in the loess country that Marco Polo had praised for verdancy and the abundance of mulberry trees had become treeless near-deserts by Victorian times. Although foreigners often confused modern and ancient decay (serious hydraulic deterioration in the Wei Valley dated back to Tang times), the nineteenth century administered the environmental coup de grace.
For peasants, meanwhile, the easy living of early pioneer days became an increasingly grim battle for survival on eroding islands of semi-arable soil. "On the lower slopes, by the later nineteenth century, there had been up to a century of maize cultivation with only limited fertilizer; yields began to fall drastically. Potato crops began to suffer seriously from disease... Yields were unstable; the price of food began to rise, doubling in the nineteenth century, owing to the increasing population and static or declining supplies." Eventually many mountain farmers were unable to produce their own family subsistence, so they turned to fruit trees as a cash crop. "This specialization," Murray explains, "was regarded by the authors of the local history as particularly precarious, because the profit of the entire year depended on a single harvest. Many of the fruit growers were extremely poor, lacking even adequate food and clothing."
The mid-century civil wars completed the denudation of China's surviving forested watersheds:
Accounts of the time... repeatedly mention wanton destruction of forests by the Taipings, and equally massive assaults by the Imperial forces in their effort to deny shelter to the rebels. The major weapon seems to have been fire. There are descriptions of former forests which by the 1860s consisted only of blackened stumps over hundreds of square miles. All of this activity was concentrated in the remaining area within, or around the edges of, the major center of population in China proper which still had some vestigial forest cover. The mountainous far west was unaffected, but forests there were of little use to the rest of China, where the vast majority of the people lived. Those forests were in turn heavily exploited in the course of the great Muslim rebellions and their suppression, concentrated in Yunnan and in Shensi-Kansu, between 1855 and 1878.
Depopulation and ecological devastation was perhaps most extreme in Shaanxi, where genocidal ethnic warfare killed or displaced an estimated 90 percent of the Muslim population and left much of the province outside the Wei Valley a wilderness for the Chinese Communists to resettle a full half-century later. As Pauline Keating points out, the financially strapped Qing "invested only in the pacification of Shaanxi, not its reconstruction."
**Figure 11.3 A Silted-up Channel in the Wei Valley**
In the absence of both an official resettlement strategy and a sustained program of infrastructural repair and development, local economic systems disintegrated. Whole villages were deserted, the distances between settlements became longer, transport routes fell into disrepair (a process made swifter by the rapid erosion of earthen constructions in loess country), and market centers and trading networks disappeared. Water wells, irrigation and drainage systems, cropland embankments, granaries, and pathways were not maintained.
The same dismal sequence, if less apocalyptically, was repeated everywhere throughout the foothills and loess plateaux of northwest China. "It seemed as if humans had set out to reduce their original environment to only two types of land: carefully maintained, productive, private farmland, and ruthlessly exploited, unproductive, common wasteland." Nor was deforestation, as an account from turn-of-the-century Shandong makes clear, the last stage in the economic exploitation of the foothills and mountains. "All the boys of the village big enough to walk and carry a basket are sent out over the hillsides to collect grass, twigs, and any kind of herbage that can be used as fodder or fuel. Each boy carries an iron grubbing hook, and thus equipped he clambers up the slopes, working away at this task with cheerful energy. Through the industry of this army of human locusts the mountains are denuded of herbage and even roots often grubbed up." The stubble that remained on the slopes was burnt to provide fertilizing ash run-off for fields downhill.
As the last local sources of firewood were exhausted, a fuel and lumber famine began to undermine agriculture throughout north China. Despite vast, although poorly mined, coal deposits in Shandong and Shanxi, the rural poor could seldom afford coal, and the breakdown of the Grand Canal system, to be discussed in a moment, inflated its price as well as that of imported wood from central China. Cheap Manchurian timber was available in the coastal cities, but was generally not imported into the interior. "Demand for construction material," wrote an American authority on Chinese forestry in the 1920s, "has been reduced to supply, until in northern Shensi about the only articles of wood within a house are chopsticks, and only the door and the paper window lattice of the house are of wood." Likewise in southwest Shandong, Pomeranz estimates that the fuel supply per peasant household at the time of the Boxer upheaval was barely a quarter of what was traditionally held to be the subsistence minimum. Scarce cattle dung, therefore, had to be burnt for heat and less fertilizer was applied to the soil. Alternatively, more intensive efforts had to be made gathering residual vegetation from the hillsides, thus ensuring their complete denudation.
As in India, deforestation enhanced the frequency of hydrological drought by lowering water tables, increasing runoff, and ruining irrigation systems and reservoirs with sedimentation. Fatalistic peasants, all too conscious that they were involuntary actors in a vicious circle of poverty and environmental destruction, quoted Mencius to each other: "mountains emptyβrivers gorged." The acceleration of the erosion cycle became nearly exponential. The American forestry expert W. C. Lowdermilk estimated in 1930 that slope denudation in Shanxi and Shandong in the previous century or so had "increased superficial runoff fifty-fold." But the "rate of erosion is increased from one hundred to several thousand-fold." As a result, visitors frequently encountered deforestation's ubiquitous monuments: great stone bridges completely mired in sediment:
Their arches were partially or entirely blocked by silt, although they had been designed originally to accommodate a deeper, more regular flow of water. One might in fact have derived a round measure of the chronology of deforestation and siltation in many areas by fixing the date of the bridges (many of them as old as Ming, some more recent) as an indication of the time when the streams were less silt-laden and comparing this with the depth and apparent recency of deposition since.
Traveling in 1923 through northern Shaanxi, the future redoubt of Mao's Long Marchers, Lowdermilk was stunned by the extent to which overcultivation had eroded the landscape into badlands. As soil exhaustion in the eighteenth century led to the substitution of pasturage for agriculture, shepherds began to systematically burn off shrub cover to open land for grass. "The result was that 50% of the groundspace in the region was occupied by erosion gullies, some several hundred feet deep."
Erosion on this scale led to radical changes in the composition of the sediment load carried downstream. For millennia, the Yellow River and its tributaries had conveyed rich loess silt to replenish and fertilize the north China plain. By the nineteenth century, however, accelerated erosion had removed the deep loess cover in many parts of the watershed and the highlands were beginning to erode bedrock and sand instead. As early as 1810, Shaanxi officials were already worried about the vast quantities of sand and gravel that were annually washed from the deforested hillsides, clogging up irrigation ditches and canals in the valleys below. ("People suffer greatly because of this!") By the end of the century, flood-deposited sand was smothering some of the best cropland in north China.
Finally, the denudation of the mountains and hills directly affected the water supply available during droughts in the plains below. "In addition to erosion and flooding," Murphey explains, "deforestation had the predictable effect of lowering the water table, especially critical in north China with its heavy dependence on shallow traditional wells, which increasingly ran dry. Without adequate cover, especially on slopes, to retain and absorb rainfall, ground water reserves were not recharged as they should be by slow release and seepage." In a fuel-famished economy that lacked cheap energy sources (even bullocks) for running hydraulic pumps, the lowering of the water tables below the reach of manually operated windlasses or level poles was a constant and sometimes deadly frustration. Drought-stricken peasants knew that there was plenty of water underneath their fields but had no means to pump it to the surface. It was not until after Liberation that suitably deep wells with electric pumps revolutionized farming in the north China plain.
**The Crisis of River Conservancy**
Sedimentation in the Yellow River Delta is a problem in hydraulic control that dwarfs the challenge of all other civilized rivers except perhaps the modern Mississippi. Twentieth-century measurements show that each cubic meter of river water carries an astonishing hundred pounds of silt in suspension. "Approximately one and one-half billion tons of loess are eroded annually in the Yellow River basin. Half of that amount settles out of suspension as the river slows down across the floodplain, and half of it is carried to the sea." (Alternately, before construction of the post-Liberation upstream dam system, the Yellow had a 40 percent silt content at flood stage.) Deposited on the nearly flat north China plain, the sediment will either force the river into chaotic and rapidly changing meanders like a great writhing snake or, if the channel is constricted by human engineering, will lead to the rapid buildup of the riverbed high above the plain. Although the mandarin engineers of the Yellow River Conservancy developed extraordinary expertise in using the diked power of the river to scour deeper and faster channels, sedimentation eventually overcame their most ingenious efforts at streamlining the flow.
There were, in fact, two warring schools about how to tame the Yellow River. One school of river managers wanted to confine the river between high, narrowly spaced levees to maximize its channel-deepening power and emancipate more floodplain for tillage, while the other advocated lower levees set five to ten kilometers apart. "These two strategies," Charles Greer writes, "represent more than different technical approaches to controlling the river. Their roots lie in different philosophical outlooks. Needham associates the construction of close, strong dikes with a Confucianist tendency to curb nature, analogous to the reliance by this school of thought on strict ethical codes for shaping human behavior. He associates widely separated, low levees with the Taoist approach of letting nature follow its own course." Even the Taoists, however, were ultimately forced to respond to the rising bed with higher levees and revetments, as well as more cutoffs, overflow basins, drainage canals and polders.
**Figure 11.4 The Grand Canal and the Yellow River**
This inexorable construction program in turn required a growing army of hired labor (the Qing had abolished the Mings' hated corvΓ©e), specialist river troops and their overseers. Thus the hydraulic evolution of the river produced a corresponding expansion in the scale, complexity and financial burden of its Conservancy. Soaring costs were aggravated by "excessive bureaucratization" and rampant corruption (especially in the procurement of the sorghum stalks used in revetments) that ultimately sped the system toward collapse. The rising river bed also generated bitter social conflict everywhere along the Yellow's course. "Newer, higher dikes," Vermeer writes, "diverted the flood problem to less well protected flood-prone areas. The city walls might offer protection for county capitals, but the countryside was left to its own devices." Likewise the widespread conversion, usually illegal, of polders and reservoirs to fields increased the river's pressure against its levees and exacerbated the chance of a catastrophic breach.
Inevitably, despite the most arduous efforts of the Conservancy's hydraulic experts, the defenses would fail after an unusually heavy summer monsoon, most likely in a major La NiΓ±a year. Angry brown waters would engulf hundreds, even thousands of villages, as in 1898 on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion. More than 1,500 such floods have been recorded since the time of the Han: they are north China's "ordinary" disasters and a major cause of its chronic peasant unrest. Every few centuries, however, cumulative sedimentation, modulated by human action (including both flood control and war), would so reshape the topography of the plain that the river would break free into a completely different channel. Thus, eight times in written history the Yellow River has radically switched its path to the sea, moving hundreds of miles from the Yellow Sea to the Gulf of Bohai and back again. These epochal changes of channel, by regionally redistributing the costs of flood control, have had complex political repercussions: indeed, have determined the fate of dynasties.
In 1800, the Yellow River flood-control system, redesigned by the great engineer Pan Jixun between 1577 and 1589, was more than 200 years old. As Randall Dodgen points out, the river "had gone longer without a change of course, but it had never been held in one course for so long by dint of human labor and engineering." It was the singular misfortune of the Qings that this inescapable hydraulic cycle, which in its final stages entailed almost geometrical increases in the costs of dike construction, reached its crisis point in coincidence with economic recession and the most destructive civil war in history. Already by the early nineteenth century, more than 10 percent of the Imperial budget was devoted to increasingly desperate efforts to control the path of the Yellow River, "an expense totally without parallel in the eighteenth century." Thereafter, as we saw in chapter 9, the Qing treasury was rapidly emptied by the forced outflow of silver to purchase opium from British India, the depletion of the Yunnan copper mines, the costs of the Opium Wars, and, finally, the Taiping catastrophe, which cut off tribute from the middle Yangzi provinces for almost a decade.
**Figure 11.5 Yellow and Yangzi Regions Disaster Reporting**
Source: B. Stavis, "Ending Famines in China," in Garcia and Escudero, p. 117.
As early as 1837, Conservancy officials had warned Beijing that, despite huge expenditures on reinforcement, many of the dikes in Henan were too weak to withstand high water. In the event, the three successive floods of 1841β43, coincident with the First Opium War, dealt crippling blows to the Qing's simultaneous effort to contain both imperialism and the river. As Dodgen points out, "the cost to the state in social disruption, lost agricultural income, and relief and repair funds was immense. Combined with the expense of the Opium War and the state's already weakened fiscal condition, these floods left the state treasury barren." For another decade, during the last years of the Daoguang emperor, troops and engineers gamely struggled to restore control over a river seemingly becoming wilder each year. "It was not until a second series of floods took place in 1851, 1852 and 1853 that the Qing's commitment to Yellow River conservancy began to waver. Concerned with the growing scope of the Taiping Rebellion, the state slowed the pace of repairs and redirected funds to the struggle against the rebels."
While Beijing was thus diverted, the Yellow in 1855 broke free of its old channel, hijacked the course of the Daqing River, and poured downgrade through Honan and Shandong, drowning hundreds of thousands of peasants and millions of acres of fertile farmland. Flood refugees, ruined farmers and displaced transportation workers, in turn, swelled the ranks of the Nian rebels and local "Turban bandits" who controlled a vast swathe of territory from the Huai River to the new course of the Yellow. (Most of the Nian, Jonathan Spence points out, were "poor peasants or ex-peasants struggling to survive in a bleak environment of worked-out soil, harsh winters, and unstable river systems subject to appalling floods.") The alliance of the Taiping and Nian in the aftermath of the channel-switching catastrophe might have doomed the Qing had not a simultaneous civil war amongst the Taiping leaders in Nanking fatally splintered the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace.
Fighting desperately for its survival on multiple fronts, meanwhile, the Empire was powerless to control nature in the Yellow River plain. Only after the defeat of the Taipings in 1865 could Beijing focus again on the complex, almost overwhelming, problem of the unleashed Yellow River. Arguing that neglect of the hydraulic infrastructure had been a principal cause of the Taiping and Nian revolts, the Qing hero Zeng Guofan made "repair of old waterworks and the construction of new and improved systems... a cardinal point in Restoration planning." His expensive schemes for forcing the Yellow back into its old channel and for developing new irrigation in eastern Hebei, however, collided with other equally ambitious plans for military modernization and the reconquest of Central Asia. The Manchu generals, not surprisingly, were a more powerful lobby than millions of ruined peasants in Shandong and Hebei. Even established water agencies, like the General Office for the Control of the Huai, "unable to compete with the armies for funds," were forced to close up shop, and thus "water control continued to be dealt with in piecemeal fashion."
The resulting decline in hydraulic control after 1870, in the Yangzi as well as the Yellow River basins, has been graphically depicted by B. Stavis as a sudden spike in locally reported disasters (see Figure 11.5).
**Abdicating Hydraulic Control**
The Tongzhi Restoration's failure to resolve the flood control crisis ignited an epic battle between regional elites. The wealthy Jiangan gentry, for their part, were delighted by the northern migration of the Yellow River, which relieved them of their traditional burden in taxes, labor duties, flood relief and periodic flood damage. On the other side, local gentry in western Shandong faced ruin: by the early 1880s the channel had grown high above the plain and flooding had become chaotic and almost impossible to contain. Then "in 1886β87, it briefly appeared that the river gods had come to Shandong's aid as the Yellow broke its banks in Henan and returned to a southern course. Shandong peasants were said to have resisted government requisitions of millet stalks to repair the break, while Shandong officials lobbied Beijing to let the river resume its old course. But the province's political weight was no match for that of Jiangnan and its powerful governor-general... After a year's respite, the breach was repaired and the river returned to continue its devastation of northwest Shandong."
This political decision to keep flood waters channeled through the north China plain, Esherick points out, reflected the emergent control of the rich coastal cities over inter-regional resource flows. It was also a decisive step in the long campaign by the Jiangnan commercial elites to shift the transport of Beijing's annual grain tribute from the Grand Canal to coastal shipping. Indeed one of the major consequences of the Yellow River's change of channel was to cut off the clear waters of the Wen River that fed the Grand Canal and kept critical sections navigable during El NiΓ±o droughts. Periodic attempts to use the Yellow River to replenish the Canal were no solution since its waters deposited too much silt. As a result, traffic along the Canal began its steep decline, with only the smallest boats able to proceed along the stretches vulnerable to drought. As we have seen, the resulting bottleneck was fatal to relief efforts during the 1876β78 drought-famine. In the 1890s the water-starved northern sections of the Canal were abandoned, and in 1901 the grain tribute was formally consigned to coastal shipping and the new railroad between Tianjin and Beijing. The decline of the Canal redounded to the great profit of the two British-owned steamship linesβthe Ewo (Jardine Matheson & Co.) and Taikoo (Butterfield & Swire)βwho from the 1870s dominated the maritime transport of rice, cotton and other staples. (Japan, by contrast, banned foreign flags from its coastal trade.)
This abdication of hydraulic control in inland north China was perhaps the most portentous consequence of the growing imperialist pressure on the Qing. "The foreign onslaught," writes Pomeranz, "destroyed basic principles of Ming-Qing statecraft, particularly a commitment to social reproduction that had often required rich areas to subsidize the infrastructure of poorer ones. Instead foreign pressures helped impart a quasi-mercantilist logic to the actions of a state that was struggling to survive. Resources had to be used where they did the most to protect China's autonomy from direct intervention or the consequences of foreign debt or both." In effect, Beijing resorted to "regional triage" by abandoning the costly upkeep of the Yellow River dikes and the Grand Canal in order to concentrate on creating new armies, coastal arsenals and flood-control works around the mouth of the Yellow River "where major floods seemed likely to provide excuses for further foreign encroachment." Whereas in the eighteenth century Qing policies had served to reduce regional inequalities, using tribute grain as a tool to regulate the flow of resources within the Empire, the decision to place all bets on the coastal-oriented economy exploded regional differentials. The Yangzi landlords, coastal merchants and British shipping interests profited directly from this neomercantilist orientation, while the inland North now became peripheralized in every sense.
Except in the Tianjin-Beijing region, which was now provisioned by sea, the ruin of the Grand Canal system grievously undermined food security in the north, especially in the event of drought-famines, which tended to be longer in duration and larger in area than flood-famines. It also wrecked the economies of the famous canal towns and grain depots. From the jobless ranks of former boatmen and Canal laborers the Boxers recruited some of their most militant leaders and fighters; as did the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s from their descendants.
Moreover without the Canal to transport timber and stone, it became increasingly difficult to keep the Yellow River within its embankments. "Lacking stone, brick, or often even wood, dike builders used various inferior materials. The most common was gaoliang (a type of sorghum) stalks... At best, they might last three years; one to two years was common, and improperly cut stalks, lacking the plant's roots, would decay in months." In 1891 Beijing disbanded most of the specialized battalions of "river troops" (ying) who maintained the dikes and devolved responsibility for flood control, like famine relief, to the impoverished counties of the plain. Within a generation, fully one-fifth of the region's net income and an equivalent proportion of its labor-time were consumed in Sisyphean efforts to defend agriculture against almost annual flood destruction.
This unraveling of centralized hydraulic control had repercussions at every level of environmental management. In contrast to India, where the traditional hydraulic infrastructure in dry regions consisted of free-standing improvements (wells, ditches and tanks) that seldom depended upon a massive central project, public works in north China functioned only as an integrated and coordinated hierarchy. Flood control, canal management and local irrigation were largely inseparable. Shuili ("water benefits") or village-level irrigation farming, as well as local drainage, depended upon the hegong ("riverworks"): regional networks of dikes, levees and master canals. A hegong system like the Yellow River Conservancy may have been designed for flood control rather than irrigation (diversion of water from the raised river channel was outlawed because of the danger of breaching the dikes), but its reliable operation was the prerequisite for stable agriculture of any kind. "Until the main drainage arteries are made effective," wrote the American agricultural expert Loessing Buck in 1938, "local drainage systems will be of limited value." Poor water management, in turn, exacerbated the problem of land scarcity. Marshes formed where the Yellow River dikes bisected local streams, and vast sections of valuable cropland were lost to waterlogging, salinization and sand sedimentation.
Finally, as in India, "small irrigation" lost much of its state sponsorship during the recessions and fiscal retrenchments of the nineteenth century. On a macro-scale, Maddison calculates an absolute decline in irrigated cropland from 21.7 million hectares (or 29.4 percent of arable) in 1820 to 20 million hectares (18.5 percent) in 1952. On a regional scale, studies of Shaanxi's Wei Valley contrast the attention given to irrigation under the early Qing to its political neglect in the nineteenth century. Thus in the aftermath of the drought of 1690β92, a famous mandarin, Wang Hsin-Ching, published a treatise on famine administration in the Wei Valley urging the government to help peasants tap plentiful groundwater reservoirs. Given the region's unreliable transport links with the surplus-producing provinces, Wang advocated well-digging and self-sufficiency as the "only 'solid and reliable' plan for preventing future drought-famines." Later agricultural reformers in the loess region echoed Wang's recommendations about peasant-managed irrigation while specifically warning against large-scale, centrally managed projects that encouraged official corruption, pitted upstream against downstream villages, and were ultimately unsustainable. There is considerable evidence, moreover, that Shaanxi's eighteenth-century governors authorized significant investment in wells, irrigation and drainage under the direct supervision of energetic hsien magistrates. The result in many cases was a 200 percent to 300 percent increase in the output of grain and cotton.
In the tumult of the nineteenth century, irrigation subsidies were more or less abandoned. The predictable consequences were a sharp decline in agricultural productivity and a concomitant increase in vulnerability to drought and flood. Murray points to Ching-yang, traditionally the richest county in the entire Wei Valley, where "agriculture was crippled" by the late nineteenth century as a result of the deterioration of the irrigation system. "A similarly depressing scene was revealed in the 1882 history of Hua-chou, located in the southeastern sector of the valley, where neglect of water control was also blamed for the decline of local agriculture. Not only had the irrigation ditches often become useless, but the natural waterways had silted up, and flooding along the riverbanks had destroyed much of the county's best farmland." Neglect of irrigation (only 6.8 percent of cultivated acreage in north China in 1932) continued through the Republican period. The famous Mass Education Movement study (1926β33) of Ting Hsien in Hebei concluded that 30,000 additional small wells were needed in this single county to fully realize its agricultural potential.
The failure of successive warlord, Guomindang and Japanese occupation governments to improve local irrigation, like their similar inability to tame the Yellow River, became powerful factors in rallying the northern peasantry behind the program of the Communist Party. After Liberation (and despite the costs of the Korean intervention), water conservancy was duly accorded the highest priority in successive agricultural plans, and, according to E. Vermeer, "during 1946β1954 the State funds expended on anti-flood work on the Yellow River constituted 22-fold the total invested during the period 1914β1932." Dam construction and dike repair in the 1950s was followed in the early 1970s by a pump-well revolution in the north China plain which (measured from 1949) increased pump horsepower 400-fold and quadrupled the irrigated acreage along the Yellow River. Irrigation, in tandem with the expansion of the chemical fertilizer industry, was the most important productive force unleashed by China's agrarian reforms just as it was the principal engine powering India's contemporaneous "Green Revolution."
Yet real environmental stability in north China has proven elusive. Modern hydraulic control has been achieved in the style of the Colorado Basin or Soviet Central Asia: at the cost of enormous wastage without systematic efforts at recycling. Indeed, by the 1990s, the profligate water-use made possible by reservoirs and electric pumps had both dried up the lower Yellow River (which now fails to reach the Bohai Sea most of the year) and lowered the water table 60 meters in the Beijing region. The northern water shortage, according to experts, is "without a doubt the country's most serious ecological problem," a direct threat to further breakneck economic expansion. The recent intensification of the ENSO cycle only magnifies the danger of growth-choking drought. Accordingly, Beijing has opted for the ultimate "Confucian fix": a vast scheme to divert northward millions of acre-feet from the headwaters of the Yangzi, and possibly from the upper reaches of the Mekong and Irrawaddy. Even more than the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi, such diversions are fraught with unpredictable environmental and geopolitical hazards.
## **12**
## [**Brazil: Race and Capital
in the Nordeste**](05_Contents.xhtml#s19)
> Definition of "drought": "a strategic element in the process of accumulation by large rural production units in the Northeast."
>
> β G. Dias
Nineteenth-century Brazil, also a subcontinent much visited by El NiΓ±o, shared two other things in common with contemporary India. First, while nominally independent, its economy, especially in the Nordeste, was so dominated by English investors and creditors that it has become the classic example of an "informal colony" in modern literature on economic dependency. Second, economic development on a national scale ground to a halt during the second half of the nineteenth century with no appreciable increase in per capita income or productivity. While per capita GDP soared by 600 percent between 1800 and 1913 in the United States and even 150 percent in Mexico, there was zero growth in Brazil. A fabulous coffee boom in the SΓ£o Paulo region was counterbalanced by the equally spectacular economic retrogression of the Nordeste. As in the case of the Deccan, a formerly core region was transformed into a periphery of hunger. Even the _zona da mata_ , the Nordeste's lush littoral, suffered a drastic decline in nutrition as real wages plunged 60 percent from 1870 to 1890. Whereas in India, however, increasing vulnerability to famine went hand in hand with notable infrastructural modernization in the late nineteenth century, the modern history of the _sertΓ£o_ is striking for the absence of any significant state developmental role until the 1960s and the threat of revolution.
**Informal Colonialism and State Capacity**
British commercial and financial hegemony in Brazil had ancient roots in Portugal's vassalage to London during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the Bragança monarchy was relocated under "tremendous British pressure" to Brazil in 1808, the immediate payoff was a commercial treaty that gave British imports preference over those from Portugal. Then in 1827 Emperor Dom Pedro, in return for British recognition of his slave empire, codified dependency in one of the most inequitable trade agreements in history: a nonreciprocal treaty that limited taxes on British imports to 15 percent ad valorum while allowing the British to impose 300 percent tariffs on Brazilian coffee. The Commercial Treaty, according to Cain and Hopkins, transformed Brazil into a "virtual British protectorate." Although the United States made substantial commercial inroads during the 1850s, the Civil War cotton boom re-established British preeminence. On the eve of the _Grande Seca_ , Britain supplied 51 percent of Brazil's imports and consumed 37 percent of its exports.
But the deepest level of British hegemony was financial. Chronic trade deficits were repeatedly financed by punitive British loans whose interest payments generated permanent budget deficits which, in turn, were financed by yet more foreign bonds. "The London Rothschilds were the empire's exclusive bond-raising agents, the leading exporters and importers were all British, and all the early railroads were British owned or financed. The largest British bank, the London and Brazilian, had considerably greater financial resources than the semi-official Bank of Brazil." The domestic banking system was stunted and undeveloped. As late as 1888, thirteen of the twenty Brazilian provinces had no local banks at all, and the total capital of the entire national banking system was only US$48 million. The state bank largely confined itself to the conservative management of the money supply in the interest of its British creditors.
Domestic capital formation as a consequence was severely bridled. "The foreign banks were notorious... [for] their reluctance to make long-term loans to agriculture or domestic concerns." Commerce, in turn, was skewed toward foreign middlemen and British imports, above all in the Nordeste. In 1890s Bahia, for example, only one of eleven licensed exporters was Bahian; and twenty-four of sixty-four import houses specialized in imported British textiles. Foreign capital, moreover, vigilantly policed the growth of any saplings of competitive, indigenous industrialism like that imagined in the utopian _literatura do Norte_ of Franklin Tavora. ("If capital and credit were mobilized, if agriculture, industrial and artistic markets were put in place, we would see at every turn a Manchester or a New York...") When local entrepreneurs occasionally tried to increase value-added income by setting up cotton-related manufactures, British exporters punctually retaliated. Warren Dean cites the telling example of a sewing thread mill in Alagoas that was purchased by an English firm for the sole purpose of dismantling it and dumping the machinery into the SΓ£o Francisco River.
Despite its elites' vast aspirations to a modernizing tropical empire, the developmental autonomy of the Brazilian state was thus circumscribed by foreign debt, a primitive banking system and the volatility of its export income. Leff argues that in land-rich Brazil, as contrasted to India and Japan, there was "little pressure of population on land," thus "Ricardian rent, the basis for land taxation, was small." The Empire, as well as the conservative Republic that succeeded it in 1889, relied on export taxes for revenue, but "until the end of the nineteenth century, the volume and growth of Brazil's foreign trade were too small to permit a high level of government expenditure." In the 1890s, as coffee prices stalled then fell, debt service soared to half the federal budget. As drought and famine again desolated the Nordeste, the Republic was hard-pressed even to pay for the bullets to kill Conselheiro's followers.
The adoption of the international gold standard during the 1870s "automated," as it were, Brazil's unequal exchange relationships. Although Rio might balk at British attempts to steer its foreign policy, London retained through the early 1900s quasi-veto power over major capital flows within the Brazilian economy. When some Brazilians protested the draconian terms of the Funding Loan of 1898, which confiscated the entirety of customs revenue for debt repayment, they were forceably reminded that dreadnaughts were the City's debt collectors of last resort. "Lord Rothschild, anticipating that the resolve of the recipients might weaken, took care to point out, in a manner which was unauthorised but managed to sound authoritative, that the alternative, repudiation, would involve not only 'the complete loss of the country's credit' but might also 'greatly affect Brazil's sovereignty, provoking complaints that could arrive at the extreme of foreign intervention.'"
Informal colonialism, however, did not affect Brazil's regions equally. If the northeastern sugar _fazendas_ were the very paradigm of dependence upon British capital, the southern coffee industry was relatively more independent. "The paulistic market," Ruthanne Deutsch points out, "was never the private sphere of influence of a single country or a single financial combine." First linked to the coast by railroad in 1872, the fertile SΓ£o Paulo region was supplying half of the world's coffee by the 1890s. An informal pact between the Republican parties of SΓ£o Paulo and Minas Gerais after the overthrow of the Empire in 1889 "guaranteed these two states control of the economic policy of the central government," supplanting the old landowning elites of Rio who had been the chief beneficiaries of the Empire. The new dispensation was sweetened, however, by an elaborate system of bribes and concessions that buttressed the local power of the _coroneis_ in the smaller states.
Despite its nationalist rhetoric, the "Revolution of 1889β91," as Dean emphasizes, did nothing to address export dependency or the financial dominance of the City of London. Indeed, with the consolidation of Paulista power, Brazil became a monoculture. "It is remarkable that Brazil, a country of immense territory and varied resources, participated in world trade essentially as a planter of a single crop: coffee." The developmental ambitions of the new Republic, moreover, were almost entirely concentrated on railroad construction in the dynamic coffee-growing core. "National integration" meant little more than the Paulistas in Congress occasionally scratching the backs of other oligarchs. Unlike Victorian India with its impressive railroads and inter-regional grain trade, Brazil until the early twentieth century remained an "archipelago" of distinctive economies separated by dauntingly high internal costs of transportation. Indeed, "class interests were so disparate as to raise serious questions concerning the validity of using the nation as a unit of analysis."
**Table 12.1**
**Unequal Regional Development**
(Per Capita Product)
| **1872** | **1900** | **Change**
---|---|---|---
CearΓ‘ | Β£2.2 | Β£0.8 | β275%
Rio Grande do Norte | Β£0.4 | Β£0.2 | β100%
BahΓa | Β£4.0 | Β£3.9 | β3%
SΓ£o Paulo | Β£3.1 | Β£15.7 | +506%
Source: Mircea Buescu, "Regional Inequalities in Brazil During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Barioch and Levy-Leboyer, p. 352.
The rise of the coffee states inevitably accelerated the decline of the northern sugar littoral. Contemporary Brazilians are used to thinking of their country as "Belindia: Belgium in the south, India in the north," but as Deutsch shows, "around 1870, the quality of life and the level of economic development in the Nordeste rivaled, if it did not surpass, that of the Southeast." This quickly changed, however, as real per capita income in the once economically dominant north fell by 30 percent (to 1913) in tandem with the collapse of its chief exports. Sugar and cotton, which in 1822 comprised 49 percent of Brazil's export income, contributed barely 3 percent in 1913 against the 60 percent represented by coffee. Meanwhile, local markets were supplanted by warehouses at railroad hubs and town life atrophied. The rapid urbanization of the southeast after 1880 contrasted with relative deurbanization in the north.
The dismal decade of the 1890s, which combined drought with the international deflation of commodity prices and a national financial panic, was particularly devastating in the Nordeste. By 1897, for example, the transport price of sugar exceeded the selling price offered by brokers, and numerous plantations and _usinas_ (sugar refineries) went belly up. ("Only southern Bahia's cacao region avoided the overall economic decline of the 1890s, chiefly because prices for cacao on the world market rose during this period and planters were able to profit from cheaper labor costs because of an influx of migrants driven from the _sertΓ£o_ by drought.")
**Eugenics and Economic Involution**
As Leff has pointed out, it is not immediately obvious why the late-nineteenth-century Nordeste should have undergone such extraordinary economic devolution. Certainly other primary producers made up for falling export prices with higher productivity and increased output. "In view of the rapid growth of world demand for cotton and sugar during the nineteenth century, Brazil's failure to expand its exports of these products much more vigorously seems astonishing." His own explanation hinges on the exchange-rate consequences of Brazilian coffee's dominant position in the world market. Under the gold standard system, strong coffee earnings led to the automatic appreciation of the milreis, which in turn raised northern sugar and cotton prices to uncompetitive levels. The Nordeste's biggest problem, in this view, was its monetary integation with the rest of Brazil. "The coffee-dominated exchange rate," writes Leff, "squeezed factor returns and priced ever-larger quantities of the northeast's sugar and cotton out of the world market."
The decline of export competitiveness brutally pruned the foliage of the Nordeste's class structure. If successive southern-dominated governments assuaged the great northern oligarchs with regular political kickbacks (often in the guise of "drought aid"), more modest _fazendeiros_ were left to the mercy of market forces. From about 1875, control over production began to pass into the hands of the owners (often foreign or foreign-born) of modernized usinas. "The capability of the usinas to handle a greater load of cane called for further monopolistic consolidation of land resources; in the wake of this process, small and middle landowners became uprooted." The fate of ex-slaves, of course, was unimaginably more difficult in an economic system that no longer required the same huge levies of labor-power. As the Nordeste's economy slumped into a coma, supernumerary labor was either pushed into the _sertΓ£o_ 's "black, barren fields of hunger" (Tavora) or induced to gamble with disease and exploitation in the rubber forests of Amazonas.
What did _not_ happen in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was what neoclassical theory would have predicted as an automatic reflex: the emigration of northern labor to southeastern growth poles. Instead, beginning in the late Empire, national and local governments began to heavily subsidize mass immigration from Italy, Germany and Portugal. Even the elites of the Nordeste fervidly embraced "Europeanization." An extraordinary example was Bahia during the terrible "Two Eights" drought-famine of 1888β89. While state authorities were roadblocking _retirantes'_ route to the cities and forcibly interning them by the thousands in camps, they continued efforts to lure European immigrants with expensive subsidies (few were tempted).
Southeastern coffee planters, for their part, wanted only "white" overseas laborers after Emancipation, and soon made this federal policy in the new Republic. (The racial preference was later amended to include Japanese as well as southern Europeans.) "Why were the coffee planters in the southeast more willing to finance immigration from Europe than from the northeast?" Leff believes that "part of the answer may have been the prevalent racial attitudes on the part of the coffee planters, which led them to prefer European to mulatto workers," while Deutsch points to "cultural biases on the part of Southeastern planters against native Brazilian workers."
Both understate racism as public policy. Gerald Greenfield has shown how Liberal discourse about drought and development in the late 1870s revolved around urban perceptions of the "dark, primitive world of the hinterland" and "retirante inferiority and aversion to labor." "To the extent that Brazil during the latter portion of the nineteenth century embraced the tenets of positivism, enlightenment notions of progress, and the concomitant scientific racism of thinkers like Buckle and Spencer, the backlanders became not merely curiosities from a bygone age, but detriments to the nation's progress. Evolving institutions of national culture, largely based in Rio and revealing marked influence from Western Europe and the United States, stressed the nation's great potential while lamenting the inadequacies, intellectual as well as moral, of much of the nation's population." The Brazilian Republic, moreover, was probably the first government anywhere explicitly committed to large-scale "positive Eugenics." Leading fin de siècle savants like the Bahian scientist Nina Rodrigues corroborated fears that "race mixing was responsible for all social deviance such as banditry, religious heresy, and the like." Whereas mass European immigration into the United States in the 1890s was conceived as simply providing human fuel for the economy, Brazil's elites also wanted to use immigration to radically transform the nation's racial physiognomy. They were obsessed with "de-Africanizing" and "whitening" Brazil.
The War of Canudos, as we have seen, became a macabre racial allegory driven by elite fears of the northern poor whom they denigrated as _caboclos_ : a racial caste strongly marked by admixture of Indian ancestry with Portuguese and African. The demonized figure of Antonio Conselheiro was frequently invoked to justify the urgency of Europeanization. ("Always insecure over the rest of Brazil's whispers that Bahia's leading families had intermixed so much with the _gente de cor_ during the heyday of slavery, the Bahians seized the conflict as a way to demonstrate their commitment to continued progress on the European model.") In this way, European immigration became the deliberate substitute for either developing the _sertΓ£o_ and/or letting the northern poor move southwards.
As a result, scientific racism helped create the mother of all dual labor markets. "The highly elastic supply of labor from overseas meant that output could expand at a rapid pace in Brazil's advanced sector without raising the wages of workers in the rest of the economy." By 1889 the British consul in Pernambuco reported to London "that labor there was cheaper than anywhere in the world except in Asia." As Celso Furtado famously argued, the Nordeste, following the pattern of previous export booms and busts in Brazilian history, regressed on a diet of super-cheap labor. As in Victorian India or late Qing China, the glut of labor-power created massive disincentives to productivity-raising capital investment (the usinas being a partial exception). "This economic 'involution,' as Furtado called it, was the opposite of development because each historical export boom until coffee (brazilwood, sugar, gold, and contemporaneous with coffee, rubber) led to retrogression, not to sustained growth."
**Ecological Decline**
Since the emergence of the great _fazendas de gado_ in the late seventeenth century, the ecology and economy of the _sertΓ£o_ repeatedly have been reshaped by El NiΓ±o droughts. The "Leather Age" of the eighteenth century, when _fazendeiros_ made legendary fortunes selling their longhorned cattle and _carne do CearΓ‘_ (dried beef) to coastal sugar plantations and the gold mines of Minas Gerais, was brought to an end by the terrible drought of 1791β93, which decimated the semi-wild herds. Some of the big _fazendeiros_ clung to their feudal domains, while others moved to the coast and became absentee landlords, but even more let their cattle ranges be broken up into impoverished shards. The ecology of the _sertΓ£o_ was ill-suited to the pressures of many small, marginal ranches. "As a matter of fact," Kenneth Webb has argued, "the sertΓ£o is not really very good for cattle," but was adapted to this use when the herds were forced out of the _zona da mata_ by the sugar boom. The productivity of the _sertΓ£o_ with its scant forage was notoriously low. "The carrying capacity of the land was determined not by how many head of cattle were supported by one hectare of _caatinga_ , but rather how many hectares of land were required by one beef critter." A typical ranch of 1,000 hectares, for example, might sustain only 50 scrawny cattle; and even the biggest _fazendas_ (10,000 hectares or more) rarely pastured herds larger than 1,000.
In the early nineteenth century, large numbers of subsistence farmers and laborers as well as fugitive slaves, mostly from the adjacent _agreste_ of Pernambuco or Bahia, began to move into the sertΓ£o for the first time. "Agriculture required little or no investment," writes Chandler in her study of the CearΓ‘n _sertΓ£o_ of Inhamuns, "and although it was even more susceptible to the disastrous effects of droughts than cattle, recovery was much easier." The vast northeast interior became a frontier safety valve for the social contradictions of the coastal slave economy. "The _sertΓ£o_ absorbed the surplus population of the _zona da mata_ during the stagnant periods of the sugar industry, and benefited from the labors and energies of those who, for economic, psychological, or whatever reason, could not integrate themselves into the famous _casa grande e senzala_ sugar culture." Between 1822 and 1850, the Empire officially supported this immigration by recognizing homestead claims on land formerly belonging to the _sertΓ£o_ 's fast-disappearing indigenous peoples.
As the greatest twentieth-century authority on Nordeste agriculture, Jose Guimaraes Duque, has emphasized, most of the new settlers brought labor-intensive, mid-latitude farming techniques ill-suited to the dry tropical climate and infertile soils of the _sertΓ£o_. This 650,000-square-kilometer regionβEuclydes da Cunha pointedly named his famous book _Os SertΓ΅es_ rather than _O SertΓ£o_ βencompasses a stunning variety of landscapes and local climates. But only the fertile bottomlands along the rivers corresponded to the immigrants' experience and these were monopolized by the cattle _fazendas_ , their orchards and loyal tenants. So the newcomers moved into the humid _serras_ (uplands). These hilly soils gave good harvests for a year or two, but quickly lost their fertility. After tragic trial and error, they eventually adapted a semi-nomadic swidden style of agriculture: two years of cultivation followed by eight years of fallow and cattle-grazing. But population pressure eventually forced thousands into the dry _sertΓ£o_ or _caatinga_ βcharacterized by shallow rocky soils and spiny cactiβwhere ownership was unestablished or where they squatted at the pleasure of the big _fazendeiros_ whose gunmen might remove them at will.
After the termination of legal squatting in 1850, most new immigrants to the _sertΓ£o_ simply became _parceiros_ (sharecroppers) on _fazenda_ land. Although the backlands were still popularly identified with the picturesque figure of the free-ranging _vaqueiro_ , the great majority of the population by mid-century were threadbare subsistence farmers, _parceiros_ or migratory _agregados_ (day-laborers). "In the mid-nineteenth century," estimates Levine, "certainly less than 5% and probably less than 1% of the rural population owned land." These poor _sertanejos_ , unlike the slaves of the _zona de mata_ , were nominally free men, but access to land and water was as tenuous as the life of a laborer confronted by the _capangas_ of an angry landowner. The most powerful _fazendeiro_ in each rural municipio typically held the rank of "coronel" in the old imperial Guardia Nacional, and the system of boss-controlled voting and elite violence, which originated in the coastal sugar plantations then spread to the _fazendas_ , became known as _coronelismo_. It was the "essential partner to economic exploitation, allowing landlords to squeeze the maximum possible surplus from their work-force, eliciting submissiveness and crushing any resistance or attempts to challenge their monopoly over the land." As Hamilton Monteiro has emphasized, high levels of routine violenceβwhether between squatters and _fazendeiros_ or between competing elite _parentelas_ βorganized and directed the relations of production in the Victorian _sertΓ£o_.
The slow deterioration of the landscape under the pressure of overgrazingβvisible since the late eighteenth centuryβwas accelerated by the slash-and-burn agriculture of the rural poor who cultivated maize, beans and manioc. "In the caatinga especially, impermeable, crystalline rock formations are common, which slope towards the rivers, facilitating rapid run-off, soil erosion, silting up of rivers and evaporation." Poverty became synonymous with the lack of water and clear title to the land. A small number of big _fazendas_ , the enduring centers of oligarchical power, monopolized the perennial water sources and were usually well protected from drought, but the rest of the population in the _semi-arido_ was pitifully dependent upon the erratic rainfall. Every year the _sertanejo_ made a desperate wager with a devil we know as El NiΓ±o:
The lives of all the dwellers of the backlands were inescapably linked to the fluctuations of the seasons, but none so closely, hence so vulnerable, as the small subsistence farmer. In November and December he would burn off the dry stalks remaining from the previous season, preparing to plant his beans, corn, and manioc in the ashes of the previous crop; if the land had yielded poorly the past year, he might move to a new location. When the first rains arrived, usually in January, he would plant his seeds and hope for their continuance.
In seasons of relatively light rainfall, those able to plant in the _baixos_ [pockets of rich soil in streambeds] were better off than those on the higher ground, but they ran the risk of losing their crops to flash floods which might sweep down the creekbeds without warning with heavy local showers upstream. If heavy showers came before the seedlings had taken firm hold, they would be washed out; frequently, plants sprouted only to wither as the rains stopped. In such cases, the farmer would plant again, and if necessary, a third or fourth time. Exhibiting astonishing tenacity and patience, he would plant time and time again, reserving only a minimal stock of seed for food until the harvest.
At intervals, the rain would fail completely, or hold off so long as to make a successful harvest impossible. Only then would the stubborn backlands farmers leave their homes and move toward the better-watered hills, the coast, or, as a last resort, to the towns and cities like "... so many errant ants hunting food wherever they could find it, crossing and recrossing the roads and on them meeting others in similar condition." In the towns they would seek work, or failing that, surrender their pride and beg, but only until such time as they could safely return to their plots of ground.
The drought-famine of 1825, which killed 30,000 in CearΓ‘ alone, exposed the full ecological precariousness of the _sertΓ£o_ 's hybrid cattle and subsistence farming economy in the absence of systems of water storage and irrigation. It caused "such widespread mortality and human dislocation," according to Cunniff, "as to alter radically the settlement and economic patterns of the region." In effect, it revealed that the biological endowments of the _sertΓ£o_ were being dangerously mined out. "Cattle were grazed beyond the areas of natural pasture, into the previously shunned arid land and onto the wooded hills, where they came into conflict with the similarly expanding agriculture of the slopes." What cattle on the overstocked ranges did not eat up was quickly stripped away as firewood or fodder by squatters. The infinite network of cattle trails worn into the sterile, friable soil accelerated erosion. In the classic pattern, as the sparsely wooded hillsides were denuded, runoff increased while water tables and springflows declined. It was evident both to the _sertanejos_ themselves as well as the occasional foreign visitor that they were desertifying parts of the backlands and probably altering the climate as well. Some dreamed of a vast irrigation network of wells, dams and reservoirs; others envisioned reforestation "as the route back to the mythical once-verdant _sertΓ£o_."
But there was no source of investment to stabilize or reverse the _sertΓ£o_ 's ecological decline. The backward cattle industry, little changed since the seventeenth century, supported the autocratic power of the local _coroneis_ but failed to generate an accumulable surplus for irrigation works had such inclinations towards improvement existed amongst the _sertΓ£o_ 's oligarchs. Even on the great _fazendas_ , hydraulic engineering consisted simply of shallow wells ( _cacimbas_ ) in creek beds that were dug by hand every May as the surface waters dried up. The few small reservoirs actually built during the nineteenth century were so unusual as to become objects of local awe.
As discussed earlier, the capacity of any layer of government to sponsor irrigation works was constrained by what might be called "triple peripheralization": the underdevelopment of the Brazilian financial system vis-Γ -vis British capital; the Nordeste's declining economic and political position vis-Γ -vis SΓ£o Paulo; and the _sertΓ£o_ 's marginality within state politics vis-Γ -vis the plantation elites of the coast. Politicians endlessly proposed irrigation schemes, but none were built. Ironically, the State's impotence to develop the _sertΓ£o_ was inverted by the littoral elite into the racist caricature of the indolent, backward _sertanejo_.
**The Cotton Boom**
The socio-ecological crisis in the backlands was temporarily hidden from view (as in India and Egypt) by the cotton boom that accompanied the US Civil War. The abdication of the irrigation debate, as Cunniff points out, had ultimately fatal consequences. "Ironically, the most prosperous period in the history of the sertΓ£o was to compound the errors and continue the trends of the previous years; the relative affluence of the 1860s was in large part responsible for the horrors of the 1870s." A drought-resistant variety of arboreal cotton was introduced in the _sertΓ£o_ and exports to English textile mills from the port of Recife increased from 165,265 kilos in 1845 to nearly 8 million kilos in 1871. Prices almost doubled from 885 reis in 1861 to 1,600 reis in 1863, and "the cotton boom at its zenith reached into nearly every corner of the sertΓ£o." The mirage of prosperity was reinforced by the remarkable absence of drought between 1845 and 1869.
But high cotton prices were only a magnet that attracted yet more "landless, directionless subsistence farmers" to the backlands. The labor required during the short vegetative cycle of cotton did not amortize the annual subsistence cost of slaves, so it was usually cultivated by free labor. "Although it is evident that some larger landholders turned to cotton, it was essentially the crop of the poor, who had no previous agricultural investment to hinder their plunge into its culture." As workers deserted the plantations of Pernambuco for the cotton frontier of CearΓ‘'s CarirΓ valley, the sugar barons complained bitterly about the growing labor shortage. By 1876 the poorest stratum of the _sertΓ£o_ social order, the landless _agregados_ , comprised fully 40 percent of the population of CearΓ‘ (epicenter of the 1877 drought).
Although it should have been evident after Appomattox that high-quality US cotton would soon flood the world market, the Cotton Supply Association of Manchester, whose overriding interest (as we saw in Berar) was a permanently overstocked buyer's market in raw cotton, fiercely lobbied Brazilians to bring even more acreage under cultivation. Before long, however, the return of short-staple Southern cotton drove down the price of the varieties that Manchester had promoted so zealously in Egypt, India and Brazil.
Desperate _sertanejos_ tried to compensate by producing yet more cotton. But as cotton patches blossomed in the most remote corners of the _sertΓ£o_ , the producers were caught in a vise between falling world market prices and high, rigid costs of overland transport to the nearest river ports. Unlike India, the Nordeste lacked a railroad infrastructure, and unlike China, which also suffered from transportation bottlenecks, it lacked a huge domestic market to encourage value-added cotton handicrafts. The only hope for saving the _sertΓ£o_ 's cotton industry was a crash program of railroad and road construction in the interior. As Cunniff explains, the imperial government toyed in the late 1860s with a plan to build a railroad from CearΓ‘'s capital of Fortaleza to the major cotton center of Uruburetama, but the project was abandoned in 1868 after the completion of a only few kilometers of track. As with irrigation, there was neither state capacity nor obvious foreign interest to take up the challenge of developing the _sertΓ£o_.
By 1869, when a new drought devastated subsistence crops in many parts of the backlands, the same British cotton buyers who had orchestrated the boom a decade before were rejecting the Nordeste's "inferior," "poorly processed" cotton shipments. The _sertanejos_ βonce again pariahsβhad nowhere to turn. "From subsistence farmers and herdsmen, a large proportion of backlanders had been converted into the marginal commercial farmers and agricultural laborers existing in an extremely precarious economic state, more vulnerable than ever to sudden crisis by virtue of the fact that their traditional ties to the large landholders had been greatly weakened or broken." As in north China, the commercialization of agriculture in the _sertΓ£o_ had less to do with seedlings of rural capitalism than with increased social and ecological marginality.
**Table 12.2
Rise and Fall of the _SertΓ£o_ Cotton Boom**
| Pernambuco | CearΓ‘
---|---|---
| **Kilos Exported** | **Price** | **Kilos Exported** | **Price**
1860 | 1.3 million | β | 0.8 million | β
1862 | 2.8 million | β | 0.7 million | β
1864 | 8.4 million | 1.00 | 1.0 million | 1.00
1866 | 18.2 million | .62 | 2.1 million | .74
1869 | 15.2 million | .71 | β | .49
1871 | 16.8 million | β | 7.3 million | .35
1873 | 15.2 million | .47 | 5.1 million | .35
1875 | 11.1 million | .35 | 5.8 million | β
1877 | 2.6 million | β | .06 million | .24
Price: 1864=1.00
Source: Adapted from data in Cunniff, Table II-1, p. 81, and Johnson, _Sharecroppers of the SertΓ‘o,_ Table 1, p. 20.
To make matters worse, the overextension of cotton cultivation during the 1860s had been matched by the expansion of the cattle population: from 1.2 million in CearΓ‘ in 1860 to 2 million in 1876. Like the pauper cotton-growers, the _fazendeiros_ had recklessly increased the size of their herds, despite legislation attempting to stabilize land/cattle ratios, to compensate for falling beef and leather prices. Soil degradation and erosion were accelerated. Moreover the combined pressure of cotton and cattle on the soil left less room for traditional subsistence crops, and Cunniff finds indications that the Nordeste "was entering a period of famine even before the great drought devastated the area." The epidemiological evidence includes the appearance of beriberi in CearΓ‘ and Paraiba in 1872βattributed to the _sertanejos_ ' increasing dependence on cheap, poorly milled rice imported from Indiaβas well as outbreaks of smallpox, cholera and yellow fever.
The international shockwaves from the collapse of the US railroad boom, which inaugurated the depression of 1873β79, reached the _sertΓ£o_ in 1874. "The most drastic deflation in the memory of man," it depressed even further the prices of the agricultural exports that were now the faltering livelihood of _agregados_ as well as _fazendeiros_. The small trickle of domestic credit, inadequate even in boom times, dried up completely. "By the end of the year the majority of banks [in the Nordeste] suspended loans. In 1875 the Banco Maua begged for a moratorium, while the Banco National stopped payments and the director of the Banco AlemΓ£o committed suicide. There was no way to control the ensuing panic."
The provincial governments, meanwhile, were wrestling with public debts they could no longer finance. At the edge of default, several provinces, led by Pernambuco, imposed onerous taxes on foodstuffs sold at regional fairs. This despised legislation fatefully coincided with simultaneous efforts by the imperial government to introduce the metric system and reinforce conscription (a measure that was widely feared as an attempt to "enslave" freedmen). The resulting explosion was known as the Quebraquilos ("smashing the kilos") revolt. Throughout the _agreste_ and _sertΓ£o_ regions of Paraiba, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte and Alagoas, armed crowds systematically destroyed decimal weights and measures and burned tax records. The revolt was finally crushed by imperial troops, forcing many rebellious _sertanejos_ to flee into the hills where they became _cangaceiros_ preying on the _fazendas_ and towns. Thus, on the eve of the Grande Seca, local government in the Nordeste was bankrupt, malnutrition and beriberi were widespread, rioting had broken out in some of the towns, the poor were pillaging _fazendas_ , and banditry was the only growth sector in the economy.
**The Irrigation Charade**
Large northern landowners, needless to say, welcomed the emergence of this overstocked labor-supply without realizing that they were, in effect, embracing their own underdevelopment. Indeed, as we have seen, they protested violently against anything, like Conselheiro's saintly and autarchic city of Canudos, that appeared to threaten their abundance of labor. Elsewhere such a surfeit of immiseration might have produced a social revolution, but the northeastern littoral had the vastness of the _sertΓ£o_ as a social safety-valve. Indeed, from the 1870s onward, the Nordeste was effectively capitalized on the fluxes of labor between the backlands and the coast. Potentially explosive accumulations of poor and unemployed laborers in the littoral were diverted into the subsistence economy of the _sertΓ£o_ , then periodically regurgitated towards the coast by drought. The _sertΓ£o_ , in effect, provided welfare for the poor, while drought guaranteed that desperate laborers would always be available to depress wages on the coast. Even in the CearΓ‘ _sertΓ£o_ , virtually depopulated by the great _secas_ of the 1870s and 1890s, local oligarchs as we have seen were able to find profit as labor contractors for ParΓ‘ and Amazonas.
Thus while the _coroneis_ had the most avid interest in "drought relief" (which they largely intercepted), they were little disposed toward any real development or ecological stabilization of the _sertΓ£o_. The all-out national mobilization to destroy Canudos was in stark contrast to official apathy over the fate of _sertanejos_ in the four successive El NiΓ±o droughts between 1888 and 1902. The great domestic debate of the 1890s, symptomatically, was not over arresting the decline of the Nordeste, but between Paulistas who urged more state spending in the southeast and the opposition, which wanted to bolster Brazil's international credit after the milreis lost half of its value to runaway inflation between 1892 and 1897. The Rothschilds rescued the government in 1898 with a Β£10 million loan in return for a surcharge on import duties and a deflationary budget that left no spare change for public works.
The economic and political hegemonies, respectively, of the British and the Paulistas, plus the northeastern oligarchs' deepening investment in their own underdevelopment, thus explains much of the structural context of the century-long burlesque of "irrigating the _sertΓ£o_." In the wake of successive El NiΓ±os, national commissions and visiting foreign irrigation experts drew up sweeping, never-implemented plans for stabilizing agriculture and human settlement in the backlands. The few hydraulic projects that were actually built, beginning with the Acude Quixada reservoir in CearΓ‘ in 1899, "stored water which benefited large landowners and protected their cattle by providing pasture and watering facilities but... left most of the low-income agricultural population untouched." Only 500 hectares of the _sertΓ£o_ had actually been irrigated by 1941, and twenty-seven years later, when a military dictatorship worried about possible Guevarist _focos_ in the Nordeste hired Israeli consultants to conduct the first comprehensive irrigation survey, conditions of life for millions of drought-stricken and immiserated _sertanejos_ were little different from the days when Conselheiro and CΓcero first preached Apocalypse on the backroads of CearΓ‘.
## **Glossary**
_agregado_ | Tenant or tolerated squatter (literally, one who lives by favor on another's land); same as _morador_.
---|---
_agreste_ | Intermediate zone between the drought-stricken _sertΓ£o_ and humid coastal zona de mata.
_bajra_ | Pearl millet: extremely drought resistant and more nutritious than higher-status grains.
_bania_ | Moneylender (and usually trader).
_beata_ ( _o_ ) | Lay ascetic.
_caatinga_ | Thorny scrub forest.
_caboclo_ | Mixed-race person.
_cangaceiro_ | Outlaw.
cash | Bronze coin (1/1000th of a tael).
_coronel_ | Rural political boss (plural: _coroneis_ ).
_cultuurstelsel_ | "Culture system": obligatory regime of agricultural export production in the Netherlands East Indies.
_dacoit_ | Robbery/expropriation.
Deccan | Peninusular interior of India south of the Narmada River; also the volcanic Deccan Plateau.
_durbar_ | State meeting of officials.
Encilhamento | Speculative bubble in the early Brazilian Republic.
ENSO | El NiΓ±o-Southern Oscillation.
_fazenda_ | Cattle ranch (in the Nordeste).
_fazendeiro_ | Rancher ( _hacendado_ ).
_fellah_ | Peasant (plural _fellahin_ ).
_flagelado_ | "Scourged one" (drought victim).
_gente de cor_ | People of color.
gram | Pulse grown during _rabi_.
_hsien_ | Chinese county.
ITCZ | Intertropical Convergence Zone (of trade winds).
_jagunco_ | Pejorative term for herdsmen of the _sertΓ£o_ /follower of Conselheiro.
_jawar_ | _Sorghum vulgare_.
_khatedar_ | Equivalent of _ryot_ in Berar.
_kaoliang_ | All-purpose sorghum: milled for grain while stalks used in construction.
_kharif_ | Growing season of crops harvested in the autumn.
_lakh_ | 100,000.
_makhzan_ | Government/royal power (Morocco).
_malguzar_ | Landowner, often with tenants (India's Central Provinces).
_mandioca_ | Cassava (the root is poisonous unless carefully prepared).
_maund_ | Unit of weight (82 lbs.).
milreis | Nineteenth-century Brazilian currency.
MSLP | Mean Sea Level Pressure.
_mu_ | One-sixth of an acre (China).
NAO | North Atlantic Oscillation.
Nian rebellion | Vast peasant uprising north of the Huai River (1851β68) led by Zhang Luoxing and defeated by U. S. Grant's host, Li Hongzhan.
Nordeste | Eight states of the Brazilian northeast whose vast interior is the _sertΓ£o_.
_parceiro_ | Sharecropper.
_rabi_ | Growing season of crops harvested in the spring.
_retirante_ | Refugee (Brazil).
_ryot_ | Peasant (Deccan).
_ryotwari_ | System by which each peasant is assessed separately for revenue.
_sabha_ | Association.
_seca_ | Drought.
_sertΓ£o_ | Backland region of Brazil's Nordeste.
_sertanejo_ | Resident of the _sertΓ£o_.
_shi_ | Measure of grain: about 176 pounds in weight.
SOI | Southern Oscillation Index.
_sowcar_ | Moneylender (also _sahukar_ ).
SPCZ | South Pacific Convergence Zone.
SST | Sea surface temperature.
_takavi_ | State-backed agricultural loan (also _taqavi_ and _tagai_ ).
tael | Chinese ounce of silver; nineteenth-century monetary unit.
_taluk_ | Indian revenue division.
_talukdar_ | Large landowner.
teleconnection | Correlation between widely separated climate events.
thermocline | The sharp temperature gradient separating warm surface layer of ocean from deeper cold water.
Warm Pool | Trade Windβdriven pooling of very warm surface water in the western Pacific (Indonesia and Queensland); it drives earth's largest tropical convection system; both migrate towards the International Date Line during El NiΓ±o events.
_vaqueiro_ | Cowboy (in Brazil's Nordeste).
_zamindar_ | Property-holder under permanent settlement (Bengal).
zemstvo | Provincial and county council.
_zona de mata_ | Well-watered zone of sugar cultivation on the coast of the Nordeste.
## **Notes**
**Preface**
The epigraph is from John Hidore, _Global Environmental Change: Its Nature and Impact_ , Upper Saddle River, N.J. 1996, p. 96.
.William McFeely, _Grant: A Biography_ , New York 1981, pp. 453, 457β60 and 471.
.Ibid., pp. 458β71.
.John Russell Young, _Around the World with General Grant_ , subscription edn. (American News Company in 20 parts), New York 1878β79, pp. 242 and 246.
.Ibid., pp. 266β7 and 274.
.Ibid., pp. 278 and 284β5.
.Ibid., p. 622.
.Ibid., p. 624.
."On this occasion 'our distinguished guest,' the double Ex-President of the 'Great Western Republic,' who got as drunk as a fiddle, showed he could also be as profligate as a lord. He fumbled Mrs. A., kissed the shrieking Miss B.βpinched the plump Mrs. C. black and blueβand ran at Miss D. intent to ravish her. Finally, after throwing all the... female guests into hysterics by generally behaving like a must elephant, the noble beast was captured by main force and carried (quatre pattes dans l'air) by six sailors... which relieved India of his distinguished presence. The marine officer... reports that, when deposited in the public saloon cabin, where Mrs. G. was awaiting him... this remarkable man satiated there and then his baffled lust on the unresisting body of his legitimate spouse, and copiously vomited during the operation. If you have seen Mrs. Grant you will not think this incredible" (Lytton quoted in McFeely, p. 473).
.Adam Badeau, _Grant in Peace_ , Hartford 1887, pp. 310β11.
.Quoted in McFeely, p. 474.
.Young, p. 414.
.Hang-Wei He, _Drought in Northern China in the Early Guang Xu (1876β1879)_ , Hong Kong 1980, pp. 36β7 (in Chinese).
.Quoted in McFeely, p. 557 fn43.
.J. T. Headley, _The Travels of General Grant_ , Philadelphia 1881, p. 444.
.William Digby, _"Prosperous" British India: A Revelation from Official Records_ , London 1901, p. 118.
.Ibid., p. 122.
.Alfred Russel Wallace, _The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures_ , London 1898, p. 341.
.David Landes, _The Wealth and Poverty of Nations_ , New York 1998, p. 437.
.W. Arthur Lewis, _Growth and Fluctuations, 1870β1913_ , London 1978, pp. 29, 187 and 215 especially.
.Karl Polanyi, _The Great Transformation_ , Boston 1944, p. 160.
.Ibid., pp. 159β60.
.Slavoj Ε½iΕΎek, _The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around! An Introduction to the 150th Anniversary Edition of the Communist Manifesto_ , Zagreb 1998, p. 17.
.Rosa Luxemburg, _The Accumulation of Capital_ , trans. Agnes Schwarzchild, London 1951 [1913], pp. 370β71.
.Bertolt Brecht, _Poems 1913β1956_ , London 1976, p. 204.
.See chapter 7.
.Jill Dias, "Famine and Disease in the History of Angola, c. 1830β1930," _Journal of African History_ 22 (1981).
.P. Wright, _An Index of the Southern Oscillation_ , University of East Anglia, Climate Research Unit Publication, Norwich 1975; and William Quinn et al., "Historical Trends and Statistics of the Southern Oscillation, El NiΓ±o, and Indonesian Droughts," _Fish. Bull_. 76 (1978).
.George Kiladis and Henry Diaz, "An Analysis of the 1877β78 ENSO Episode and Comparison with 1982β83," _Monthly Weather Review_ 114 (June 1986). Although they "resist the temptation to compare the 'intensity'" of the two events, they point out that the 1876β78 event lasted longer and was associated with sea-level pressure anomalies across a larger area of the tropics (p. 1046).
.Peter Whetton and Ian Rutherfurd, "Historical ENSO Teleconnections in the Eastern Hemisphere," _Climatic Change_ 28 (1994), p. 243.
.Michael Watts, _Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria_ , Berkeley 1983.
.David Arnold, _Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change_ , London 1988.
.Alfred Sauvy, "Trois mondes, une planete," _L'Observateur_ 118 (14 Aug. 1952), p. 5.
.See the discussion in chapter 9; also the much-awaited study by Kenneth Pomeranz, _The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy_ , Princeton, N.J. 2000, which appeared while this book was in proof.
**A Note on Definitions**
.See Kevin Trenbeth, "General Characteristics of El NiΓ±o-Southern Oscillation," in M. Glantz, R. Katz, and N. Nichols (eds.), _Teleconnections Linking Worldwide Climate Anomalies_ , Cambridge 1991, pp. 13β42.
.Rolando Garcia, _Drought and Man: The 1972 Case History, vol. 1, Nature Pleads Not Guilty_ , Oxford 1981, p. 157.
. _Report on the Famine in the Bombay Presidency, 1899-1902, vol. 1_ , Bombay 1903, p. 3; and J. A. Crawford, _Report on the Famine in the Hyderabad Assigned Districts in the Years 1899 and 1900_ , Nagpur 1901, p. 2. On China, see Pierre-Etienne Will, _Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China_ , Stanford, Calif. 1990.
.Amartya Sen, P _overty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation_ , Oxford 1984, p. 1. Also Meghnad Desai, "The Economics of Famine," in G. Harrison (ed.), _Famine_ , Oxford 1988.
.Arnold, pp. 44β5 and 85.
.Amarita Rangasami, "'Failure of Exchange Entitlements' Theory of Famine: A Response," in _Economic and Political Weekly_ 20:41 (12 Oct. 1985), p. 178.
.Michael Watts, "Drought, Environment and Food Supply," in Michael Glantz (ed.), _Drought and Hunger in Africa: Denying Famine a Future_ , Cambridge 1987, p. 205.
.Michael Watts,"Heart of Darkness" in Stephen Reyna (ed.), _The Political Economy of African Famine_ , New York 1991, p. 44.
.Alexander De Waal, _Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984β1985_ , Oxford 1989, pp. 6 and 10.
. _Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Famine in Bengal and Orissa 1866_ , vol. 1, Calcutta 1867, p. 24.
.Klein, "Plague, Polity and Popular Unrest," p. 731.
.Maharatna, pp. 7β8.
.David Washbrook, "The Commercialization of Agriculture in Colonial India: Production, Subsistence and Reproduction in the 'Dry South,' c. 1870β1930," _Modern Asian Studies_ 28:1 (1994), p. 151.
.Klein, p. 735.
.Inga Glendinnen, _Reading the Holocaust_ , Cambridge 1999, p. 14.
**1. Victoria's Ghosts**
.William Digby, _The Famine Campaign in Southern India: 1876β1878_ , 2 vols., London 1878, p. 505; references are to vol. 1 unless otherwise noted.
."Philindus," "Famines and Floods in India," _Macmillan's Magazine_ , Jan. 1878, pp. 244β5.
.Digby, pp. 7 and 13.
.British Parliamentary Papers, _Report of the Indian Famine Commission_ , part 1, _Famine Relief_ , cd. 2591, London 1880, p. 191. On the revolutionary role of Burmese rice surpluses in the imperial economy, see Cheng Siok-hwa, _The Rice Industry of Burma, 1852β1940_ , Kuala Lumpur 1968.
.Cornelius Walford, _The Famines of the World_ , London 1879, p. 126.
.Meerut district officer quoted in Elizabeth Whitcombe, _Agrarian Conditions in Northern India_ , vol. 1 of _The United Provinces Under British Rule, 1860β1900_ , Berkeley 1972, p. 195.
.Letter from Madras Government to Government of India, 30 Nov. 1876, quoted in B. Bhatia, _Famines in India, 1850β1945_ , Bombay 1963, p. 94.
. _The Nineteenth Century_ , Sept. 1877, p. 177.
.Christophe Guilmoto, "Towards a New Demographic Equilibrium: The Inception of Demographic Transition in South India," _The Indian Economic and Social History Review_ (hence, _IESHR_ ) 29:3 (1992), p. 258.
.Digby, pp. 38 and 361.
.Andrew Roberts, _Salisbury: Victorian Titan_ , London 1999, p. 215.
. _The Times_ , 9 Jan. 1877; Aurelia Harlan, _Owen Meredith_ , New York 1946, pp. 218β20; and Bernard Cohn, "Representing Authority in Victorian India," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., _The Invention of Tradition_ , Cambridge 1983, pp. 179β208.
.Digby, vol. 1, p. 46.
.R. Neelankanteswara Rao, _Famines and Relief Administration: A Case Study of Coastal Andhra, 1858β1901_ , New Delhi 1997, p. 120.
.Roberts, p. 218.
.For Lytton as a war hawk within Disraeli's government, see R. Ensor, _England: 1870β1914_ , Oxford 1936, p. 62; and Lt.-Col. R. Osborne, "India Under Lord Lytton," _Contemporary Review_ , Dec. 1879, p. 555 (Liberal view). On the effects of the Gold Standard on Indian finances, see Lance Brennan, "The Development of the Indian Famine Codes," in Wolf Tietze, ed., _Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon_ , Dordrecht 1984, pp. 94 and 97.
."Swinburne called Lytton's poem 'Lucille' an 'infamous imposture' in that the plot, characters, situations, and even minute descriptions were borrowed from George Sand's novel _Lavinia_. The accusation of plagiarism was also made by Lytton's father" (John Lowe Duthie, "Lord Lytton and the Second Afghan War: A Psychohistorical Study," _Victorian Studies_ [Summer 1984], p. 471).
.Janet Oppenheim, _"Shattered Nerves": Doctors, Patients and Depression in Victorian England_ , Oxford 1991, pp. 173β4.
.Roberts, p. 220.
.Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ (1776), fifth edn., London 1930, pp. 27β8.
.S. Ambirajan, _Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India_ , Cambridge 1978, p. 63.
.Osborne, p. 553; Hari Srivastava, _The History of Indian Famines_ , Agra 1968, p. 131; Digby, pp. 50β51; and David Steele, _Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography_ , London 1999, p. 98. Compare also to Bentham: " _Laissez faire_ , in short, should be the general practice: every departure, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil." In a notable dissent from ultra-orthodoxy, however, John Stuart Mill criticized the policy of absolute nonintervention when large numbers of lives were at stake: "Direct measures at the cost of the state, to procure food from a distance are expedient when, from peculiar reason, the thing is not likely to be done by private speculation" (quoted in Rao, pp. 250).
.Steele, p. 98 (it is unclear whether this is a direct quotation or paraphrase from a letter from Lytton to Sir John Strachey, Oct. 1877).
.Angus Maddison, _Moghul Class Structure and Economic Growth: India and Pakistan Since the Moghuls_ , New York 1971, p. 40.
.Derived from Bhatia, Table 5, p. 38.
.Quoted in John Caldwell, "Malthus and the Less Developed World: The Pivotal Role of India," _Population and Development Review_ 24:4 (Dec. 1998), p. 683.
.From _Parliamentary Papers_ , 1881, 68, "Famine Commission βFinancial Statement," quoted in Sheldon Watts, _Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism_ , New Haven, Conn. 1997, p. 203.
.Caldwell, p. 683.
.Quoted in Roberts, pp. 85β6.
.Quoted in Steele, pp. 95 and 102.
."General Tremenheere on Missions," _Calcutta Review_ 128 (1877), p. 278.
.Salisbury in Steele, p. 98.
.Government of India, _Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1878_ , Part I, Famine Relief, London 1880, p. 59.
.Digby, pp. 173β4
.K. Suresh Singh, _The Indian Famine 1967_ , New Delhi 1975, p. 242.
.Digby, p. 105.
.Ibid., pp. 103β4.
."Famine and Debt in India," _The Nineteenth Century_ , Sept. 1877, p. 184; and Jairus Banaji, "Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Gyan Prakash, ed., _The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India_ , Delhi 1992, p. 124.
.Correspondent for the _Calcutta Statesman_ quoted in Digby, pp. 276β81.
.Digby, pp. 46β7 and 265; and Bhatia, pp. 94β5. For the quarrel between Lytton and Wodehouse, see _The Times_ , 5 Feb. 1877.
.Bhatia, pp. 85β7.
. _The Economist_ 32 (July 1874), p. 802.
.See Ambirajan, p. 92.
.Quoted in ibid., p. 96.
. _The Times_ , 5 Feb. 1877.
.Copy of Victoria's telegram to the Imperial Assemblage, 1 Jan. 1877, in Huntington Library (San Marino), Grenville Papers (Stowe Collection), 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, STG India, box 2 (file 7).
.Secretary of State for India quoted in A. Loveday, _The History and Economics of Indian Famines_ , London 1914, p. 57.
.De Waal, p. 32.
."Although no one person can be blamed for the deficiencies of the relief policies, Trevelyan perhaps more than any other individual represented a system of response which increasingly was a mixture of minimal relief, punitive qualifying criteria, and social reform" (Christine Kinealy, _This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845β52_ , Dublin 1994, pp. 349β50).
.Cf. Rao, p. 118, and Currie, p. 47.
.Digby, p. 52.
.Ibid., pp. 85 and 135.
.Anonymous, "The Indian Famine: How Dealt with in Western India," _Westminster Review_ , Jan. 1878, p. 145.
.Quoted in "Indian Famines," _Edinburgh Review_ , July 1877, p. 80. Of all common cereals, rice is the most incomplete in amino acids. See discussion of rural diet and protein deficiencies in Paul Greenough, _Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal_ , Oxford 1982, p. 70 passim.
.S. Partridge, medical inspector of emigrants, in _Indian Economist_ , 15 Oct. 1870, p. 45 (cited in Dadabhai Naoroji, _Poverty and Un-British Rule in India_ , London 1901, p. 25).
.Quoted in "The Indian Famine: How Dealt with in Western India," p. 145. Cornish hoisted Temple by his own petard by publishing in parallel columns Temple's contrasting views on nutrition requirements in the 1874 and 1876 famines βsee his account in _The Times_ , 18 May 1877.
Digby, pp. 55, 74β5, 85, 113, and 135; and Bhatia, p. 96. For Temple's point of view, see _The Story of My Life_ , vol. 1, London 1896, esp. 289β94.
.Digby, vol. 2, pp. 247 and 252.
.Kohei Wakimura, "Famines, Epidemics and Mortality in Northern India, 1870β1921," in Tim Dyson (ed.), _India's Historical Demography: Studies in Famine, Disease and Society_ , London 1989, pp. 285β6 (on grain prices).
. _The Times_ , 9 July 1877.
.Digby, vol. 2, pp. 203β4.
.Digby, p. 26.
.Rev. A. Rowe, _Every-Day Life in India_ , New York 1881, pp. 347β8.
.Quoted in Kerby Miller, _Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America_ , New York 1985, p. 283.
.Rowe, pp. 204 and 372β3.
.Quoted in "The Indian Famine: How Dealt with in Western India," p. 153.
.Digby, p. 340.
.S. Mehrotra, "The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha: The Early Phase (1870β1880)," _IESHR_ 3 (Sept.1969), pp. 305 and 310.
.Quoted in Digby, pp. 341β2. Lytton's granite face towards India's starving children in these monthsβlike Temple's repudiation of his own "excessive charity" in 1874 βperhaps needs to be seen in a tormented psychological context: perhaps his father's (Bulwer Lytton's) cruel attacks on his "unmanly repining" after the death of his little son in 1871 (Harlan, p. 205).
.Rowe, p. 345.
.Digby, p. 283.
.Harlan, p. 214.
."The Sabha humbly submits that no small portion of the success [in restoring rations and reducing deaths] is due to the attitude of complaint and watchfulness taken up by the native and European press..." Letter to Temple, 16 May 1877, quoted in Digby, p. 355.
.Lytton in a letter to Sir Louis Mallet (11 Jan. 1877), quoted in Ambirajan, p. 93.
.Quoted in Brennan, p. 97.
.Digby, pp. 148β50 and 361β2.
.Ira Klein, "Imperialism, Ecology and Disease: Cholera in India, 1850β1950," _IESHR_ 31:4 (1994), pp. 495 and 507; David Arnold, "Cholera Mortality in British India, 1817β1947" in Dyson, p. 270; and Rita Colwell, "Global Climate and Infectious Disease: The Cholera Paradigm," _Science_ 274 (20 Dec. 1996), p. 2030.
.Cecil Woodham-Smith, _Florence Nightingale: 1820β1910_ , New York 1983, p. 338.
.Digby, pp. 361β5; and Richard Tucker, "Forest Management and Imperial Politics: Thana District, Bombay, 1823β1887," _IESHR_ 16:3 (1979), p. 288 (quote).
.Washbrook, "The Commercialization of Agriculture in Colonial India," _Modern Asian Studies_ 28:1 (1994), p. 131; and W. Francis, _Bellary District_ , Madras 1904, p. 135.
.Digby, vol. 2, p. 148.
.Kate Currie, "British Colonial Policy and Famines: Some Effects and Implications of 'Free Trade' in the Bombay, Bengal and Madras Presidencies, 1860β1900," _South Asia_ 14:2 (1991), p. 43.
.Loveday, p. 60.
.Cf. Ira Klein, "When the Rains Failed: Famine, Relief, and Mortality in British India," _IESHR_ 21:2 (1984), p. 195; and Charles Elliot, _Report on the History of the Mysore Famine of 1876β1878_ , pp. xxβxxix.
.Klein, p. 195.
.Elliot, p. 42.
.Klein, pp. 196β7.
.Victoria's speech in _The Economist_ , 18 Aug. 1877.
.A clipping from August 1877 in Grenville Papers, STG India, outsized box (file 5).
.Ibid.
.Mary Lutyens, _The Lyttons in India_ , London 1979, pp. 111β12. The Madras Government, on the other hand, described its relief workers as "an industrious, hardworking set, fully alive to the grave situation they were in, and grateful for the work provided for them" ( _Report on the Buckingham Canal [Koitadatam] Division During the Madras Famine_ , Box 2[a], Grenville Papers, STG India).
.Digby, pp. 206β23.
.Rev. J. Chandler quoted in Digby, vol. 2, p. 148.
.David Arnold, "Famine in Peasant Consciousness and Peasant Action: Madras, 1876β78," _Subaltern Studies_ 3 (1984), pp. 86β7 and 93; and "Dacoity and Rural Crime in Madras, 1860β1940," _The Journal of Peasant Studies_ , p. 163.
.Sharma, p. 359.
.Neville Nicholls, "Complex Climate-Human-Ecosystem Interactions in the 1877 El NiΓ±o," _Abstracts_ , Second International Climate and History Conference, Norwich 1998, pp. 65β6; and J. Mayer, "Coping with Famine," _Foreign Affairs_ 53:1 (Oct. 1974), p. 101.
. _The Times_ , 9 July 1877.
.Digby, p. 241.
.Ibid., pp. 243β4.
.Reprinted as James Wilson, _The Government of India in Relation to Famines and Commerce_ , London 1878, pp. 9 and 13.
.D. Rajasekhar, "Famines and Peasant Mobility: Changing Agrarian Structure in Kurnool District of Andhra, 1870β1900," _IESHR_ 28:2 (1991), pp. 143 (quote), 144 and 150.
.This is the hardly unbiased recollection of a relief official, Lepel Griffin, told to _Harper's Weekly_ many years later during the famine of 1896 ("Indian Famine," 7 Nov. 1896, pp. 489β90).
.Bhatia, pp. 98β101.
.Quoted in Osborne, p. 563 (his emphasis).
.Ibid., pp. 563β7.
.Wakimura, p. 286.
.Osborne, p. 564.
.Ibid., pp. 553 and 565.
.Digby singles out Knight's _Statesman_ for praise for sending a correspondent to spend six months reporting from the famine districts of Bombay, Madras and Mysore (Digby, p. 22). The _Statesman_ 's scathing editorials and similarly critical letters from missionaries were published in pamphlet form as _Sir George Couper and the Famine in North Western Provinces_ (Calcutta 1878). This excerpt is from Bhatia, p. 100.
.Cf. Kaushalya Devi Dublish, _Revolutionaries and Their Activities in Northern India_ , Delhi 1982, pp. 3β4; and Mehrotra, pp. 310β11.
.John McLane, _Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress_ , Princeton, N.J. 1977, p. 45. On widespread British anxiety that the 1876β77 famine might lead to "revolution," see Ems Namboordiripad, _A History of the Indian Freedom Struggle_ , Trivandrum 1986, p. 136.
.Premansukumar Bandyopadhyay, _Indian Famine and Agrarian Problems_ , Calcutta pp. 97β103.
.Nightingale, quoted in _The Ninetenth Century_ , 8 Sept. 1878.
.F. B. Smith, _Florence Nightingale_ , London 1982, p. 146.
."When I wrote these notes in 1873, or read them in 1876, I little dreamt that they would so soon obtain such terrible confirmation as the present deplorable famines have given them" (D. Naoroji, _Poverty and Un-British Rule in India_ , London 1901, pp. 60 and 141); and R. Masani, _Dadabhai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India_ , London 1939, p. 192.
.Quoted in Osborne, p. 568.
.Bandyopadhyay, p. 104.
.Ibid., pp. 106 (Gladstone) and 113 (funds spent).
.Brennan, p. 98.
.Ibid., p. 108.
.Ibid., pp. 103β7.
.Carol Henderson, "Life in the Land of Death: Famine and Drought in Arid Western Rajasthan," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University 1989, p. 66.
.H. M. Hyndman, _The Bankruptcy of India_ , London 1886, p. 26.
.Naoroji, pp. 212 and 216.
.Brennan, p. 107.
.Bandyopadhyay, p. 109; and 1880 Report quoted in _Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1901_ , Calcutta 1901, p. 2.
.McLane, p. 49.
.Masani, p. 295.
**2. 'The Poor Eat Their Homes'**
The statement by the governor of Shanxi appeared in the _Imperial Gazette_ (15 March), translated in _The Times_ (London), 21 June 1877.
.Cf. _L'Exploration_ [Paris] 6 (1877), p. 43; and K. De Silva, _A History of Sri Lanka_ , Berkeley 1981, p. 308.
.George Kiladis and Henry Diaz, "An Analysis of the 1877β78 ENSO Episode and Comparison with 1982β83," _Monthly Weather Review_ 114 (1986), pp. 1035 (quote), 1037β9 and 1046.
.Eric Foner, _Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863β1877_ , New York 1988, pp. 512β13. "1873 is a great economic divide. It was the peak of the trading boom of the mid-nineteenth century" (Derek Beales, _From Castlereagh to Gladstone, 1815β1885_ , New York 1969, p. 232).
.Eric Hobsbawm, _The Age of Capital 1848β1875_ , London 1975, p. 46.
.The extensive plantation economy of Oceania, usually associated with copra and sugar, actually started with the cotton boom of the 1860s. See the preface in Brij Lal, Doug Munro and Edward Beechert, _Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation_ , Honolulu 1993, pp. 3β4.
.P. Cain and A. Hopkins, _British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688β1914_ , London 1993, p. 371.
. _The Times_ (21 June 1877) blamed the famine on the refusal of the Qing to allow European investors to build a mainline railroad into interior northern China.
.On the 1867β68 famine in Hebei (Xhili), see Mary Wright, _The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung-Chih Restoration, 1862β1874_ , Stanford, Calif. 1957, p. 135.
.R. H. Tawney, _Land and Labour in China_ , London 1932, p. 77.
.UK, Foreign Office, _Parliamentary Papers_ , China No. 2 (1878), pp. 1β2.
.Rev. Timothy Richard, quoted in Paul Bohr, _Famine in China and the Missionary_ , Cambridge, Mass. 1972, p. 14.
.Will, _Bureaucracy and Famine_ , p. 36.
.Frederick Williams, _The Life and Letters of Samuel Wells Williams_ , New York 1889, p. 432.
.Bohr, p. 15.
. _Parl. Papers_ , No. 2, p. 3.
.Richard, pp. 98 and 117.
.Cited in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ , 1 May 1877.
.Bohr, p. 15; and Timothy Richard, _Forty-Five Years in China_ (third edn.), New York 1916, p. 119.
.Quoted in _Parl. Papers_ , No. 2, p. 11.
.Bohr, pp. 60β63 and 218.
. _Times_ (London), 1 May 1877.
.Bohr, pp. 35β41 and 227.
. _Parl. Papers_ , No. 2, p. 6.
.Srinivas Wagel, _Finance in China_ , Shanghai 1914, p. 23.
. _Parl. Papers_ , No. 2, p. 6.
.Arthur Smith, _Village Life in China_ , Boston 1970 [1899], p. 116. See also Kamal Sheel, _Peasant Society and Marxist Intellectuals in China_ , Princeton, N.J. 1989, p. 12.
.Joseph Esherick, _The Origins of the Boxer Uprising_ , Berkeley 1987, p. 101.
.David Faure, "Local Political Disturbances in Kiangsu Province, China: 1870β1911," Ph.D. diss., Princeton, N.J. 1975, pp. 162β3.
.Will, p. 49.
.Faure, pp. 162β5, 275 and 468.
.John Hidore, _Global Environmental Change_ , Upper Saddle River, N.J. 1996, p. 96.
. _Parl. Papers_ , No. 2, p. 6. Two members of the China Inland Mission had attempted to found a mission in Henan in 1875 but were quickly driven out. With enormous difficulty a foothold was finally achieved in Chowkiakow in 1884, but missionaries had little success and most were forced to flee during the uprising in 1900 (Marshall Broomhall [ed.], _The Chinese Empire: A General and Missionary Survey_ , London 1907, pp. 159β61).
.Resumes in _L'Exploration_ [Paris] 6 (1878), pp. 172 and 416.
.Elizabeth Perry, "Social Banditry Revisited: The Case of Bai Lang, a Chinese Brigand," _Modern China_ 9:3 (July 1983), p. 362.
.Milton Stauffer, _The Christian Occupation of China_ , Shanghai 1922, p. 211.
.In Ping-ti Ho, _Studies on the Population of China, 1366β1953_ , Cambridge, Mass. 1959, p. 232.
.S. Wells Williams, _The Middle Kingdom_ , vol. 2, New York 1883, p. 736.
.On Shanxi's dependence on Wei Valley surpluses, see Helen Dunstan, _Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary History of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644β1840_ , Ann Arbor 1996, pp 250β51.
. _Parl. Papers_ , No. 2, pp. 5β7.
. _Gazette_ (15 March), translated in _The Times_ , 21 June 1877.
. _New York Times_ , 24 February 1878.
.Harold Hinton, _The Grain Tribute System of China (1845β1911)_ , Cambridge, Mass. 1956, pp. 42β3.
. _Parl. Papers_ , No. 6 (1878), p. 2.
.Bohr, p. 43.
. _The Times_ (London), 21 June 1877.
.A. Broomhall, _Hudson Taylor and China's Open Century: Book Seven (It Is Not Death to Die!)_ , London 1989, pp. 170 and 467 ff 13. See also Adrian Bennett, _Missionary Journalist in China: Young J. Allen and His Magazines, 1860β1883_ , Athens, Ga. 1983, p. 174.
.Bohr, pp. 16β21.
.Hang-Wei He, _Drought in North China in the Early Guangxu (1876β1879)_ [in Chinese], Hong Kong 1980, p. 15.
.William Soothill, _Timothy Richard of China_ , London 1924, p. 102.
.Richard, p. 130.
.Syndicated to the _New York Times_ , 6 July 1878.
. _Parl. Papers_ , No. 6, p. 1.
.A. Broomhall, _China's Open Century: Book Seven_ , pp. 111 and 163.
.James Legge (trans.), _The Famine in China. Pictures Illustrating the Terrible Famine in Honan That Might Draw Tears from Iron. Extracts from a Translation of the Chinese Texts_ , London 1878 (Trinity College Library [Dublin] pamphlet collection).
.Lillian Li, "Introduction: Food, Famine, and the Chinese State," _Journal of Asian Studies_ , 41:4 (Aug. 1982), p. 700.
. _Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China_ (Shanghai, 10β24 May 1877), Shanghai 1878, p. 446.
.A. Broomhall, _China's Open Century, Book Seven_ , p. 115; and Arthur Smith, _The Uplift of China_ (revised edn.), New York 1912, p. 175.
.Arnold, _Famine_ , p. 137.
.Rudolf Wagner, "The _Shenbao_ in Crisis: The International Environment and the Conflict Between Guo Songtao and the _Shenbao_ ," _Late Imperial China_ 20:1 (June 1999), p. 117.
.Quoted in B. MacGillivray, _A Century of Protestant Missions in China_ , Shanghai 1907, pp. 78β9.
.Williams, p. 433.
.Ibid., p. 184.
.A. Broomhall, _China's Open Century: Book Six_ , pp. 169 and 246.
.Ibid., pp. 176β7
. _Parl. Papers_ , No. 2, p. 7.
.A. Broomhall, _China's Open Century: Book Six_ , p. 169.
.Ibid., pp. 175 and 181.
.Euclydes da Cunha, _Rebellion in the Backlands_ ( _Os SertΓ΅es_ ), trans. Samuel Putnam, Chicago 1944, p. 41.
.Professor and Mrs. Louis Agassiz, _A Journey to Brazil_ , Boston 1869, p. 459.
.Herbert Smith, _Brazil: The Amazon and the Coast_ , New York 1879, p. 400.
.Da Cunha, p. 24.
.Ibid., p. 410.
.Roger Cunniff, "The Great Drought: Northeast Brazil, 1877β1880," Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin 1970, p. 128.
Pierre Denis, _Brazil_ , London 1911, p. 330.
.Ibid., p. 129.
.Smith, pp. 411β13.
.Rodolfo Theofilo, _Historia da seca do CearΓ‘, 1877β1880_ , Rio de Janeiro 1922, p. 120.
.Smith, ibid.
.Cunniff, pp. 248β50.
.Account of 11 November 1877 cited in Billy Jaynes Chandler, _The Feitosas and the SertΓ£o dos Inhamuns_ , Gainesville, Fla. 1972, p. 162.
.Cunniff, pp. 152β3.
.Chandler, pp. 160β61.
.Rodolfo Theofilo, quoted by Anthony Hall in _Drought and Irrigation in North-East Brazil_ , Cambridge 1978, p. 5.
.Gerald Greenfield, "Migrant Behavior and Elite Attitudes: Brazil's Great Drought, 1877β1879," _The Americas_ 43:1 (July 1986) p. 73; and Cunniff, ibid.
.Smith, pp. 415β6.
.Cunniff, p. 163.
.Father CΓcero RomΓ£o Baptista describing conditions in CearΓ‘'s CarirΓ Valley (ibid., p. 202).
.Smith, p. 417.
.Cunniff, pp. 166 and 192.
.Ibid., pp. 206β11 and 242.
.Smith, p. 419.
.Cunniff, pp. 212β13; Smith, pp. 419β35; Kempton Webb, _The Changing Face of Northeast Brazil_ , New York 1974, pp. 30β32; and Hall, p. 5.
.Nicanor Nascimento quoted in JosuΓ© de Castro, _Death in the Northeast_ , New York 1969, pp. 51β2.
.Chandler, pp. 164β5.
.Cunniff, p. 299
.Ibid., pp. 292β3.
**3. Gunboats and Messiahs**
The quote from Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib appears in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, _Modern South Asia_ , Delhi 1999, p. 43.
.Hilary Conroy, _The Japanese Seizure of Korea: 1868β1910_ , Philadelphia 1974, pp. 90β91. See also Han Woo-Keun, _The History of Korea_ , Seoul 1970, p. 403.
.Reynaldo Ileto, "Religion and Anti-colonial Movements," in Nicholas Tarling (ed.), _The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia_ , vol. 2, Cambridge 1992, pp. 220β21.
.Kiladis and Diaz, p. 1038.
.Han Knapen, "Epidemics, Droughts, and Other Uncertainties on Southeast Borneo During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in Peter Boomgaard, Freek Colombijn, and David Henley, _Paper Landscapes: Explorations in the Environmental History of Indonesia_ , Leiden 1997, p. 140.
.Henry Forbes, "Through Bantam and the Preanger Regencies in the Eighties," reprinted in Pieter Honig and Frans Verdoorn (eds.), _Science and Scientists in the Netherlands Indies_ , New York 1945, pp. 112β13.
.Knapen, p. 144.
.W. Hugenholz, "Famine and Food Supply in Java, 1830β1914," in C. Bayle and D. Kolff (eds.), _Two Colonial Empires_ , Dordrecht 1986, pp. 169β71.
.M. Ricklefs, _A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1300_ , 2nd edn., Stanford, Calif. 1993, pp. 121β23; C. Faseur, "Purse or Principle: Dutch Colonial Policy in the 1860s and the Decline of the Cultivation System," _Modern Asian Studies_ 25:1 (1991), p. 34.
.J. Furnivall, _Netherlands India: A Study of Political Economy_ , Cambridge 1944, pp. 138 and 162. For a synthesis of current research on the _cultuurstelsel_ , see R. Elson, _Village Java under the Cultivation System, 1830β1870_ , Sydney 1994.
.Hugenholz, ibid.
.Alfred McCoy, "Sugar Barons: Formation of a Native Planter Class in the Colonial Philippines," _The Journal of Peasant Studies_ , 19:3/4 (April/July 1992), pp. 109β14.
.Violeta Lopez-Gonzaga, "Landlessness, Insurgency and Food Crisis in Negros Island," in _Famine and Society_ , p. 111.
.Angel Martinez Duesta, _History of Negros_ , Manila 1980, pp. 253, 259β61, 378β9, 400, and 412β13.
.Michael Billig, "The Rationality of Growing Sugar in Negros," _Philippine Studies_ 40 (1992), pp. 156β7.
.Filomeno Aguilar, _Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island_ , Honolulu 1998, p. 166.
.Ibid.
.Ibid., pp. 166β70.
.Myriam Dornoy, _Politics in New Caledonia_ , Sydney 1984, pp. 19, 24β5 and 26.
.Linda Latham, "Revolt Re-examined: The 1878 Insurrection in New Caledonia," _Journal of Pacific History_ 10:3 (1975), p. 62.
.Martyn Lyons, _The Totem and the Tricolour_ , Kensington, NSW 1986, p. 61.
.Ibid.
.Latham, p. 49.
.Lyons, pp. 58β65.
.Louise Michel, _The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel_ , Birmingham 1981, p. 114.
.Sharon Nicholson, "Environmental Change Within the Historical Period," in J. Adams, A. Goudie and A. Orme, _The Physical Geography of_ Africa, Oxford 1996, pp. 75 and 79; and Jill Dias, "Famine and Disease in the History of Angola, c. 1830β1930," _Journal of African History_ 22 (1981), pp. 366β7.
.Dias, p. 368.
.Ibid., p. 366.
.Ibid.
.Ibid., pp. 368β9.
.Donald Morris, _The Washing of Spears_ , London 1966, p. 267.
.See Charles Ballard, "Drought and Economic Distress: South Africa in the 1800s," _Journal of Interdisciplinary History_ , 17:2 (Autumn 1986), pp. 359β78.
. _Nature_ , 28 March 1878, p. 436.
.Morris, p. 254.
.Shula Marks, "Southern Africa, 1867β1886," in Roland Oliver and G. Sanderson (eds.), _The Cambridge History of Africa_ , vol. 6, Cambridge 1985, pp. 381 and 387.
.Morris, p. 267.
.Cain and Hopkins, p. 372.
.On the centrality of the labor-supply question to British strategy, see Marks, p. 380; and Jeff Guy, _The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom_ , London 1979, p. 45.
.T. Davenport, _South Africa: A Modern History_ , 4th edn., Toronto 1991, p. 128.
.Morris, p. 286.
.Guy, p. 49.
.Michael Lieven, "'Butchering the Brutes All Over the Place': Total War and Massacre in Zululand, 1879," _History_ 84:276 (Oct. 1999), pp. 621 and 630.
.Karl Butzer, "History of Nile Flows," in P. Howell and J. Allan (eds.), _The Nile: Sharing a Scarce Resource_ , Cambridge 1994, p. 105.
. _The Times_ (London), 2 Jan. 1878.
.Luxemburg, p. 437. Luxemburg devoted most of a chapter to debt imperialism and the ensuing famine in Egypt (pp. 429β39).
.Lady Gordon quoted in Roger Owen, _The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800β1914_ , 2nd edn., London 1993, p. 142.
.Wilfred Blunt, _Secret History of the British Occupation of Egypt_ , New York 1922, pp. 8β9.
.Roger Owen, _Cotton and the Egyptian Economy: 1820β1914_ , Oxford 1969, p. 147.
.Juan Cole, _Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's 'Urabi Movement_ , Princeton, N.J. 1993, pp. 87β8.
.Cited in Theodore Rothstein, _Egypt's Ruin_ , London 1910, pp. 69β70.
.Cole, ibid.
.Quoted in the Earl of Cromer, _Modern Egypt_ , vol. 1, London 1908, p. 35.
.Cole, pp. 87β8. See also Allan Richards, "Primitive Accumulation in Egypt, 1798β1882," _Review_ 1:2 (Fall 1977), pp. 46β48.
."The Winter of 1876β7 in Algiers," _Symons' Monthly Meteorological Magazine_ , October 1877, pp. 132β3.
.Charles-Robert Ageron, _Les Algeriens musulmans et la France (1871β1919)_ , vol. 1, Paris 1968, pp. 380β81.
.Ibid., pp. 378β9.
.Ageron, _Histoire de l'Algerie contemporaine_ , vol. 2, Paris 1979, p. 202.
.Julia Clancy-Smith, _Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters_ , Berkeley 1994, p. 224.
.Ageron, _Histoire_ , pp. 201β2, 211 and 220.
.Jean-Louis Miege, _Le Maroc et l'Europe (1830β1894)_ , vol. 3, Paris 1962, pp. 383β4, 403, 419 and 441. On the monetarization of agrarian taxation, see Edmund Burke III, _Prelude to Protectorate in Morocco, Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860β1912_ , Chicago 1976, p. 22.
.Miege, pp. 382β3, 390 and 398.
.Quoted in Cornelius Walford, _The Famines of the World_ , London 1879, p. 19.
.Miege, pp. 385β8 and 393.
.Ibid., pp. 395β7, 450β53 and 458.
. _Nature_ , 28 March 1878, p. 436.
.Walford, p. 49.
.Letter to _Nature_ , 4 April 1878; Doug Munro and Stewart Firth, "Samoan Plantations: The Gilbertese Laborers' Experience, 1867β1896," in Lal, et al. (eds.), _Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation_ , Honolulu 1993, p. 111; and Kiladis and Diaz, p. 1040.
.Enrique Florescano and Susan Swan, _Breve historia de la sequia en Mexico_ , Xalapa (Ver.) 1995, p. 57.
.Walford, p. 70.
.Kiladis and Diaz, p. 1042. It was the second wettest winter in San Francisco, the first elsewhere in Northern California.
.Walford (1879), p. 299.
.H. Diaz, "A Possible Link of the 1877β78 Major El NiΓ±o Episode and a Yellow Fever Outbreak in the Southern United States," _Abstracts_ , Second International Climate and History Conference, University of East Anglia, Norwich 1998.
.W. Quinn and V. Neal, "The Historical Record of El NiΓ±o Events," in R. Bradley and P. Jones (eds.), _Climate Since AD 1500_ , London 1992, p. 638.
. _Nature_ (1878), p. 447.
.Marx to N. F. Danielson (19 February 1881) in _Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Colonialism_ , Moscow n.d., p. 337.
.Romesh Chunder Dutt, _Open Letters to Lord Curzon_ , Calcutta 1904, pp. 3β4.
.Kohei Wakimura, "Famines, Epidemics and Mortality in Northern India, 1870β1921," in Tim Dyson (ed.), _India's Historical Demography_ , London 1989, pp. 288β90.
.Klein, "When the Rains Failed," pp. 199 and 210.
.William Digby, "Famine Prevention Studies," in Lady Hope, _General Sir Arthur Cotton: His Life and Work_ , London 1900, pp. 362β3.
.Rajasekhar, "Famines and Peasant Mobility," p. 132.
.Washbrook, p. 141.
.Rajasekhar, p. 134.
.Ibid., pp. 142 and 150 (quote).
.Rao and Rajasekhar, p. A-82.
.Figures from Hugh Tinker, _A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830β1920_ , Oxford 1974, pp. 49 and 305.
.Srivastava, p. 226.
.Zhang Jiacheng, Zhang Xiangong and Xu Siejiang, "Droughts and Floods in China During the Recent 500 Years," in Jiacheng (ed.), _The Reconstruction of Climate in China for Historical Times_ , Beijing 1988, p. 46 (driest year); Hang-Wei He, pp. 36β7 (quote); Will, _Bureaucracy and Famine_ , p. 30 ("the worst drought in North China's premodern history was undoubtedly that of 1876β79"); A. Broomhall, _China's Open Century, Book Six_ , p. 466 fn44 (official estimate); and Cahill, p. 7. Susan Cotts Wakins and Jane Menken estimate that 12 percent of the population died in five northern provinces ("Famines in Historical Perspective," _Population and Development Review_ 11:4 (Dec. 1985), p. 651.)
. _Report of the China Famine Relief Fund_ , Shanghai 1879, p. 7; and Lillian Li, "Introduction: Food, Famine, and the Chinese State," _Journal of Asian Studies_ , 41:4 (Aug. 1982), p. 687. This is the same range of mortality earlier quoted by Tawney in his famous study (p. 76).
.This is based on articles in _China's Millions_ used by A. Broomhall, _China's Open Century, Book Six_ , p. 181.
.Ibid., p. 181; Soothill, p. 101. Richard, it should be noted, believed that the death toll throughout nine affected provinces was somewhere between 15 and 20 million (Soothill, p. 103).
.Arnold, p. 21.
.Burke, p. 23.
.Miege, p. 443.
.Luis Felipe de Alencastro (ed.), _Historia da vida privada no Brasil: Imperio_ , SΓ£o Paulo, 1997, p. 312.
.Seymour Drescher, "Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective," in Rebecca Scott, et al. (eds.), _Abolition of Slavery in Brazil_ , Durham, N.C. 1988, p. 32.
.Quoted in de Castro, p. 53.
.Cunniff, p. 283.
.Arup Maharatna, _The Demography of Famines: An Indian Historical Pespective_ , Delhi 1996.
**4. The Government of Hell**
R. Anatase quoted in Harold Marcus, _The Life and Times of Menelik II_ , Oxford 1975, pp. 136β7.
.Cf. Avner Offer, _The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation_ , Oxford 1989, pp 85, 89; Dan Morgan, _Merchants of Grain_ , New York 1979, esp. pp. 32β6; and Carl Solberg, _The Prairies and the Pampas: Agrarian Policy in Canada and Argentina, 1880β1930_ , Stanford, Calif. 1987, esp. p. 36.
.Eric Stokes, _The Peasant and the Raj_ , Cambridge 1978, p. 275.
.Quoted in Neil Charlesworth, "Rich Peasants and Poor Peasants in Late Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra," in Dewey and Hopkins (eds.), p. 108.
.Christopher Baker, _An Indian Rural Economy, 1880β1955: The Tamilnad Countryside_ , Bombay 1984, p. 135.
.Gilbert Fite, _The Farmers' Frontier, 1865β1900_ , New York 1966, p. 96.
.The Nordeste was an exception: the improvement in weather could not make up for the decline in the earnings of sugar and cotton. Recession on the coast, moreover, turned into depression in the hinterlands. "In the _sertΓ£o_ , even formerly independent cowherds reverted to marginal activities, selling goat hides and working for pitiful wages on the ranches of large landowners. Bankrupt agriculturalists sold or abandoned their land and moved to cities" (Levine, p. 37).
.See Donald Meinig's brilliant studies of bonanza wheat belts and rainfall modification theories, "The Evolution of Understanding and Environment: Climate and Wheat Culture in the Columbia Plateau," _Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers_ 16 (1954); and _On the Margins of the Good Earth: The South Australian Wheat Frontier, 1869β1884_ , Chicago 1962. (It should be noted that South Australia's climatic boomβbust cycle was in antiphase to most other regions, with humid years in the late 1870s and severe drought in the early 1880s. Unlike eastern Australia, its weather has little correlation with ENSO.)
.Jonathan Raban, _Bad Land: An American Romance_ , New York 1996, p. 208. He refers to the drought of 1917β20 that broke the wartime wheat boom in eastern Montana.
.Meinig, _On the Margins_ , p. 207.
.See "Filtered Normalised Monthly Anomalies of MSLP and SST Since 1871," in Rob Allan, Janette Lindesay and David Parker, _El NiΓ±o Southern Oscillation and Climate Variability_ , Collingwood, Vic. 1996, pp. 188β201.
.Peak grain prices in the pre-Depression United States (which reflect global, not just local, harvest conditions)βe.g., 1891β92, 1897β98, 1908β09, 1914β19 and 1924β25βcorrelated to observed El NiΓ±o events (price trend from Wilfred Malenbaum, _The World Wheat Economy, 1885β1939_ , Cambridge, Mass. 1953, p. 29).
.Fite, pp. 108β9 and 126β7. Drought in 1892β93 again produced great distress throughout the Great Plains. The famous hunger-fighter Louis Klopsch, the publisher of New York's _The Christian Herald_ , reported incredulously from Nebraska that "there was really a famine in one of the richest agricultural regions of the United States" and that thousands faced death from cold or starvation unless they received immediate relief (quoted in Charles Pepper, _Life-Work of Louis Klopsch: Romance of a Modern Knight of Mercy_ , New York 1910, pp. 245β6).
.Florescano and Swan, pp. 57 and 113β14.
.Bhatia, pp. 168β9.
.Digby, _Prosperous British India_ , London 1901, p. 129.
.Bhatia, pp. 172β8.
.Carol Henderson, "Life in the Land of Death: Famine and Drought in Arid Western Rajasthan," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University 1989, p. 42.
.Navtej Singh, _Starvation and Colonialism: A Study of Famines in the Nineteenth Century British Punjab, 1858β1901_ , New Delhi 1996, pp. 89β91.
.Ibid.
.Digby considered this an accurate estimate of total famine mortality ( _"Prosperous" British India_ , p. 129).
."Hume to Every Member of the Congress Party" (16 Feb. 1892, quoted in Edward Moulton, "Allan O. Hume and the Indian National Congress: A Reassessment," in Jim Masselos (ed.), _Struggling and Ruling: The Indian National Congress 1885β1985_ , New Delhi 1987, p. 11.
.For an 1888 account of depopulation in Shaanxi, see George Jamieson, "Tenure of Land in China and the Condition of the Rural Population," _Journal of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society_ (for 1888), Shanghai 1889, p. 91.
.Allan, Lindesay and Parker, pp. 188β91.
.Cf., T. L. Bullock (consul at Chefoo), "The Geography of China," _The Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society_ , 14:4β6 (AprilβJune 1896), p. 129; John Freeman, "Flood Problems in China," _Proceedings, American Society of Civil Engineers_ , May 1922, pp. 1113 and 1137β8; Alvyn Austin, _Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom_ , Toronto 1986, pp. 36β8; A. Broomhall, _China's Open Century: Book Seven_ , pp. 97β8; _Spectator_ syndicated in _New York Times_ , 5 March 1888; and C. Vorosmarty, et al., "Drainage Basins, River Systems, and Anthropogenic Change: The Chinese Example," in James Galloway and Jerry Melillo, _Asian Change in the Context of Global Climate Change_ , Cambridge 1998, p. 212.
.Han Woo-Keou, _History of Korea_ , p. 404.
.George Lensen, _Balance of Intrigue: International Rivalry in Korea and Manchuria, 1884β1899_ , vol. 1, Tallahassee 1982, p. 118.
.Han Woo-Keou, pp. 404β13.
.Richard Robbins, Jr., _Famine in Russia: 1891β1892_ , New York 1975, pp. 6β10.
.Ibid., pp. 12β13 and 170β71.
.Leroy Vail and Landeg White, _Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District_ , Minneapolis 1980, pp. 100β101.
.Denis, p. 351.
.Graciliano Ramos, _Barren Lives_ , Austin, Tex. 1971, p. 121.
.Arthur Dias, _The Brazil of Today_ , Nivelles 1903, pp. 249β50.
.Ralph Della Cava, _Miracle at JoΓ£seiro_ , New York 1970, p. 31.
.James McCann, _People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800β1900_ , Madison, Wis. 1995, p. 89.
.Richard Pankhurst, _The History of Famine and Epidemics in Ethiopia Prior to the Twentieth Century_ , Addis Ababa 1986, pp. 62β3.
.William Jordan, _The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century_ , Princeton, N.J. 1996, p. 36.
.McCann, p. 89.
.Pankhurst, pp. 59 and 91β2.
.Holger Weiss, "'Dying Cattle': Some Remarks on the Impact of Cattle Epizootics in the Central Sudan During the Nineteenth Century," _African Economic History_ 26 (1998), p. 182.
.Richard Pankhurst, _Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800β1935_ , Addis Ababa 1968, pp. 216β20.
.James McCann, _From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia: A Rural History, 1900β1935_ , Philadelphia 1987, pp. 73β4.
.Chris Prouty, _Empress Taytu and Menelik II_ , London 1986, p. 101.
.Pankhurst, _The History of Famine_ , pp. 71β2 and 100.
.Marcus, _Menelik II_ , pp. 135, 139 and 143 fn2.
.Haggai Erlich, _Ethiopia and Eritrea During the Scramble for Africa: A Political Biography of Ras Alula, 1875β1897_ , East Lansing 1982, p. 141.
.Pankhurst, _History of Famine_ , pp. 74β85 and 96; and _Economic History_ , pp. 216β20. McCann ( _People of the Plow_ ) questions accounts of cannibalism, "since no such practices have been reported from recent famines of equal or greater severity" (p. 90).
.Pankhurst, _The History of Famine_ , pp. 87β8.
.Ibid., p. 91.
.Harold Marcus, _A History of Ethiopia_ , Berkeley 1994, p. 94.
.A. Donaldson Smith, "Expedition through Somaliland to Lake Rudolf," _Geographical Journal_ 8 (1896), p. 127.
.Pankhurst, _The History of Famine_ , pp. 86β9, 105.
.Marcus, p. 143.
.Father Joseph Ohrwalder (edited by F. Wingate), _Ten Years' Captivity in the Mahdi's Camp_ , London 1897, p. 283.
.P. Holt, _The Mahdist State in the Sudan: 1881β1898_ , Oxford 1958, pp. 157β60.
.Ibid., pp. 160 and 165β7.
.Ibid., pp. 171β3. See also Augustus Wylde, _Modern Abyssinia_ , London 1901, p. 106.
.Alexander De Waal, _Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984β1985_ , Oxford 1989, pp. 63β4.
.Ohrwalder, p. 306.
.Holt, pp. 174β5.
.C. Rosignoli, "Omdurman during the Mahdiya," _Sudan Notes and Records_ 48, Khartoum 1967, p. 43.
.Rudolf Slatin Pasha, _Fire and Sword in the Sudan_ , London 1897, p. 274.
.Ibid., p. 273.
.Ibid., pp. 274β5.
.Rosignoli, _Sudan Notes_ , p. 42.
.Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, "Ecologie et historie en Afrique noire," _Histoire, economie et sociΓ©tΓ©_ 16:3 (1997), p. 501;
.Richard Pankhurst, _The Ethiopians_ , Oxford 1998, pp. 183β9.
.Marcus, pp. 92β3.
.On the 1896 drought-famine in Ethiopia, see Coquery-Vidrovitch, p. 503. For a recent overview of Ethiopian climate history, see Maria Machado, Alfredo Perez-Gonzalez and Gerardo Benito, "Paleoenvironmental Changes During the Last 4000 years in the Tigray, Northern Ethiopia," _Quaternary Research_ 49 (1998), pp. 312β21.
.Sir John Elliot, "Address to the Sub-section Cosmical Physics," reprinted in _Symon's Meteorological Magazine_ 465 (Oct. 1904), p. 147.
.Malenbaum, pp. 178β9.
.For a discussion of drought and dearth in Upper Egypt and the Sudan, see A. Milne, "The Dry Summer on the Upper Nile," _Scottish Geographical Magazine_ 16 (1900), pp. 89β91. Tolstoy's observations on the agrarian crisis that began with the 1896β97 crop failures ("La Famine en Russie en 1898") was published in _La Revue socialiste_ (Paris), 1898, pp. 129β42. In Milan, the army massacred 80 bread rioters on 8 May 1898 (see Offer, p. 220).
.David Landes, _The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present_ , Cambridge 1969, p. 231.
.Elizabeth Isichei, _A History of African Societies to 1870_ , Cambridge 1997, p. 293.
.David Arnold, "Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896β1900," _Subaltern Studies_ 5 (1987), p. 74.
.Esherick, p. 300; and David Little, _Understanding Peasant China_ , New Haven, Conn. 1989, pp. 152β3 (quote).
.Arthur Smith, _China in Convulsion_ , vol. 1, Edinburgh 1901, p. 219; and A. Broomhall, _China's Open Century, Book Seven_ , p. 306.
.Della Cava, p. 55.
.Charles Ambler, _Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism_ , New Haven, Conn. 1988, p. 3.
.John Lonsdale, "The European Scramble and Conquest in African History," in Oliver and Sanderson, p. 692.
**5. Skeletons at the Feast**
The quote appears in H. M. Hyndman, _The Bankruptcy of India_ , London 1886, p. vi.
."Presidential Address at Lucknow Congress," (Dec. 1899) in Romesh Chunder Dutt, _Romesh Chunder Dutt_ , New Delhi 1968, p. 202.
.Loveday, p. 65.
.Michelle McAlpin, "Price Movements and Fluctuations in Economic Activity (1860β1947), in Dharma Kumar (ed.), _Cambridge Economic History of India_ , Cambridge 1983, pp. 886β8. See also Sir John Strachey, _India_ , London 1894, pp. 184β5.
.Augustin Filon, "L'Inde d'aujourd'hui d'apres les ecrivains indiens: I. La Situation economique et la vie publique," _Revue des deux mondes_ , Nov.βDec. 1899, p. 381.
.Rashmi Pande, _The Viceroyalty of Lord Elgin II_ , Patna 1986, p. 131.
.Premansukumar Bandyopadhyay, _Indian Famine and Agrarian Problems_ , Calcutta, p. 231.
.The steep decline of British agriculture is vividly illustrated by the contrast between the harvest of 80 million bushels in 1884 and the meager 37 million bushels harvested in 1895 (Marcello de Cecco, _The International Gold Standard: Money and Empire_ , New York 1984, p. 25).
.Thus in an October 1896 letter the collector of Godavari complained that despite a bountiful local harvest, grain prices "depend almost entirely on the condition in other parts of India" (quoted in A. Satyananarayana, "Expansion of Commodity Production and Agrarian Market," in Ludden [1994], p. 207). Satyananarayana provides a useful overview of the complex debate on the degree of integration and automatic price movement in local, national and international markets by the late nineteenth century.
.G. Chesney, "Famine and Controversy," _The Nineteenth Century_ , March 1902, pp. 479 (preexisting drought in Central Provinces and Rajputana) and 481 (price of millet).
. _The Times_ , 18 Jan. 1897.
.Quoted in B. Bhatia, "The 'Entitlement Approach' to Famine Analysis," in G. Harrison (ed.), _Famine_ , Oxford 1988, pp. 39β40.
.Moulton, p. 17.
.Bandyopadhyay, p. 140.
. _Spectator_ , 30 Jan. 1897.
."From Ahmednagar," 16 Oct., in _New York Times_ , 22 Nov. 1896.
.Margaret Denning, _Mosaics from India_ , Chicago 1902, pp. 168β9.
."Sir Edwin Arnold on the Famine in India," reprinted from the _North American Review_ (March 1897) in the _Review of Reviews_ , April 1897, p. 459.
."Pestilence and Famine in India," _Spectator_ , 16 Jan. 1897, p. 81.
.S. N. Kulkarni, _Famines, Droughts and Scarcities in India (Relief Measures and Policies)_ , Allahabad 1990, p. 16; and Hari Srivastava, _The History of Indian Famines_ , Agra 1968, pp. 205 and 226; Bandyopadhyay, pp. 14β16.
.Bandyopadhyay, ibid.
.Ibid., p. 231.
.Ibid., p. 39.
.As Currie points out, most of the apparatus of the New Poor Law of 1834 was imported into India, except "under normal conditions, there was no commitment to the maintenance of the 'deserving' poor" (p. 49).
.Singh, p. 110.
.George Lambert, _India, The Horror-Stricken Empire_ , Elkhart, Ind. 1898, p. 144.
.Loveday, pp. 88β9.
.Lambert, pp. 99β100.
.Pepper, p. 59.
.Ibid., pp. 318β19.
.G. Thomas, _History of Photography in India, 1840β1980_ , Pondicherry 1981, p. 28. For a British howl of protest against "misleading" famine photographs, see J. Rees, "Fighting the Famine in India," _The Nineteenth Century_ , March 1897, pp. 358β61.
.Sir Andrew Fraser, _Among Rajas and Ryots_ , London 1911, pp. 111β25.
.John McLane, _Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress_ , Princeton, N.J. 1977, p. 71.
.On Tilak and the Irish, see H. Brasted, "Irish Models and the Indian National Congress, 1870β1922," in Masselos, pp. 31β2.
.E. Pratt, "India and Her Friends," _Westminster Review_ , June 1897, p. 647.
.McLane, p. 29.
.H. Birdwood, "The Recent Epidemics of Plague in Bombay," _Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society_ , 1898, pp. 141β3. See also Alok Sheel, "Bubonic plague in south Bihar: Gaya and Shahabad districts, 1900β1924," _IESHR_ , 35:4 (1998), pp. 426β7.
.Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, "Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896β1914," in Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (eds.), _Epidemics and Ideas_ , Cambridge 1992, p. 213.
.F. B. Smith, _Florence Nightingale_ , London 1982, p. 125.
.Ira Klein, "Urban Development and Death: Bombay City, 1870β1914," _Modern Asian Studies_ 20:4 (1986), p. 748.
.Radhika Famasubban and Nigel Crook, "Spatial Patterns of Health and Morality," in Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (eds.), _Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India_ , pp. 148β51.
.Klein, p. 734.
.See the _Spectator_ , 16 January 1897, p. 81.
.On unrest over grain prices, see Kulkarni, p. 16; on rioting, David Arnold, _Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India_ , Berkeley 1993, pp. 214 and 230.
.Ira Klein, "Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India," _Modern Asian Studies_ , 22:4 (1988), p. 737.
.Arnold, p 204.
.Chandavarkar, p. 207.
.Nayana Goradia, _Lord Curzon: The Last of the British Moghuls_ , Delhi 1993, p. 123.
."Four of every five patients who entered Bombay hospitals perished there," Klein, "Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest," p. 742.
.Arnold, "Touching the Body," p. 71.
.McLane, p. 30.
.Cf. D. Tahmankar, _Lokamanya Tilak_ , London 1956, p. 68 passim; N. Kelkar, _Life and Times of Lokamanya Tilak_ , Delhi, p. 338 passim; Richard Cashman, _The Myth of the Lokamanya_ , Berkeley, pp. 123β50; and Romesh Chunder Dutt, _The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age_ , 2nd edn., London 1906, p. 456 (quote).
.I. Catanach, "Plague and the Indian Village, 1896β1914," in Peter Robb (ed.), _Rural India: Land, Power and Society Under British Rule_ , London 1983, pp. 218 and 227.
.Chandavarkar, p. 210.
.Catanach, ibid.
. _India in 1897_ , quoted in Filon, p. 381. In his study of the history of famine in a poor district of Bihar, K. Suresh Singh observes that although "the [1896β97] famine was the most lethal in Palamau's recorded history... officially it was reported that 'no deaths were caused by starvation'" ( _The Indian Famine 1967_ , New Delhi 1975, p. 32).
."The Famine in India," _Missionary Review of the World_ , April 1897, p. 286.
.He judged 1897, not 1857 or 1877, to be India's "most calamitous year of the century"; see Ramabai Ranade (ed.), _Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Hon'ble Mr. Justice M.G. Ranade_ , Delhi 1992 (reprint), p. 180.
.Singh, _Starvation and Colonialism_ , pp. 98β9.
.Dutt, pp. 219β22 (Indian National Congress); _Famine and Agrarian Problems_ , pp. 193 (Bilaspur) and 227 (Hamilton in House of Commons).
.This claim (supposedly based on testimony by Sir Charles Lyall in 1898) was made by "E. C." in "The Indian Famine," _Westminster Review_ 155:2 (1901), p. 135.
.D. E. U. Baker, _Colonialism in an Indian Hinterland: The Central Provinces, 1820β1920_ , Delhi 1993, pp. 174, 194 and 202.
.F. Merewether, _A Tour Through the Famine Districts of India_ , London 1898, pp. 129β30. Merewether's account of the Jubbulpur poorhouse was scoffed at by J. Rees in _The Nineteenth Century_ (March 1897), who claimed that conditions were not radically different than in Limehouse or Mile End. "If the misery and destitution of London itself were collected within a ring fence, it is doubtful if a visitor from the east would think it other than a sad spectacle" (p. 359).
.See Pepper, p. 78.
. _The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne_ , ed. Edith Hawthorne, New York 1938, p. 295.
.Julian Hawthorne, "India Starving," _Cosmopolitan_ 23:4 (August 1897), pp. 379β82
.Ibid. Dr. Louis Klopsch of the _Christian Herald_ penned equally shocking accounts from the Ahmedabad poorhouse where prostrate victims were left out in the open, to be eaten by flies in the 110-degree heat. "On inquiring why these people were exposed to the relentless rays of the sun without shelter or shade, I was told that they had been brought in from the neighboring villages on carts and were to remain under observation for twenty-four hours in order to determine whether symptoms of contagious disease developed. They had come in during the afternoon, they had lain there for three or four hours, they were to remain there all night and to stay there all the next forenoon. Possibly the evening of the next day they would be admitted to the inhospitable shelter of the Ahmedabad poor-house. Myriads of flies were feasting on each individual bundle, and the eyelids, mouths, nostrils and ears were all besieged with battalions of flies gorging themselves on the helpless victims of the India famine." Klopsch found the "indescribable misery" of the small children almost "unbearable" to relate (quoted in Pepper, pp. 79β80).
.W. Aykroyd, _The Conquest of Famine_ , London 1974, pp. 64β7.
.Rudyard Kipling, "William the Conqueror," in _The Day's Work_ , London 1898, p. 203.
.Ibid., pp. 380β81.
.Caption on photographs, inside front cover, _Cosmopolitan_ 23:3 (July 1897).
.Bandyopadhyay, p. 51.
.For example, _Harper's Weekly_ in 1900 claimed: "The famine of 1877 killed some ten million beings; that of 1897, about sixteen millions; whilst the present one will probably break the record with twenty million" (p. 350). See also Digby, _"Prosperous" British India_ , p. 129.
.C. Ramage, _The Great Indian Drought of 1899_ , Boulder 1977, pp. 1β3. Ramage is a world authority on the Indian monsoon.
.See D. Mooley and B. Parthasarathy, "Fluctuations in All-India Summer Monsoon Rainfall During 1871β1978," _Climate Change_ 6 (1984), pp. 287β301.
.Ramage, p. 6.
.Bombay Government, _Report on the Famine in the Bombay Presidency, 1899β1902_ , vol. 1, Bombay 1903, p. 114.
.Ramage, p. 4.
.Pierre Loti, _India_ , English translation by George Inman, London 1995, pp. 145β6.
.Bombay, _Report_ , vol. 1, p. 3.
.Vaughan Nash, _The Great Famine and Its Causes_ , London 1900, p. 12.
.Scott, pp. 142β3.
.Frederick Lamb, _The Gospel and the Mala: The Story of the Hyderabad Wesleyan Mission_ , Mysore 1913, p. 49.
.Scott, pp. 31β2.
.Singh, pp. 113β18.
.Bombay, _Report_ , vol. 1, pp. 3 and 83 (artisans and mill workers).
.Charlesworth, "Rich Peasants and Poor Peasants," pp. 110β11.
.McLane, pp. 26β7.
.C. J. O'Donnell, _The Failure of Lord Curzon_ , London 1903, pp. 37β41.
.Quoted in C. Ramage, p. 5.
.O'Donnell, p. xviii.
.Nash, p. 171.
.Bandyopadhyay, pp. 63β7 and 226.
.Bernard Semmel, _The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire_ , Baltimore 1993, p. 109. "Never since the Crimean War, never perhaps since the death of Castlereagh in 1822," wrote Dutt, "has Imperialism been so rampant in England; never have the higher instincts of humanity and justice, of respect towards rival nations, and fairness towards subject nations, been at a lower ebb" (quoted in Romesh Chunder Dutt, _Romesh Chunder Dutt_ , New Delhi 1968, p. 63).
.S. Thorburn, _Problems of Indian Poverty_ , Fabian Tract No. 110, London, March 1902, p. 226 (he is writing about 1899β1901).
.See figures in _The Times_ (London), 17 Feb. 1900.
.Scott, p. 153.
.Ibid.
.Eddy, p. 25.
.On Naoroji's and Dutt's disenchantment with British Liberalism and the former's turn towards the Socialists, see Masani, pp. 201, 400β402 and 432; Dutt, pp. 62β3 and 79; and J. K. Gupta, _Life and Work of Romesh Chunder Dutta, CIE_ , Calcutta 1911 (reprinted Delhi 1986), pp. 240β44, 318β19 and especially 458. On demoralization and lack of direction within the Indian National Congress during the famines, see McLane, pp. 130β31. On British Christian socialists and imperialism, see Peter d'A. Jones, _The Christian Socialist Revival 1877β1914_ , Princeton, N.J., esp. pp. 198β205; and on Fabian imperialism, see Francis Lee, _Fabianism and Colonialism: The Life and Political Thought of Lord Sydney Olivier_ , London 1988.
.Raymond Challinor, _The Origins of British Bolshevism_ , London 1977, p. 15 (Falkirk SDF). At the 1904 Amsterdam Congress of the Socialist International, which branded "Great Britain with the mark of shame for its treatment of India," a thousand delegates (including Hyndman, JaurΓ¨s, Luxemburg and Lenin) stood in silence in commemoration of the Indian famine dead, then gave Naoroji a rapturous applause when he declared that the liberation of India from hunger and the drain of wealth "rests in the hands of the working classes. Working men constitute the immense majority of the people of India, and they appeal to the workmen of the whole world, and ask for their help and sympathy" (Masani, pp. 431β2).
.Nash, pp. 179β80.
.Ibid., pp. 19β33.
.Ibid., pp. 19, 173 and 181.
.Bombay, _Report_ , vol. 1, p. 91
.Klein, p. 752.
.Ibid., p. 54.
.On Kholapur, see Merewether, pp. 27β8.
.Goradia, pp. 71β4 and 146.
.Scott, pp. 113β14.
.Loti, pp. 171β2.
.Ibid., p. 172.
.Kuldeep Mathur and Niraja Jayal, _Drought, Policy and Politics_ , New Delhi 1993, p. 63.
.Scott, p. 107.
."The outturn of crops which was in the previous year 27,710,258 Indian maunds fell in 1899β1900 to 1,174,923 Indian maunds" (R. Choksey, _Economic Life in the Bombay Gujarat [1800β1939]_ , Bombay 1968, p. 171).
.Ibid; and Scott, pp. 107β8. Choksey estimates that about half of the cattle (or 800,000 head) in Gujarat perished (p. 176).
.Sherwood Eddy, _India Awakening_ , New York 1911, p. 24.
.Scott, ibid.
.Quoted in Pepper, pp. 82β3.
.Vasant Kaiwar, "The Colonial State, Capital and the Peasantry in Bombay Presidency," _Modern Asian Studies_ , 28:4 (1994), p. 813.
.Bombay, _Report_ , p. 100.
.Choksey, p. 44.
.Eddy, ibid.
.Klein, "When the Rains Failed," p. 205.
.J. Coe, "Congress and the Tribals in Surat District in the 1920s," in Masselos, pp. 60β62.
."A lady writing from Ahmedabad," quoted in ibid., p. 36.
.Choksey, p. 44.
.Bombay, _Report_ , p. 95.
.Nash, pp. 9β10.
.David Hardiman, "The Crisis of Lesser Patidars: Peasant Agitations in Kheda District, Gujarat, 1917β34," in D. Low (ed.), _Congress and the Raj_ , London 1977, pp. 55β6.
.Baker, p. 231.
.Ibid., p. 198.
.Bombay, _Report_ , pp. 5β6.
.Tim Dyson, "On the Demography of South Asian FaminesβPart 1," _Population Studies_ 45 (1991), pp. 16 and 22.
.Dutt, _Romesh Chunder Dutt_ , p. 252.
.Arup Maharatna, _The Demography of Famines: An Indian Historical Perspective_ , Delhi 1996, p. 15 (Table 1.1); Stein, "The Making of Agrarian Policy in India," p. 18; and Lewis, p. 173.
.Speech to the Legislative Council, Simla, 19 Oct. 1900 (in Curzon, _Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection of His Speeches..._ , London 1906, p. 394.
.Bombay, _Report_ , p. 103.
.Tim Dyson, "Indian Historical Demography: Developments and Prospects," in Dyson (ed.), _India's Historical Demography: Studies in Famine, Disease and Society_ , London 1989, p. 5; and J. A. Crawford, _Report on the Famine in the Hyderabad Assigned Districts in the Years 1899 and 1900_ , vol. 1, Nagpur 1901, p. 8.
. _The Lancet_ , 16 May 1901.
.Digby, _"Prosperou" British India_ , pp. 137β9.
.Klein, "When the Rains Failed," p. 186 (on Davis); and Pierre Le Roy, _Le Faim dans le monde_ , Paris 1994, p. 16.
.Maharatna, pp. 15 and 63β7.
.Chandavarkar, p. 203.
.Srivastava, p. 269.
.Ibid., p. 219; and B. Tomlinson, _The Economy of Modern India, 1860β1970 (The New Cambridge History of India_ , 3:3), Cambridge 1993, p. 83.
.Bandyopadhyay, pp. 192 and 200.
.Sumit Sarkar, _Modern India: 1885β1947_ , Madras 1983, p. 36.
.Wakimura, p. 301; and Choksey, p. 44.
. _Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1901_ , Calcutta 1901, p. 7; Klein, "When the Rains Failed," p. 204 fn33.
**6. Millenarian Revolutions**
The epigraph appears in Euclydes da Cunha, _Rebellion in the Backlands_ ( _Os SertΓ΅es_ ), trans. Samuel Putnam, Chicago 1944, p. 133.
.Pepper, _Life-Work of Louis Klopsch_ , p. 172.
.Francis Nichols, _Through Hidden Shensi_ , New York 1902, pp. 2β9; Marshall Broomhall, _The Chinese Empire: A General and Missionary Survey_ , London (China Inland Mission) 1907, p. 206 (mortality figures).
.Broomhall, pp. 228β35 and 242. Arthur Tiedemann draws attention to comparable suffering in northern Anhui. "A Jesuit priest at Mengcheng observed, for example, that so many people were dying in the city that the naked dead and dying had to be dumped outside the city walls to be devoured by hungry dogs" ("Boxers, Christians and the Culture of Violence in North China," _Journal of Peasant Studies_ 25:4 [July 1899], p. 156).
.According to Wilkinson (Table 3, p. 144) 75 of 90 Shenxi districts reported crop disaster in 1898. The drought continued through 1900 (67 districts) and was punctually followed by war and brigandage affecting agriculture in 68 districts.
.On the centrality of _fengshui_ doctrines to the popular Chinese interpretation of the crisis, see Smith, vol. 1, p. 57.
.Esherick, p. 299.
.Tiedemann (p. 159) cites the _North-China Herald_ on "a general crop failure in the wheat-exporting area of northwestern Shandong" previous to the inundation.
.Ibid., pp. 175β7.
.Quoted in Pepper, p. 164.
.Paul Cohen, _History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth_ , New York 1997, p. 69.
. _New York Times_ , 25 March 1899.
.Lu Yao, "The Origins of the Boxers," _Chinese Studies in History_ , 20:3β4 (1987), p. 54.
.Esherick, pp. 179β80.
.Pepper, pp. 164β5. A year later, however, the navy did provide Klopsch with a transport, the _Quito_ , to carry 5,000 tons of Kansas relief grain to India.
.Harlan Beach, "The History of Christian Missions in China," in G. Blakeslee (ed.), _China and the Far East_ , New York 1910, p. 274.
.Endymion Wilkinson, "Studies in Chinese Price History," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University 1970, p. 52.
.Smith, vol. 2, p. 573.
.S. Teng, _The Nien Army and Their Guerrilla Warfare, 1851β1868_ , Paris 1961, p. 127.
.Smith, vol. 1, pp. 155β6.
.Elizabeth Perry, "Social Banditry Revisited: The Case of Bai Lang, a Chinese Brigand," _Modern China_ 9:3 (July 1983), pp. 361, 366 and 369.
.Esherick, pp. 174, 223 and 281β2.
.Smith, p. 219.
.Ibid., p. 244.
.Lu, p.52.
.Cohen, pp. 35, 77β82 (first quote) and p. 95 (second quote); Tiedemann, p. 156.
.Lu, p. 55.
.Qi Aizhang, "Stages in the Development of the Boxer Movement and Their Characteristics," _Chinese Studies in History_ 20:3β4 (1987), p. 115. In the same issue, Liao Yizhong ("Special Features of the Boxer Movement") denies the existence of any "anti-feudal" dimension, although his citations are from Shandong, not Hebei (pp. 186β7).
.Broomhall, vol. 7, p. 374.
.Georges Lefebvre, _The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France_ , New York 1973.
.Eva Price, _China Journal, 1889β1900: An American Missionary Family During the Boxer Rebellion_ , New York 1989, pp. 199 and 203β4. See also Sarah Alice (Troyer) Young, letter from Shanxi (2 Dec. 1899) in coll. 542, box 1, folder 7, Billy Graham Center.
.Price, pp. 204 and 222.
.Cohen, p. 172. For similar populist, anti-foreign reactions to the drought in the Beijing region, see E. Ruoff (ed.), _Death Throes of a Dynasty: Letters and Diaries of Charles and Bessie Ewing, Missionaries to China_ , Kent, Ohio 1990, p. 68 (letters of Sept. and Oct. 1899).
.Price, pp. 191β4, 199 and 209.
.Archibald Glover, _A Thousand Miles of Miracle in China_ , London 1904, pp. 6, 85, 195 and 244 (song).
.Price, p. 224.
.Austin, p. 75.
.Esherick, pp. xvβxvi, 282 and 291β2.
.Smith, vol. 2, p. 716. The Japanese, in contrast to the barbarities of their armies in China in the 1930s, were the honorable exception, and were praised by all independent observers for their humane and respectful treatment of Chinese civilians.
.E.J. Dillon, "The Chinese Wolf and the European Lamb," excerpted in the _New York Times_ , 27 Jan. 1901.
.Ibid.
.Joseph Page, _The Revolution That Never Was: Northeast Brazil, 1955β1964_ , New York 1972, pp. 26β7.
.Vera Kelsey, _Seven Keys to Brazil_ , New York 1941, p. 172.
.Robert Levine, _Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893β1897_ , Berkeley 1992, pp. 34β8.
.Levine, pp.193β203 and 229.
.Ibid., pp. 139, 151 and 159β61.
.Ibid., pp. 132β3 and 229β31.
.Ibid., pp 142β6.
.On the drought in 1898 and 1900, see Charles Wagley, _An Introduction to Brazil_ , London 1971, p. 41. According to historical statistics from the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (University of California, San Diego), the 1897β98 drought in the Nordeste had a rainfall anomaly of β8.15 cm/month. In the following century, the next most severe drought (1915) measured β3.3 cm/month. Moreover, all years from 1897 through 1906 were in the driest historical tercile and had rainfall anomalies of at least β1.4 cm/month. (database at iri.ucsd.edu/hot_nino/impacts/ns_amer/index).
.Levine, pp. 164β5.
.Ibid., p. 177.
.Ibid., p. 178.
.Da Cunha, p. 475.
.Levine, p. 190.
.Della Cava, ibid.
.Levine, p. 148.
.Della Cava, p. 89.
.C. Kim and Han-Kyo Kim, _Korea and the Politics of Imperialism, 1876β1910_ , Berkeley 1967, pp. 116β17.
.Pierre van der Eng, "The Real Domestic Product of Indonesia, 1880β1989," _Explorations in Economic History_ 1992, pp. 355 and 358.
.Furnivall, p. 232.
.See R. Elson, "The Famine in Demak and Grobogan in 1849β50; Its Causes and Circumstances," _Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs_ 19:1 (1985).
.Hugenholz, pp. 178β9
.R. Elson, "From 'States' to State: The Changing Regime of Peasant Export Production in Mid-Nineteenth Century Java," in J. Lindblad (ed.), _Historical Foundations of a National Economy in Indonesia, 1890sβ1990s_ , Amsterdam 1996, p. 128.
.Ricklefs, pp. 124β5.
.Hugenholz, ibid.
.H. Dick, "The Emergence of a National Economy, 1808β1990s," in Linblad, p. 36.
.Ricklefs, pp. 151β3.
.Martinez Duesta, p. 260.
.Ken De Bevoise, _Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines_ , Princeton, N.J. 1995, pp. 60β62 and 447.
.Ibid., pp. 41β2 and 158β60.
.Ibid., pp 63β6, 177 and 181β2.
.Ibid., p. 65.
.Brian Linn, _Guardians of Empire: The US Army and the Pacific, 1902β1940_ , Chapel Hill, N.C. 1997, p. 14.
.De Bevoise, pp. 13 and 65; see also Matthew Smallman-Raynor and Andrew Cliff, "The Philippines Insurrection and the 1902β04 Cholera Epidemic: Part IβEpidemiological Diffusion Processes in War," _Journal of Historical Geography_ 24:1 (1998), pp. 69β89.
.Billig, p. 159.
.Violeta Lopez-Gonzaga and Michelle Decena, "Negros in Transition: 1899β1905," _Philippine Studies_ 38 (1990), p. 112.
.McCoy, pp. 120β22.
.Robin Palmer, "The Agricultural History of Rhodesia," in Palmer and Parsons, p. 223.
.S. Nicholson, "The Historical Climatology of Africa," in Wigley, pp. 262β3.
.John Reader, _Africa: A Biography of the Continent_ , New York 1998, p. 587.
.Coquery-Vidrovitch, pp. 495 and 502; A. Milne, "The Dry Summer on the Upper Nile," _Scottish Geographical Magazine_ 16 (1899), pp. 89β90; and Quinn, "A Study of Southern OscillationβRelated Climatic Activity," p. 144.
.On the drought-famine in Swaziland in 1896β97, see Neil Parsons and Robin Palmer, "Introduction: Historical Background," in Palmer and Parsons (eds.), _The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa_ , Berkeley 1977, p. 17.
.Terence Ranger, _Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896β7_ , London 1967, p. 148.
.John Iliffe, _Famine in Zimbabwe_ , pp. 21β30.
.Charles Ambler, _The Great Famine in Central Kenya 1897β1900_ , Nairobi 1977, pp. 122β8 and 143. (On the plague and the railroad, see Peter Curson and Kevin McCracken, _Plague in Sidney: The Anatomy of an Epidemic_ , Kensington, p. 31.)
.H. J. Mackinder, _The First Ascent of Mount Kenya_ , ed. K. Michael Barbour, London 1991, pp. 82β5. This account was never published in the author's lifetime, its editor explains, to prevent disclosure of an atrocity: eight of the expedition's Swahili porters were executed at Mackinder's order (pp. 22β3).
.Ambler, ibid.
.D. Low, "British East Africa: The Establishment of British Rule, 1895β1912," in Vincent Harlow et al. (eds.), _History of East Africa_ , vol. 2, Oxford 1965, pp. 4β5.
.Marcia Wright, "East Africa, 1870β1905," in Oliver and Sanderson, p. 576.
.Isichei, p. 454; and Ambler, p. 146.
.Low, pp. 16β17.
.Mackinder, p. 99.
.Frederick Cooper, _From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890β1925_ , New Haven, Conn. 1980, pp. 59β60 and 220β22.
.Low, pp. 110β11.
.Ibid., p. 111; and Wright, p. 576β7.
.James Giblin, _The Politics of Environmental Control in Northeastern Tanzania, 1840β1940_ , Philadelphia 1992, pp. 90β91, 114β15, and 124β7
.Leroy Vail and Landeg White, _Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District_ , Minneapolis 1980, pp.
.Allen and Barbara Isaacman, _The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique: The Zambesi Valley 1850β1921_ , Berkeley 1976, p. 115.
.Ibid., pp. 134β42.
.Palmer, ibid.
.Ambler, p. 149.
.Tomlinson, p. 195.
.Jairus Banaji, "Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late 19th Century," in Gyan Prakash (ed.), _The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India_ , Delhi 1994, p. 123.
.Sumit Guha, _The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan_ , p. 192.
.Banaji, pp. 123β4; Arnold, "Famine in Peasant Consciousness," p. 42.
.Charlesworth, _Peasants and Imperial Rule: Agriculture and Agrarian Society in the Bombay Presidency, 1850β1935_ , Cambridge 1985, pp. 109β10.
.Sir John Strachey, _India: Its Administration and Progress_ , London 1911, p. 249.
.Guha, pp. 149β58.
.Vasant Kaiwar, "The Colonial State, Capital and the Peasantry in Bombay Presidency," _Modern Asian Studies_ 28:4 (1994), p. 822.
.Philip Huang, _The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China_ , Stanford, Calif. 1985, pp. 85β105.
.Philip Huang, _The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350β1988_ , Stanford, Calif. 1990, p. 71.
.Huang, _Peasant Economy_ , p. 17.
.Fritjof Tichelman, _The Social Evolution of Indonesia_ , The Hague 1980, p. 33.
.D. R. Gadgil, _The Industrial Evolution of India in Recent Times, 1860β1939_ , Delhi 1971, p. 180; and Daniel Little, _Understanding Peasant China_ , New Haven, Conn. 1989, p. 92.
.Jan Breman and E. Valentine Daniel, "Conclusion: the Making of a Coolie," in Daniel, Bernstein and Brass (eds.), _Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia_ , London 1992, p. 290.
.Pauline Keating, _Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement in Northern Shaanxi, 1934β1945_ , Stanford, Calif. 1997, pp. 27β8.
.Ibid., p. 33.
.Ibid., pp. 10β13, 23 and 30. Between 1920 and 1936 18,350,000 people were officially estimated to have died of famine in China, mostly in the north (E. Vermeer, _Water Conservancy and Irrigation in China_ , The Hague 1977, p. 32).
**7. The Mystery of the Monsoons**
The quote is from Frater, _Chasing the Monsoon_ , New York 1991, p. 190.
."Climate" and "weather" differ not only in time-scale (mean versus individual value), but also in causal level. As Kevin Trenberth has pointed out, "Climate variation results from the interactions between the atmosphere and the other spheres (hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, etc.) in the Earth system. Weather variations occur from instabilities within the atmosphere itself and are much more short-lived" (see ENSO Colloquium, July 1997, at www.dir.ucar.edu/esig/enso).
.Why not, then, an Atlantic "El NiΓ±o" as well? The trade winds also pool warm water off Brazil and leave a cold tongue off Africa, but the Atlantic Ocean apparently does not provide a wide enough basin for ENSO-scale fluctuations to initiate or become a self-sustaining system. See F. Jin, "Tropical Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction, the Pacific Cold Tongue, and the ENSO," _Science_ 274 (4 Oct. 1996), pp. 77β8.
.Richard Grove, "The East India Company, the Raj and the El NiΓ±o: The Critical Role Played by Colonial Scientists in Establishing the Mechanisms of Global Climate Teleconnections, 1770β1930," in Richard Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan, _Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia_ , Delhi 1998, pp. 301β23.
.Frederik Nebeker, _Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century_ , San Diego 1995, p. 12. By 1880 there were 121 meteorological stations in India including Burma and Ceylon ( _Nature_ , 23 August 1883, p. 406).
.Blanford virtually founded modern monsoon meteorology, and his 1877 book, _The Indian Meteorologist's Vade-Mecum_ , "became the most widely used textbook on tropical meteorology for the rest of the century" (see Gisela Kutzbach, "Concepts of Monsoon Physics in Historical Perspective," in Jay Fein and Pamela Stephens [eds.], _Monsoons_ , New York 1987, p. 181).
."On the Barometric See-Saw Between Russia and India in the Sun-Spot Cycle," _Nature_ , 18 March 1880, p. 477. See also his _Report on the Meteorology of India in 1878_ , Calcutta 1880.
.On China, see "On the Barometric See-Saw," p. 480.
.The first use of the term _teleconnection_ was apparently A. Angstroem, "Teleconnections of Climate Changes in Present Time," _Geogr. Ann_. 17 (1935), pp. 242β58.
.Richard Grove, _Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600β1860_ , Cambridge 1995, p. 446.
.J. Norman Lockyer and W. Hunter, "Sun-Spots and Famines," _The Nineteenth Century_ , Nov. 1877, p. 601.
. _Nature_ , 17 Aug. 1899, p. 374.
.Douglas Hoyt and Kenneth Schatten, _The Role of the Sun in Climate Change_ , Oxford 1997, pp. 36 and 144β5.
.For a dessicationist perspectiveβinfluenced by Marsh's _The Earth as Modified by Human Action_ βon the famine of 1876, see "Philindus," "Famines and Floods in India," _Macmillan's Magazine_ , Feb. 1878 (quote from p. 256).
.Lockyer and Hunter, p. 599.
.See the discussion by Lloyd's expert Henry Jeula in Cornelius Walford's _The Famines of the World: Past and Present_ , London 1879, pp. 94β6.
.Meldrum also virtually accused Hunter of plagiarizing his 1875 research on Madras rainfall; see "Sun-Spots and Rainfall," _Nature_ , 4 April 1878, pp. 448β50. Hunter's earlier reservations about a sunspot signature in higher latitude rainfall can be found in "Rainfall in the Temperate Zone in Connection with the Sun-Spot Cycle," _Nature_ , 22 Nov. 1877, pp. 59β61.
.See, for example, the richly sardonic critique of Hunter's speculations by Richard Proctor: "Sun-Spot, Storm, and Famine," _Gentleman's Magazine_ , Dec. 1877, pp. 705β6.
.E. Archibald, "W. W. Hunter: The Cycle of Drought and Famine in Southern India," _Calcutta Review_ 131 (1878), p. 129; and for an account of Strachey's paper "On the Alleged Correspondence of the Rainfall at Madras with the Sun-spot Period, and on the True Criterion of Periodicity in a Series of Variable Quantities," read before the Royal Society in May 1877, see letter of B. Stewart to W. S. Jevons, 5 June 1877, in _Papers and Correspondence of William Stanley Jevons_ , vol. 4, ed. R. Collison Black, London 1977, p. 203.
.See C. Meldrum, "Sun-Spots and Rainfall," 4 April 1878, pp. 448β50; E. Archibald, "Indian Rainfall," 25 April 1878, p. 505; and S. Hill, "Indian Rainfall," 20 June 1878, p. 193.
.Blanford, "On the Barometric See-Saw," pp. 477β8.
.Kutzbach, p. 199.
.Archibald, pp. 148β9.
.Cunniff, p. 195. Cunniff points out, however, that Tomas Pompeu, an ardent "rainmaker" and author of _Memoria sobre a clima e seccas do CearΓ‘_ (1878), had been "the first Brazilian to correlate sunspots and droughts" (ibid.).
."The Rainfall of Brazil and the Sun-Spots," _Nature_ , 8 Aug. 1878, p. 384; and Joaquim Alves, _Historia das secas (Seculos XVII a XIX)_ , Fortaleza 1953, p. 123.
.Cunniff, pp. 183β9.
.Hoyt and Schatten, p. 163.
."The Periodicity of Commercial Crises and Its Physical Explanation," _Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland_ 7 (1878); "Commercial Crises and Sun-Spots I," _Nature_ , 14 Nov. 1878; and "Commercial Crises and Sun-Spots II," _Nature_ , 24 April 1879.
.Walford, pp. 292β3.
.W. Jevons, "Economic Policy," in R. Smyth (ed.), _Essays in Economic Method_ , London 1962, p. 26.
.Philip Mirowski, "Macroeconomic Instability and the 'Natural' Processes in Early Neoclassical Economics," _Journal of Economic History_ 44:2 (June 1984), p. 346.
.Ibid., p. 349. In an earlier letter to his brother, Jevons admitted that "my theory of crises has the appearance of being a little too ingenious... but I have great confidence in its substantial truth" (14 Nov. 1878 in _Papers and Correspondence_ , vol. 4, p. 293).
.Letter to _The Times_ , published 17 Jan. 1879, ibid., vol. 5, pp. 10β11.
.Letter to _The Times_ , published 19 April 1879, ibid., vol. 5, pp. 44β8.
.On Jevons's interest in Brazilian _secas_ , see his letter to his brother, 18 June 1879, vol. 5, p. 65. While she never saw sunspots, Rosa Luxemburg in _The Accumulation of Capital_ (1913) accepted part of Jevons's argument, agreeing that "periodical famines in India... recurring at intervals of ten or eleven years, were... among the causes of periodical crises in England," p. 286).
.Quoted in Proctor, p. 701.
.Ibid., p. 165.
.Indeed, the indefatigable Archibald, after a quarter-century's statistical labor, claimed that droughts in southern India followed minima, while those in the north coincided with maxima: a decidedly confusing (or, as he put it, "spasmodic") conclusion ( _Nature_ , 2 Aug. 1900, p. 335).
.Quoted in Kutzbach, p. 200.
.Colin Ramage, _Monsoon Meteorology_ , New York 1971, p. 239.
.A. Meadows, _Science and Controversy: A Biography of Sir Norman Lockyer_ , Cambridge, Mass. 1972, pp. 284β6.
.Cf. report on Hildebrandsson's recent papers in _Nature_ , 17 Aug. 1899; and Allan, Lindesay and Parker, p. 12.
.Kutzbach, p. 202. See, for example, Gilbert Walker, _Outlines of the Theory of Electromagnetism_ , Cambridge 1910.
.Ibid., p. 203 (the analogy to geopolitics is mine).
.Halford Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," _Geographical Journal_ 23 (1904), p. 422.
.Mark Cane, "El NiΓ±o," _Ann. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci_. 14 (1986), p. 44. On the other hand, contemporary geodesistsβlike John Hayford in Americaβhad achieved spectacular results (the figure of the earth) through massive computations where the "sheer bulk of information" was most important. (See the discussion of turn-of-the-century geodesy in Naomi Oreskes, _The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science_ , New York 1999, pp. 234β5.)
.Donald Mock, "The Southern Oscillation: Historical Origins," NOAA (www.ced.noaa.gov/-dm/pubs/mock81).
.Allan, Lindesay and Parker, p. 13. Walker's concept of the SO was partly anticipated by C. Brooks and H. Braby's 1921 article "The Clash of the Trades in the Pacific" ( _Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc_. 47, pp. 1β13).
.Peter Webster and Song Yang, "Monsoon and ENSO: Selectively Interactive Systems," _Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc_. 118 (1992), p. 878.
.Ibid.
.Ibid., p. 17.
.Allan, Lindesay, and Parker, p. 14.
.See the brief history of the Bergen School in Nebeker, pp. 49β57 and 84β6.
.H. Berlage, "Fluctuations of the General Atmospheric Circulation of More Than One Year: Their Nature and Prognostic Value," _K. Ned. Meteorol. Inst. Meded. Verh_. 69 (1957); and Allan, Lindesay and Parker, p. 5 (quote). An even earlier precursor of Bjerknes's focus on oceanβatmosphere interaction was J. B. Leighly's "Marquesan Meteorology" ( _Univ. Calif. Publ. Geogr_. 6:4 [1933], pp. 147β72), although as J. Wallace et al. note, "The lack of citations of this remarkable paper indicates that it had little or no impact on the field at the time" (J. Wallace et al., "On the Structure and Evolution of ENSO-Related Climate Variability in the Tropical Pacific: Lessons from TOGA," _Journal of Geophysical Research_ 103:C7 [29 June 1998], p. 14,242).
.E. Rasmusson and T. Carpenter, "Variations in Tropical Sea Surface Temperature and Surface Wind Fields Associated with the Southern Oscillation/El NiΓ±o," _Mon. Wea. Rev_. 110 (1982), pp. 354β84.
.J. Bjerknes, "Atmospheric Teleconnections from the Equatorial Pacific," _Mon. Wea. Rev_. 97 (1969), p. 170.
.Thomas Levenson argues that John Leighy, studying the weather of the Marquesas Islands in 1933, had glimpsed this complex wind/sea surface temperature interaction in microcosm, but his work was not resurrected until 1978, a decade after Bjerknes's breakthrough ( _Ice Time: Climate, Science and Life on Earth_ , New York 1989, pp. 70, 72).
.George Philander, "Learning from El NiΓ±o," _Weather_ 53:9 (Sept. 1998), p. 273.
.Bjerknes, ibid.
.K. Wyrtki, "El NiΓ±o: The Dynamic Response of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean to Atmospheric Forcing," _Journal of Physical Oceanography_ 5, pp. 572β84; and "The Response of Sea Surface Topography to the 1976 El NiΓ±o," _Journal of Physical Oceanography_ 9, pp. 1223β31. Also see the characterization of Wyrtki's contribution in Allan, Lindesay and Parker, pp. 19 and 24β5.
.There is also a deep ocean transfer of heat through thermohaline convectionβthe famous "conveyor belt"βdriven by subduction of water masses in the Nordic Sea and Antarctica, but it works very slowly on wavelengths of decades or more. It constitutes the long-term memory of the coupled atmosphereβocean system.
.On the "capacitator" analogy, cf. Joel Gunn, "Introduction," special issue of _Human Ecology_ (22:1 [1994]) on global climate change, p. 11; and Peter Webster and Timothy Palmer, "The Past and the Future of El NiΓ±o," _Nature_ 390 (11 Dec. 1997), p. 562.
.There is considerable debate about which is the more important control over the ENSO cycle: heat storage in the Warm Pool or the internal wave dynamics of the Pacific. The latter is given priority in the famous "dampened oscillator" or "delayed action oscillator" model of ENSO developed by P. Schopf and M. Suarez in 1988 ("Vacillations in a Coupled OceanβAtmosphere Model," _J. Atmos. Sci_. 45, pp. 549β66). Their revision of Wyrtki was a response to the puzzling absence of a "canonical" buildup of sea level and sea surface temperature in the western Pacific before the massive 1982β83 El NiΓ±o.
.Michael McPhaden, "Genesis and Evolution of the 1997β98 El NiΓ±o," _Science_ 283 (12 Feb. 1999), p. 953.
.See G. Kiladis, G. Meehl and K. Weickmann, "The Large-Scale Circulation Associated with Westerly Wind Bursts and Deep Convection over the Western Equatorial Pacific," _J. Geophys. Res_. 99 (1994), pp. 18527β44.
.S. G. Philander, "El NiΓ±o and La NiΓ±a," _J. Atmos. Sci_. 42 (1985), pp. 451β9.
.Richard Barber in Michael Glantz, _Currents of Change: El NiΓ±o's Impact on Climate and Society_ , Cambridge 1996, p. 167.
.Richard Kerr, "Big El NiΓ±os Ride the Back of Slower Climate Change," _Science_ 283 (19 Feb. 1999), p. 1108.
.For the most sweeping case for El NiΓ±oβlike forcing of world climate on nested time-scales from the seasonal to the orbital, see Mark Cane and Amy Clement, "A Role for the Tropical Pacific Coupled OceanβAtmosphere System on Milankovitch and Millennial Timescales: Parts I & II," in Peter Clark, Robert Webb and Lloyd Keigwin (eds.), _Mechanisms of Global Climate Change at Millennial Time Scales_ , Washington, D.C. 1999.
.Eugene Rasmusson, Xueliang Wang and Chester Ropelewski, "Secular Variability of the ENSO Cycle," Natural Research Council, _Natural Climate Variability on Decade-to-Century Time Scales_ , Washington, D.C. 1995, pp. 458 and 469.
.Henry Diaz and Roger Pulwarty, "An Analysis of the Time Scales of Variability in Centuries-Long ENSO-Sensitive Records in the Last 1000 Years," abstract, NOAA El NiΓ±o website; and Xiao-Wei Quan, "Interannual Variability Associated with ENSO: Seasonal Dependence and Interdecadal Change," Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, Boulder 1998, p. 105.
.Webster et al., "Monsoon Predictability and Prediction," _Journal of Geophysical Research_ 103: C7 (29 June 1998), p. 14,457. See also C. Folland et al., "Large Scale Modes of Ocean Surface Temperature Since the Late Nineteenth Century," in Navarra (ed.).
.For a sense of what a devilish business periodizing low-frequency ENSO variations has turned out to be, see Rasmusson, Wang and Ropelewski, "Secular Variability of the ENSO Cycle," pp. 458β69.
.See the discussion in Chapter 3, Xiao-Wei Quan, pp. 89β137.
.Richard Kerr, "In North American Climate: A More Local Control," _Science_ 283 (19 Feb. 1999), p. 1109.
.See N. Mantua, "A Pacific Interdecadal Climate Oscillation with Impacts on Salmon Production," _Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society_ 78:6 (June 1997), pp. 1069β79.
.Ben Kirtman and Paul Schopf, "Decadal Variability in ENSO Predictability and Prediction," _Journal of Climate_ 11 (Nov. 1998), p. 2805.
.Cf. Kerr, ibid. (quote); and Xiao-Wei Quan, p. 106.
.Xiao-Wei Quan, pp. 109β10.
.Although their cause is not yet known, compelling evidence that Dansgaard/Oeschger cycles have regulated climate instabilities in the Holocene as well as throughout the Quaternary is presented in Gerard Bond et al., "A Pervasive Millennial-Scale Cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and Glacial Climates," _Science_ , 278 (14 Nov. 1997), pp. 1257β66.
.Cf. Richard Kerr, "El NiΓ±o Grew Strong as Cultures Were Born"; and Donald Rodbell et al., "A 15,000-Year Record of El NiΓ±oβDriven Alluviation in Southwestern Ecuador," _Science_ 283 (22 Jan. 1999).
.Betty Meggers, "Archeological Evidence for the Impact of Mega-NiΓ±o Events on Amazonia During the Past Two Millennia," _Climatic Change_ 28 (1994), p. 328β9.
.Cf., Kirtman and Schopf, p. 2805 (quote); and K. Trenberth and T. Hoar, "El NiΓ±o and Climate Change," _Geophys. Res. Lett_. 24 (1997), pp. 3057β60.
. _Summary Report_ , NOAA/CIRES La NiΓ±a Summit, July 1998, p. 14.
**8. Climates of Hunger**
The quote is from Achebe, _A Man of the People_ , New York 1966, pp. 161β2.
.It is important to note that the famous protracted droughts of the 1930s in the US Great Plains, Australia and southern Africa occurred during one of the weakest periods of ENSO activity in the last 150 years.
.Kiladis and Diaz, p. 1071.
.Allan, Lindesay and Parker, p. 77.
.Ibid., pp. 25β6.
.Ibid.
.Peter Webster, "The Variable and Interactive Monsoon," in Fein and Stephens, p. 305.
.David Rodenhuis, "The Weather That Led to the Flood," in Stanley Changnon (ed.), _The Great Flood of 1993_ , Boulder, Colo. 1996, pp. 44β5.
.P. Webster et al., "Monsoons: Processes, predictability, and the prospects for prediction," _Journal of Geophysical Research_ 103:C7 (19 June 1998), p. 14,459.
.Alexander Gershunov, Tim Barnett and Daniel Cayan, "North Pacific Interdecadal Oscillation Seen as Factor in ENSO-Related North American Climate Anomalies," _EOS_ 80:3 (19 Jan. 1998), pp. 25 and 29β30.
. _Summary Report_ , La NiΓ±a Summit, p. 10.
.Kevin Trenberth, "The Different Flavors of La NiΓ±a," La NiΓ±a Summit, 1998, p. 2.
.Greg O'Hare, "The Indian Monsoon, Part Two: The Rains," _Geography_ 82:4 (1997), p. 335.
.Seasonal distribution is everything. For example, the cyclone of 18β20 May 1877 dumped 20 inches of rainβhalf a year's precipitationβover Madras in three days during the height of the Great Drought. As Digby points out," it did more harm than good" and the drought continued for six months more (Digby, _The Famine Campaign_ , vol. 1, pp. 148β9).
.K. Rao, _India's Water Wealth_ , Delhi 1975, pp. 10 and 16.
.J. Ju and J. Slingo, "The Asian Summer Monsoon and ENSO," _Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc_. 121 (1995), pp. 1133β68. "Displacement of the IACZ into the Pacific results in the establishment of a separate convection zone over southeast Asia during Monsoon season. This draws air from a much reduced area compared to a normal Monsoon, because of the adjustment of the tropospheric circulation to competition from the central Pacific convergence. Weak Monsoon rainfall, and drought in extreme cases, is the result."
.Webster et al., p. 14,476 (text differs from Table 2).
.O'Hare, p. 349. See also Peter Webster and Song Yang, "Monsoon and ENSO: Selectively Interactive Systems," _Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc_. 118 (1992), pp. 877β926; and Madhav Khandekar, "El NiΓ±o/Southern Oscillation, Indian Monsoon and World Grain YieldsβA Synthesis," in M. El Sabh et al. (eds.), _Land-Based and Marine Hazards_ , Kluwer 1996, pp. 79β95. Equatorial stratospheric wind oscillation may be a third independent variable interacting with ENSO and Eurasian snow cover. (See Khandekar, "Comments on 'SpaceβTime Structure of Monsoon Interannual Variability,' in _Journal of Climate_ 11 (Nov. 1998), pp. 3057β9.)
.Buwen Dong and Paul Valdes, "Modelling the Asian Summer Monsoon Rainfall and Eurasian Winter/Spring Snow Mass," _Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc_. 124 (1998), pp. 2567β9.
.R. Kripalani and A. Kulkarni, "Climatic Impact of El NiΓ±o/La NiΓ±a on the Indian Monsoon: A New Perspective," _Weather_ 52:2 (1997), p. 45.
.K. Krishna Kumar, Balaji Rajagopalan and Mark Cane, "On the Weakening Relationship Between the Indian Monsoon and ENSO," _Science_ 284 (25 June 1999), pp. 2156β9. See also H. Annamalai and Julia Slingo, "The Asian Summer Monsoon, 1997," _Weather_ 53:9 (Sept. 1998), pp. 285β6.
.Ramasamy Suppiah, "Relationships Between the Southern Oscillation and the Rainfall of Sri Lanka," _International Journal of Climatology_ 9 (1989).
.Y. Kueh, _Agricultural Instability in China, 1931β1991_ , Oxford 1998, p. 29.
.Needham, p. 246.
.Keith Buchanan, _The Transformation of the Chinese Earth_ , London 1970, p. 80; Walter Mallory, _China: Land of Famine_ , New York 1926, p. 43.
.George Cressey, _China's Geographic Foundations: A Survey of the Land and Its People_ , New York 1934, pp. 84β5.
.The occurrence of several severe El NiΓ±os in the mid seventeenth century raises the possibility that the extraordinary agricultural crisis of the late Ming dynastyβseven years of drought followed by nine years of floodingβwas ENSO-related: 1640 was the driest year in the last five hundred (cf. Zhang Jiacheng [ed.], _The Reconstruction of Climate in China for Historical Times_ , Beijing 1988, p. 45; Manfred Domros and Peng Gongbing, _The Climate of China_ , Berlin 1988, p. 198; and Jiacheng Zhang and Zhiguang Lin, _Climate of China_ , Shanghai 1992, p. 330).
.Ye Zongwei and Wang Cun, "Climatic Jumps in the Flood/Drought Historical Chronology of Central China," _Climate Dynamics_ 6 (1992), p. 158.
.Ding Yihui, _Monsoons over China_ , Dordrecht 1996, p. 290β92.
.A pioneering consideration of SO's possible role in drought and flood was Tu Chang-Wang, "China Weather and the World Oscillation," in Academia Sinica, _Collected Scientific Papers: Meteorology 1919β1949_ , Beijing 1954.
.Shao-Wu in Glantz, _Currents of Change_ , p. 173; as well as Kueh, pp. 159β61.
.Wei-Chyung Wang and Kerang Li, "Precipitation Fluctuation over a Semiarid Region in Northern China and the Relationship with El NiΓ±o/Southern Oscillation," _Journal of Climate_ (July 1990), p. 769.
.Wang Shao-wu, "La NiΓ±a and Its Impact on China's Climate," La NiΓ±a Summit, 1998, p. 1.
.Wang and Li, p. 777.
.Ding Yihui, pp. 273, 285.
.See the La NiΓ±a impact map for 1898 in Allan, Lindesay and Parker, p. 139.
.For weather conditions in 1876, cf. Broomhall, p. 166; and _Parl. Papers_ , China No. 2 (1878), p. 1.
.Chenglan Bao and Yanzhen Xiang, "Relationship Between El NiΓ±o Event and Atmospheric Circulation, Typhoon Activity and Flooding," in W. Kyle and C. Chang (eds.), _Proceedings_ , Second International Conference on East Asia and Western Pacific Meteorology and Climate (Hong Kong, Sept. 1992), Singapore 1993, p. 239.
.Yihui, pp. 286β7.
.PRC, National Environmental Protection Bureau, _The Yellow River Runs Dry and Its Sustainable Development_ (in Chinese), Beijing 1997: cited in Z. Yang et al., "Yellow River's Water and Sediment Discharge Decreasing Steadily," _EOS_ 79:48 (1 Dec. 1998), p. 592.
.Zhenhao Bao et al., "Drought/Flood Variations in Eastern China During the Colder (1610β1719) and Warmer (1880β1989) Periods and Their Relations with the Southern Oscillation," _Geographical Reports of Tokyo Metropolitan University_ 33 (1998), p. 10.
.Hengyi Weng et al., "MultiβScale Summer Rainfall Variability Over China," _Journal of the Meteorological Society of Japan_ 77:4 (1999), pp. 845β57.
.Cf. Jasper Becker, _Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine_ , New York 1996; and Philip Short, _Mao: A Life_ , London 1999, pp. 504β10 (on the severity of the drought). There is no necessary discrepancy between the characterization of the 1958 drought as the most severe _throughout_ China and the study (cited in fn 35) that finds other droughts in _north_ China to have been more extreme.
.Y. Kueh, _Agricultural Instability in China, 1931β1991_ , Oxford 1998. See also Penny Kane, _Famine in China, 1959β61: Demographic and Social Implications_ , London 1988.
.Jean Dreze and Amarya Sen, "Introduction," in Dreze, Sen and Hussain, _The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays_ , Oxford 1995, pp. 18β19.
.J. Murphy and P. Whetton, "A Re-analysis of a Tree Ring Chronology from Java," _Proceedings of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademic van Weterschappen_ B92:3 (1989), pp. 241β57.
.Christine Padoch and Nancy Peluso (ed.), _Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation, and Development_ , Oxford 1996, p. 3. See also H. Brookfield, L. Potter and Y. Byron, _In Place of the Forest: Environmental and SocioβEconomic Transformation in Borneo and the Eastern Malay Peninsula_ , Tokyo 1995.
.See rainfall anomaly tables for Indonesia and the Philippines since 1896, International Research Institute for Climate Prediction, UCSD (iri.ucsd.edu/hot_NiΓ±o/impacts).
.US Naval Intelligence Division, _Netherlands East Indies_ , Vol. 1, Geographical Handbook Series, Washington D.C. 1944, p. 338. On a drought belt in eastern Java and southernmost New Guinea, see Glenn Trewartha, _The Earth's Problem Climates_ , Madison, Wis. pp. 202β3.
.Knapen, pp. 126β7.
.Jean-Paul Malingreau, "The 1982β83 Drought in Indonesia: Assessment and Monitoring," in Michael Glantz, Ricard Katz, and Maria Krenz (eds.), _Climate Crisis: The Societal Impacts Associated with the 1982β83 Worldwide Climate Anomalies_ , New York 1987, pp. 11β18; and Eric Hackert and Stefan Hastenrath, "Mechanisms of Java Rainfall Anomalies," _Monthly Weather Review_ 114 (April 1986), p. 746.
.R. Kane, "El NiΓ±o Timings and Rainfall Extremes in India, Southeast Asia and China," _International Journal of Climatology_ 19 (1999), pp. 653β72.
.See the webpage iripred.ido.columbia.edu/research/ENSO/tables/phil1.html.
.Famine chronology from Martinez Duesta, p. 260 (my correlation to ENSO).
.Lopez-Gonzaga, pp. 113β15.
.Data from Relief Web (www.reliefweb.int), 3 Aug. 1998.
.See the chart in Glantz, Katz and Krenz, pp. 90β91.
.Quoted in Allan, Lindesay and Parker, p. 9.
.Ann Young, _Environmental Change in Australia Since 1788_ , Melbourne 1996.
.Ian Anderson, "Parched Papua Prays for Rain," _New Scientist_ , 20 Sept. 1997, p. 18.
.Jean Nicet and Thierry Delcroix, "ENSO-related Precipitation Changes in New Caledonia, Southwestern Tropical Pacific: 1969β98," _Monthly Weather Review_ 8:2 (August 2000), pp. 3001β6.
.Andrew Sturman and Nigel Tapper, _The Weather and Climate of Australia and New Zealand_ , Melbourne 1996, pp. 367β70.
.Pao-Shin Chu, "Hawaiian Drought and the Southern Oscillation," _Inter. J. Climatol_. 9 (1989), p. 628.
.Thomas Schroeder, "Climate Controls," in Marie Sanderson (ed.), _Climate and Weather in Hawaii_ , Honolulu 1993, p. 17.
."Summary of Drought Around the World, AugustβSeptember 1998," National Drought Mitigation Center.
.Antonio Moura and Jagadish Shukla, "On the Dynamics of Droughts in Northeast Brazil: Observations, Theory and Numerical Experiments with a General Circulation Model," _Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences_ 34 (December 1981), pp. 2653 (quote) and 2654.
.Webb, p. 44.
.Vernon Kousky, "Frontal Influences on Northeast Brazil," _Monthly Weather Review_ 107 (1979), pp. 1140β53.
.Hall, pp. 16β17.
.Gilbert Walker, "CearΓ‘ (Brazil) Famines and the General Air Movement," _Beitr. z. Phys. der freien Atmosphare_ 14 (1928), pp. 88β93.
.Cf. JosΓ© Gasques and Antonio Magalhaes, "Climate Anomalies and Their Impacts in Brazil During the 1982β83 ENSO Event," in Glantz, Katz and Krenz, pp. 31β2; and PaoβShin Chu, "Brazil's Climate Anomalies and ENSO," in Michael Glantz, Richard Katz, and Neville Nicholls (eds.), _Teleconnections Linking Worldwide Climate Anomalies_ , Cambridge 1991, pp. 56β61.
.Cf. Rodolfo Teofilo, _A Seca de 1915_ , Forteleza 1980, 129β31; and Kiladis and Diaz, pp. 1038β40.
.PaoβShin Chu, pp. 64β5.
.See Kiladis and Diaz, ibid.; and data at iri.ucsd.edu/hot_NiΓ±o/impacts/ns_amer/index.html.
.C. Caviedes, "The Effects of Enso Events in Some Key Regions of the South American Continent," in Stanley Gregory (ed.), _Recent Climate Change_ , London 1988, pp. 252β3 and 264.
.Carlos Malpica, _Cronica del Hambre en el Peru_ , Lima 1966, pp. 161β3.
.Caviedes, ibid.
.Gregory Asner, Alan Townsend and Bobby Braswell, "Satellite Observation of El NiΓ±o Effects on Amazon Forest Phenology and Productivity," _Geophysical Research Letters_ 27:7 (1 April 2000), p. 981.
.Betty Meggers, "Archeological Evidence for the Impact of Mega-NiΓ±o Events on Amazonia During the Past Two Millennia," _Climatic Change_ 28 (1994), p. 330.
.Allan, Lindesay and Parker, p. 65.
.Miguel Gonzalez, "Probable Response of the ParanΓ‘ River Delta (Argentina) to Future Warmth and Rising Sea Level," _J. Coast. Res. Spec. Issue_ 17 (1995), pp. 219β20.
.JosΓ© Rutllant and Humberto Fuenzalida, "Synoptic Aspects of the Central Chile Rainfall Variability Associated with the Southern Oscillation," _International Journal of Climatology_ 11 (1991), pp. 63 and 65.
.For the 1896 drought, see Antonio del Bajio, _Crisis alimentarias y subsistencias populares en Mexico_ , vol. 1, Mexico, D.F. 1987, p. 162.
.A. Filonov and I. Tereshchenko, "El NiΓ±o 1997β98 Monitoring in Mixed Layer at the Pacific Ocean near Mexico's West Coast," _Geophysical Research Letters_ 27:5 (1 March 2000), p. 705.
.During the drought corn prices soared 130 percent while minimum agricultural wages fell 28 percent (Moises Gonzalez Navarro, _Cinco crisis mexicanas_ , Mexico, D.F. 1999, p. 19). See also Florescano and Swan, _Breve historia_ , pp. 124β6 and 161; del Bajio, pp. 166β71; and Friedrich Katz, _The Life and Times of Pancho Villa_ , Stanford, Calif. 1998, pp. 48β50.
.Gonzalez, p. 31.
.See Midwestern Climate Center (Champaign, Ill.), "El NiΓ±o and the Midwest" (<http://mcc.sws.uiuc.edu/elNiΓ±o.html>).
.Jennifer Phillips, et al., "The Role of ENSO in Determining Climate and Maize Yield Variability in the US Cornbelt," _International Journal of Climatology_ 19 (1999), pp. 877β88.
.Stanley Changnon, "Impacts of El NiΓ±o's Weather," in Changnon (ed.), _El NiΓ±o 1997β1998: The Climate Event of the Century_ , Oxford 2000, pp. 151, 165.
.Julia Cole and Edward Cook, "The Changing Relationship Between Enso Variability and Moisture Balance in the Continental United States," _Geophysical Research Letters_ 25:24 (15 Dec. 1998), pp. 4529β32.
.Research in progress reported by Arthur Douglas, Creighton University (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ogp/papers/douglas.html).
.Cf. Charlotte Benson, "Drought and the Zimbabwe Economy: 1980β93," p. 246; and Bill Kinsey, "Dancing with El NiΓ±o," pp. 276β7, both in Helen O'Neill and John Toye (eds.), _A World Without Famine?_ , New York 1998.
.J. Lindesay and C. Vogel, "Historical Evidence for Southern OscillationβSouthern African Rainfall Relationships," _International Journal of Climatology_ 10 (1990), p. 679; and Mark Cane, Gidon Eshel and R. Buckland, "Forecasting Zimbabwean Maize Yield Using Eastern Equatorial Pacific Sea Surface Temperature," _Nature_ 370 (21 July 1994), pp. 204β5.
.Vincent Moron and M. Neil Ward, "ENSO Teleconnections with Climate Variability in the European and African Sectors," _Weather_ 53:9 (Sept. 1998), p. 288.
.S. Mason and M. Jury, "Climatic Variability and Change over Southern Africa: A Reflection on Underlying Processes," _Progress in Physical Geography_ 21:1 (1997), pp. 23β50.
.Lindesay and Vogel, ibid.; and Cane, Eshel and Buckland, p. 204.
.Tsegay Wolde-Georgis, "The Impact of Cold Events on Ethiopia," La NiΓ±a Summit, 1998, pp. 1β2. See also Y. Seleshi and G. Demaree, "Rainfall Variability in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Highlands and Its Links with the Southern Oscillation Index," _Journal of Biogeography_ 22 (1985); and Tesfaye Hale, "Causes and Characteristics of Drought in Ethiopia," _Ethiopian Journal of Agricultural Sciences_ 10:1β2 (1988).
.Based on Coquery-Vidrovitch, p. 503; and Glantz, Katz and Krenz, "Appendix: Climate Impact Maps," pp. 81β105.
.Cf. P. Hutchinson, "The Southern Oscillation and Prediction of 'Der' Season Rainfall in Somalia, _Journal of Climate_ 5 (May 1992), p. 525; and Gerard Beltrando, "Interannual Variability of Rainfall in the Eastern Horn of Africa and Indicators of Atmospheric Circulation," _International Journal of Climatology_ 13 (1993), pp. 533 and 543.
.M. Hulme, "Global Climate Change and the Nile Basin," in P. Howell and J. Allan (eds.), _The Nile: Sharing a Scarce Resource_ , Cambridge 1994, p. 148.
.G. Trewartha, _The Earth's Problem Climates_ , Madison, Wis. 1981, p. 134.
.A. Gouldie, "Climate: Past and Present," in W. Adams, A. Goudie and A. Orme (eds.), _The Physical Geography of Africa_ , Oxford 1996, p. 38.
.Matayo Indeje, Frederick Semazzi and Laban Ogallo, "ENSO Signals in East African Rainfall Seasons," _International Journal of Climatology_ 20 (2000), p. 20.
.Cf. G. Farmer, "Rainfall Data Bases and Seasonal Forecasting in Eastern Africa" in Gregory, pp. 197β9; and Peter Usher, "Kenya and ENSO: An Observation and La NiΓ±a Prediction," La NiΓ±a Summit, 1998.
.Indeje, Semazzi and Ogallo, pp. 30 and 44β5.
.Jennifer Phillips and Beverly McIntyre, "ENSO and Interannual Rainfall Variability in Uganda: Implications for Agricultural Management," _International Journal of Climatology_ 20 (2000), p. 171β82.
.Allan, Lindesay and Parker, p. 22.
.Bette Otto-Bliesner, "El NiΓ±o/La NiΓ±a and Sahel Precipitation During the Middle Holocene," _Geophysical Research Letters_ 26:1 (1 Jan. 1999), pp. 87β8.
.Abdel Kader Ali, "El NiΓ±o Events and Rainfall Variations in the Sahel Region of Africa," _Bulletin of the Egyptian Geographical Society_ 70 (1997), pp. 77 (see Fig. 3) and 81β3.
.M. Neil Ward et al., "Climate Variability in Northern Africa: Understanding Droughts in the Sahel and the Mahgreb," in Navarra (ed.), p. 138.
.According to the Center for Ocean-Atmosphere Prediction Studies, ENSO (1944β96) was in a warm phase 21 percent of the time; cold phase, 28 percent; and neutral phase, 51 percent; see the COAPS website. A 1950β1997 timeframe, however, gives warm phase, 31 percent; cold phase, 23 percent; and neutral, 46 percent (NCAR NewsβLa NiΓ±a website).
.Cf. "History's Favorite Hitman," _Hong Kong Standard_ , 22 May 1998; and "El NiΓ±o," _The Irish Times_ , 28 May 1998.
.D. Harrison and N. Larkin, "El NiΓ±o-Southern Oscillation Sea Surface Temperature and Wind Anomalies, 1946β1993," _Reviews of Geophysics_ 36:3 (Aug. 1998), p. 391. For an opposing view, however, see B. Dong et al., "Predictable Winter Climate in the North Atlantic Sector During the 1997β1999 ENSO Cycle," _Geophysical Research Letters_ 27:7 (1 April 2000), pp. 985β8.
.Moron and Ward, p. 289.
.Kiladis and Diaz, pp. 1041β2.
.M. Halpert and C. Ropelewski, "Surface Temperature Patterns Associated with the Southern Oscillation," _Journal of Climate_ 5 (1992). See also X. Rodo, E. Baert and F. Comin, "Variations in Seasonal Rainfall in Southern Europe During the Present Century: Relationships with NAO and ENSO," _Climate Dynamics_ 13 (1997).
.Alfredo Rocha, "Low-Frequency Variability of Seasonal Rainfall over the Iberian Peninsula and ENSO," _International Journal of Climatology_ 19 (1999), p. 889.
.A. Meshcherskaya and V. Blazhevich, "The Drought and Excessive Moisture Indices in a Historical Perspective in the Principal Grain-Producing Regions of the Former Soviet Union," _Journal of Climate_ 10 (Oct.1997), pp. 2670β82.
.Trevor Davies, "Guest EditorialβHubert Lamb," _Weather_ 53:7 (July 1998) p. 199. These data sets recently have been used to generate a landmark atlas (Allan, Lindesay and Parker, 1996) of the global oceanic and atmospheric patterns accompanying ENSO warm and cold phases since 1871.
.Cf. William Quinn, "A Study of Southern OscillationβRelated Climatic Activity for AD 622β1900, Incorporating Nile River Flood Data," in Henry Diaz and Vera Markgraf (eds.), _El NiΓ±o: Historical and Paleoclimatic Aspects of the Southern Oscillation_ , Cambridge 1992; and Quinn, Victor Neal and Santiago Antunez de Mayolo, "El NiΓ±o Occurrences over the Past Four and a Half Centuries," _Journal of Geophysical Research_ 92:C13 (15 Dec. 1987), p. 14,454.
.Whetton and Rutherfurd, p. 225.
.See discussion of data sources in Allan, Lindesay and Parker, pp. 59β60.
.Charles Ballard, "Drought and Economic Distress: South Africa in the 1800s," _Journal of Interdisciplinary History_ 17:2 (Autumn 1986), pp. 359β78.
.Charlesworth, _Peasants and Imperial Rule_ , p. 76.
.My rough annual ratios would, of course, be better expressed as seasonal ratios.
.On modification of ENSO cycle by changes in Pacific Ocean circulation, see Robert Dunbar et al., "PEP-1 Contributions to Increased Understanding of Past Variability in Enso and Its Teleconnections," poster session _Abstracts_ , IGBP PAGES Open Sciences Meeting, "Past Global Changes and Their Significance for the Future," London, 20β23 April 1998; and for a discussion of a shortened, intensifed ENSO, see Tahl Kestin et al., 'Time-Frequency Variability of ENSO and Stochastic Simulations," _Journal of Climate_ 11 (Sept. 1998), pp. 2260β61.
."Simultaneous correlation between ENSO and the monsoon is very robust over the past 140 years. The sole exception, the drop during the recent decades, obviously is of great interest, and perhaps a cause for concern": K. Kumar et al., "Epochal Changes in Indian MonsoonβENSO Precursors," _Geophysical Research Letters_ 26:1 (1 Jan. 1999), p. 78. "Before 1900, the ENSO influence on US moisture balance was more extensive than in later periods": Julia Cole and Edward Cook, "The Changing Relationship Between ENSO Variability and Moisture Balance in the Continental United States," _Geophysical Research Letters_ 25:24 (15 Dec. 1998), p. 4530.
.Quinn et al, "El NiΓ±o Occurrences," p. 14,459.
.D. Rind, "Complexity and Climate," _Science_ 284 (2 April 1999), p. 106.
.Brent Yarnal and George Kiladis, "Tropical Teleconnections Associated with El NiΓ±o/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events," _Progress in Physical Geography_ 9 (1985), pp. 541 and 544.
.Quinn and Neal, p. 627.
.David Engield and Luis Cid, "Low-Frequency Changes in El NiΓ±o-Southern Oscillation," _Journal of Climate_ 4 (Dec. 1991), p. 1139.
.Eugene Rasmusson, Xueliang Wang and Chester Ropelewski, "Secular Variability of the ENSO Cycle," in National Research Council, _Natural Climate Variability on Decade-to-Century Time Scales_ , Washington, D.C. 1995, pp. 458β70.
.D. Harrison and N. Larkin, "El NiΓ±o-Southern Oscillation Sea Surface Temperature and Wind Anomalies, 1946β1993," _Reviews of Geophysics_ 36:3 (Aug. 1998), pp. 386β91.
.T. Baumgartner et al., "The Recording of Interannual Climatic Change by HighβResolution Natural Systems: Tree-Rings, Coral Bands, Glacial Ice Layers, and Marine Varves," _Geophysical Monograph_ 55 (1989), pp. 1β14.
**9. The Origins of the Third World**
The epigraph is from Isaacs, _Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India_ , New York 1958, p. 273.
.For a typically cavalier view, see Roland Lardinois, "Famine, Epidemics and Mortality in South India: A Reappraisal of the Demographic Crisis of 1876β1878," _Economic and Political Weekly_ 20:111 (16 March 1985), p. 454.
.Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, _Tmes of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000_ , Garden City, N.Y. 1971, p. 119.
.Raymond Williams, _Problems in Materialism and Culture_ , London 1980, p. 67.
.When it served their interests, of course, the British could switch epistemologies. In the case of late-nineteenth-century China, for example, the British and their allies primarily blamed Qing corruption, not drought, for the millions of famine deaths.
.Kueh, pp. 4β5.
.Jared Diamond, _Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies_ , New York 1997, pp. 424β5.
.Re 1743β44: "another exceptional period in the eastern hemisphere, which corresponds with QN El NiΓ±o of 1744, although conditions were more markedly dry in the east in 1743" (Whetton and Rutherfurd, pp. 243β6).
."The first Qing emperor envisioned everβnormal granaries in county seats, charity granaries in major towns, and community granaries in the countryside. Everβnormal granaries were to be managed by members of the magistrate's staff, who were directed to sell, lend, or give away grain in the spring and to make purchases, collect loans, and solicit contributions in the autumn" (Pierre-Etienne Will and R. Bin Wong [with James Lee, Jean Oi and Peter Perdue], _Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650β1850_ , Ann Arbor, Mich. 1981, p. 19).
.Will, _Bureaucracy and Famine_ , Chapters 7 and .
.Ibid., pp. 86 and 189.
.John Post, _Food Shortage, Climatic Variability, and Epidemic Disease in Preindustrial Europe: The Mortality Peak in the Early 1740s_ , Ithaca, N.Y. 1985, p. 30.
.Will, p. 270.
.Jean Oi and Pierre-Etienne Will, "North China: Shandong During the Qianlong Period," in Will and Wong, pp. 369β70. ENSO correlations based on Quinn chronology.
."Introduction," in Will and Wong, p. 21. China's roads, on the other hand, remained miserable, and were a major obstacle to market integration as well as famine relief.
.Wilkinson, pp. 122β9.
.R. Bin Wong, "Decline and Its Opposition, 1781β1850," in Will and Wong, p. 76.
.Helen Dunstan, _Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644β1840_ , Ann Arbor, Mich. 1996, p. 251.
.Wilkinson, pp. 122β9. See also Will, "The Control Structure," in Will and Wong, pp. 220β21.
.Jane Leonard, "'Controlling from Afar': Open Communications and the Tao-Kuang Emperor's Control of Grand CanalβGrain Transport Management, 1824β26," _Modern Asian Studies_ 22:4 (1988), p. 666.
.Joseph Needham, _Science and Civilization in China_ , vol. 4, Cambridge 1971, p. 326.
.Will, p. 257.
.Jacques Gernet, _A History of Chinese Civilization_ , 2nd edn., Cambridge 1996, p. 468.
.Dwight Perkins, _Agricultural Development in China, 1368β1968_ , Chicago 1969, p. 176.
.Endymion Wilkinson, "Studies in Chinese Price History," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University 1970, p. 31.
.Will, p. 32.
.J. A. G. Roberts, _A Concise History of China_ , Cambridge, Mass. 1990, p. 173.
.On the special tribute granaries at Luoyang and Shanzhou organized during the Kangxi reign, see Will and Wong, pp. 32 and 301.
.Food security in the mid eighteenth century may have consumed 10 percent of annual Qing revenue. As Wong emphasizes, "For a state to spend such sums for this purpose on a regular basis for well over a century is likely unique in the early modern world" ("Qing Granaries and Late Imperial History," in Will and Wong, p. 477).
.Sanjay Sharma, "The 1837β38 Famine in U.P.: Some Dimensions of Popular Action," _IESHR_ 30:3 (1993), p. 359.
.Bhatia, p. 9.
.Darren Zook, "Developing India: The History of an Idea in the Southern Countryside, 1860β1990," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley 1998, p. 158. The Raj was built upon mythology and hallucination. As Zook points out, the British universally attributed the ruins scattered through the Indian countryside to the decadence of native civilizations, when, in fact, many were direct memorials to the violence of British conquest (p. 157).
.Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, _Modern South Asia_ , Delhi 1999, p. 43.
.Ashok Desai, "Population and Standards of Living in Akbar's Time," _IESHR_ 9:1 (1972), p. 61.
.Chetan Singh, "Forests, Pastoralists and Agrarian Society in Mughal India," in David Arnold and Raachandra Guha (eds.), _Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia_ , Delhi 1996, p. 22.
.Habibul Kondker, "Famine Policies in Pre-British India and the Question of Moral Economy," _South Asia_ 9:1 (June 1986), pp. 25β40; and Kuldeep Mahtur and Niraja Jayal, _Drought, Policy and Politics_ , New Delhi 1993, p. 27. Unfortunately, contemporary discussion of famine history before 1763 has been contaminated by Hindu-versus-Muslim bickering. See, for example, the apparent anti-Muslim bias in Mushtag Kaw, "Famines in Kashmir, 1586β1819: The Policy of the Mughal and Afghan Rulers," _IESHR_ 33:1 (1996), pp. 59β70.
.C. Blair, _Indian Famines_ , London 1874, pp. 8β10.
.David Hardiman, "Well Irrigation in Gujarat: Systems of Use, Hierarchies of Control," _Economic and Political Weekly_ , 20 June 1998, p. 1537.
.Commission quoted in W. R. Aykroyd, _The Conquest of Famine_ , London 1974, p. 51. See also John Richards, _The Mughal Empire_ ( _The New Cambridge History of India, 1_ :5), Cambridge 1993, p. 163.
.Bagchi, pp. 11β12 and 27.
.J. Malcolm, _A Memoir of Central India_ , vol. 1, London 1931, p. 7, quoted in D. E. U. Baker, _Colonialism in an Indian Hinterland: The Central Provinces, 1820β1920_ , Delhi 1993, p. 28.
.Baker, p. 52.
.J. Richards and Michelle McAlpin, "Cotton Cultivating and Land Clearing in the Bombay Deccan and Karnatak: 1818β1920," in Richard Tucker and J. Richards (eds.), _Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy_ , Durham 1983, pp. 71 and 74.
.Ibid.
.Nash, p. 92.
.Greenough, _Prosperity and Misery_ , p. 59.
.C. Walford, "The Famines of the World: Past and Present," _Journal of the Statistical Society_ 41:13 (1878), pp. 434β42. I cite Walford elsewhere from the expanded 1879 book version of this article.
.Michael Watts, _Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria_ , Berkeley 1983, pp. 462β3. This "negotiation," of course, is two-sided and must include climate shock as an independent variable.
.Watts, pp. 267 and 464.
.Hans Medick, "The Proto-Industrial Family Economy and the Structures and Functions of Population Development under the Proto-Industrial System," in P. Kriedte et al. (eds.), _Industrialization Before Industrialization_ , Cambridge 1981, p. 45.
.Ibid., pp. 44β5.
.Lewis, _Growth and Fluctuations_ , p. 189.
.Cited in Clive Dewey, "The End of the Imperialism of Free Trade," p. 35.
.Kenneth Pomeranz, _The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853β1937_ , Berkeley 1993.
.Paul Bairoch, "The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities Since the Industrial Revolution," in Paul Bairoch and Maurice Levy-Leboyer (eds.), _Disparities in Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution_ , London 1981, p. 7.
.Paul Bairoch, "International Industrialization Levels from 1750β1980," in _Journal of European Economic History_ 11 (1982), p. 107.
.Fritjof Tichelman, _The Social Evolution of Indonesia_ , The Hague 1980, p. 30.
.Prasannan Parthasarathi, "Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in Eighteenth-Century Britain and South India," _Past and Present_ 158 (Feb. 1998), pp. 82β7 and 105β6.
.Dutt, cited in Eddy, p. 21.
.Philip Huang, _The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350β1988_ , Stanford, Calif. 1990.
.Wong, p. 38.
.F. W. Mote, _Imperial China, 900β1800_ , Cambridge, Mass. 1999, p. 941.
.Kenneth Pomeranz, "A High Standard of Living and Its Implications," contribution to "E. H. R. Forum: Re-thinking 18th Century China," Internet, 19 Nov. 1997.
.Pomeranz, "Two Worlds of Trade, Two Worlds of Empire: European State-Making and Industrialization in a Chinese Mirror," in David Smith et al., _States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy_ , London 1999, p. 78 (my emphasis).
.See S. Patel, "The Economic Distance Between Nations: Its Origin, Measurement and Outlook, _Economic Journal_ , March 1964. (There is some discrepancy between his figures for the aggregate non-European world and the later estimates of Bairoch and Maddison.)
.Albert Feuerwerker, _The Chinese Economy, 1870β1949_ , Ann Arbor, Mich. 1995, pp. 32β3.
.Paul Bairoch, "Geographical Structure and Trade Balance of European Foreign Trade, from 1800β1970," _Journal of European Economic History_ 3:3 (Winter 1978), p. 565. Ch'en cites 1866 as the beginning of the serious penetration of imported textiles into China (p. 64).
.Jack Goldstone, "Review of David Landes, _The Wealth and Poverty of Nations," Journal of World History_ 2:1 (Spring 2000), p. 109.
.Carl Trocki, _Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy_ , London 1999, p. 98.
.Brian Bond, _Victorian Military Campaigns_ , London 1967, pp. 309β11.
.See O'Rourke and Williamson, pp. 53β4.
.Historians traditionally contrast the Meiji and Tonzhang restorations, but as Goldstone suggests, the more significant comparison is between the Taipings and Japan. "What if China's old imperial regime, like Japan's, had collapsed in the mid nineteenth century, and not fifty years later, what then? What if the equivalent of Chiang Kai-shek's new model army had begun formation in the 1860s and not the 1920s? Would Japan still have been able to colonize Korea and Taiwan? What would have been the Asian superpower?" (Goldstone, ibid.).
."India wealth supplied the funds that bought the national debt back from the Dutch and others, first temporarily in the interval of peace between 1763 and 1774, and finally after 1783, leaving Britain nearly free from overseas indebtedness when it came to face the great French wars from 1793" (Ralph Davis, _The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade_ , Leicester 1979, pp. 55β6).
.P. Cain and A. Hopkins, _British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688β1914_ , London 1993, p. 334.
.For a recent review, see Young Goo-Park, "Depression and Capital Formation: The UK and Germany, 1873β96," _Journal of European Economic History_ 26:3 (Winter 1997), especially pp. 511 and 516.
.Giovanni Arrighi, _The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times_ , London 1994, p. 263.
.A. Latham, _The International Economy and the Undeveloped World, 1865β1914_ , London 1978, p. 70. Latham, it should be noted, is notoriously apologistic for British colonialism in India, arguing that the subcontinent's "relatively low growth overall is due largely to climatic factors, not to any deleterious effect of British colonial policy" (See A. Latham, "Asian Stagnation: Real or Relative?", in Derek Aldcroft and Ross Catterall (eds.), _Rich NationsβPoor Nations: The Long-Run Perspective_ , Cheltenham 1996, p. 109).
.Robin Moore, "Imperial India, 1858β1914," in Andrew Porter (ed.), _The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century_ , Oxford 1999, p. 441.
.Marcello de Cecco, _The International Gold Standard: Money and Empire_ , New York 1984, p. 30.
.Ravi Palat, et al., "Incorporation of South Asia," p. 185. According to these authors, the apparent exceptions to Indian deindustrialization in fact proved the rule: cotton spinning was integral to the production of an export surplus from the China trade while jute manufacture was an "island of British capital... initiated, organized, and controlled by British civil servants and merchants" (p. 186).
.Ibid., pp. 37β8.
.J. Stamp, _British Incomes and Property_ , London 1916, p. 36.
.Cain and Hopkins, pp. 338β9.
.Eric Hobsbawm, _Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain Since 1750_ , London 1968, p. 123.
.The same question, of course, could be asked of Indonesia, which in the late nineteenth century generated almost 9 percent of the Dutch national domestic product. See Angus Maddison, "Dutch Income in and from Indonesia, 1700β1938," _Modern Asian Studies_ 23:4 (1989), p. 647.
.Eric Stokes, "The First Century of British Colonial Rule in India: Social Revolution or Social Stagnation?" _Past and Present_ 58 (Feb. 1873), p. 151.
.Dietmar Rothermund, _An Economic History of India_ , New York 1988, p. 36; Dutt, _Open Letters_ , p. 48.
.Lu Aiguo, _China and the Global Economy Since 1840_ , Helsinki 2000, pp. 34, 37 and 39 (Table 2.4).
.J. W. Wong, _Deadly Dreams: Opium and the Arrow War (1856β1860) in China_ , Cambridge 1998, pp. 390 and 396. The British tea imports from China, which opium also financed, were the source of the lucrative tea duty that by mid-century almost compensated for the cost of the Royal Navy (pp. 350β55).
.Lu Aiguo, p. 36.
.Latham, _The International Economy_ , p. 90. India (including Burma) also earned important income from rice exports to the Dutch East Indies.
.Ibid., pp. 409β10. See also M. Greenberg, _British Trade and the Opening of China_ , Cambridge 1951, p. 15.
.Latham, pp. 453β4.
.Ibid., pp. 81β90. After Japan's victory in 1895, however, its textile exports began to crowd India and Britain out of the Chinese market (p. 90).
.Cain and Hopkins, p. 425.
.Jerome Ch'en, _State Economic Polices of the Ch'ing Government, 1840β1895_ , New York 1980, p. 116.
.Latham, ibid.
.John Hobson, "The Military-Extraction Gap and the Wary Titan: The Fiscal Sociology of British Defense Policy, 1870β1913," _Journal of European Economic History_ 22:3 (Winter 1993), p. 480.
.Historians have yet to address Chi-ming Hou's complaint in 1963 that "no serious studies have ever been made of the effects of such wars on the Chinese economy" ("Some Reflections on the Economic History of Modern China, 1840β1949," _Journal of Economic History_ 23:4 [Dec. 1963], p. 603).
.Bohr, p. 24.
.Michelle McAlpin, "Price Movements and Fluctuations in Economic Activity," in Dumar (ed.), _Cambridge Economic History of India_ , p. 890.
.John McGuire, "The World Economy, the Colonial State, and the Establishment of the Indian National Congress," in I. Shepperson and Colin Simons (eds.), _The Indian National Congress and the Political Economy of India, 1885β1985_ , Avebury 1988, p. 51.
.Nash, p. 88.
.McAlpin, "Price Movements," ibid.
.Bandyopadhyay, _Indian Famine_ , p. 130.
.De Cecco, pp. 62 and 74. "[Indians] considered fiscal pressure to be unduly high, in view of the fact that the Indian government's budget was every year in surplus and the country had a trade surplus year after year; in addition to which the government had a substantial credit balance" (p. 74).
.Krishnendu Ray, "Crises, Crashes and Speculation," _Economic and Political Weekly_ (30 July 1994), pp. 92β3. By 1913 the Government of India's account in London was Β£136 million (ibid.).
.Dieter Rothermund, "The Monetary Policy of British Imperialism," _IESHR_ 7 (1970), pp. 98β9.
.Wilkinson, pp. 34, 41β3, 52.
.Wright, _The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism_ , p. 166.
.Ch'en, p. 120.
.Aiguo, p. 48.
.Wilkinson, pp. 34, 41β3, 52.
.Lewis, p. 216.
.Charlesworth, pp. 13 and 22.
.Tomlinson, "Economics: The Periphery," p. 68 (Table 3.7).
.Quoted in Bipan Chandra, "Colonial India: British versus Indian Views of Development," _Review_ 14:1 (Winter 1991), p. 102.
.Bagchi, p. 27.
.William Lavely and R. Bin Wong, "Revising the Malthusian Narrative: The Comparative Study of Population Dynamics in Late Imperial China," _Journal of Asian Studies_ 57:3 (Aug. 1998), pp. 714β48.
.Esther Boserup, _The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure_ , Chicago 1967.
.Angus Maddison, _Chinese Economic Peformance in the Long Run_ , Paris 1998, p. 39. See also Zhang Kaimin, "The Evolution of Modern Chinese Society from the Perspective of Population Changes, 1840β1949," in Frederic Wakeman and Wang Xi (eds.), _China's Quest for Modernization: A Historical Perspective_ , Berkeley 1997.
.Pomeranz, p. 121.
.Gernet, p. 560.
.Martin Heijdra, "The Socio-Economic Development of Ming Rural China (1368β1644)," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University 1994, pp. 50β56; and Mote, pp. 903β6.
.Mote, p. 906.
.Pomeranz, "Two Worlds of Trade," pp. 81β3.
.Patrick O'Brien, "Intercontinental Trade and Third World Development," _Journal of World History_ (Spring 1997), p. 91.
.Hardiman, "Well Irrigation in Gujarat," p. 1533. He is characterizing the conclusions of Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain ( _Dying Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India's Traditional Water Harvesting Systems_ , Delhi 1997).
.Feuerwerker, p. 21.
.Maddison, _Chinese Economic Performance_ , p. 30.
.As the geographer Joshua Muldavin has emphasized, economic and ecological poverty are not equivalent: Households with identical levels of economic poverty can have extremely different levels of vulnerability to climatic instability or disaster ("Village Strategies for Maintaining SocioβEcological Security in the post-Mao Era," unpublished paper, UCLA Department of Geography, 1998).
**10. India: The Modernization of Poverty**
The quotation in the epigraph is from Romesh Chunder Dutt, _Open Letters to Lord Curzon_ , Calcutta 1904, p. 27.
.Maddison, _Chinese Economic Performance_ , p. 67. Revisionist attempts to claim an increase in per capita income in Victorian India despite an undeniable collapse in life expectancy are dealt with, rather devastatingly, by Irfan Habib in "Studying a Colonial Economy β Without Perceiving Colonialism," _Modern Asian Studies_ 19:3 (1985), pp. 368β74.
.H. M. Hyndman, _The Awakening of Asia_ , London 1919, p. 22.
.B. Tomlinson, _The Economy of Modern India, 1860β1970_ , Cambridge 1993, p. 31.
.Sumit Guha, "Introduction," in Guha (ed.), _Growth, Stagnation or Decline? Agricultural Productivity in British India_ , Delhi 1992, pp. 45β6.
.Kingsley Davis, _Population of India and Pakistan_ , Princeton, N.J. 1951, p. 8. Measured from the "good decade" of the 1880s to 1911β21, Irfan Habib (Table 2, p. 373) finds that male life expectatancy declined by 22 percent.
.Laxman Satya, "Cotton and Famine in Berar, 1850β1900," Ph.D. diss., Tufts University 1994, pp. 50 and 155. See also Peter Harnetty, _Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in the Mid-Nineteenth Century_ , Vancouver 1972.
.Dewey, "The End of the Imperialism of Free Trade," p. 51.
.Stanley Wolpert, _A New History of India_ , Oxford 1989, p. 248.
.Satya, pp. 21β7, 36β7, 50β51, 72, 155, 162, 188β90 and 333; and "Introduction" to book version ( _Cotton and Famine in Berar, 1850β1900_ , Delhi 1997), p. 25.
.Satya, p. 182 (export); and Vasant Kaiwar, "Nature, Property and Polity in Colonial Bombay," _Journal of Peasant Studies_ 27:2 (Jan. 2000), p. 7 (acreage).
.Satya, p. 182.
.Charlesworth, p. 81.
.Satya, pp. 68 and 298.
.Ibid., p. 200.
.Ibid., pp. 148, 281β2 and 296.
.Tim Dyson, "The Historical Demography of Berar, 1881β1980," in Dyson (ed.), _India's Historical Demography: Studies in Famine, Disease and Society_ , London 1989, pp. 181β2.
.David Washbrook, "The Commercialization of Agriculture in Colonial India: Production, Subsistence and Reproduction in the 'Dry South,' c. 1870β1930," _Modern Asian Studies_ 28:1 (1994), p. 131.
.Ibid., pp. 137 and 161. In another article, Washbrook claims that the average cultivator had only half the dry land acreage needed for subsistence ("Economic Development and Social Stratification in Rural Madras: The 'Dry Region' 1878β1929" in Dewey and Hopkins [eds.], pp. 70β72).
.David Washbrook, _The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency, 1870β1920_ , Cambridge 1976, p. 69.
.Washbrook, "Commercialization of Agriculture," p. 145.
.Ibid., p. 146.
.Richards and McAlpin, p. 83
.Washbrook, "Commercialization of Agriculture," p. 153.
.As elsewhere in India, British land settlements in the 1860s had transformed the conditional tenure of Mogul or (in this case) Maratha tax farmers into a simulacrum of an English squirearchy. The ranks of the _malguzars_ , however, were severely pruned in the terrible repression that followed 1857. Rebel leaders were shot from cannon, hanged or, in one case, even crucified by vengeful British officers. See D. E. U. Baker, pp. 101β6.
.On the credit system and merchant hypothecation of harvests, see T. Raghavan, "Malguzars and Peasants: The Narmada Valley, 1860β1920," in David Ludden (ed.), _Agricultural Production and Indian History_ , Delhi 1994, pp. 309 and 339β40.
.Baker, p. 124
.Peter Harnetty, "Crop Trends in the Central Provinces of India, 1861β1921," _Modern Asian Studies_ 11:3 (1977), p. 347.
.Baker, p. 106.
.Ibid., p. 147.
.Ibid., p. 151.
.Ibid., pp. 129 and 150.
.Raghavan, p. 311.
.Ibid., pp. 137β41.
.Ibid., pp. 182β3; Solberg, _The Prairies and the Pampas_ , p. 36 (Table 3.3).
.Singh, _Starvation and Colonialism_ , p. 220.
.Neeladri Bhattacharya, "Lenders and Debtors: Punjab Countryside, 1880β1940" in Bose (ed.), _Credit, Markets and the Agrarian Economy_ , p. 200.
.Singh, _Starvation and Colonialism_ , p. 220.
.Ibid., p. 221.
.Hardiman, "Introduction," pp. 13β14.
.Colin Fisher, "Planters and Peasants: The Ecological Context of Agrarian Unrest on the Indigo Plantations of North Bihar, 1820β1920," in Clive Dewey and A. Hopkins (eds.), _The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India_ , London 1978, pp. 125β31.
.Carl Trocki, _Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy_ , London 1999, p. 67.
.Binay Chaudhuri, "Growth of Commercial Agriculture," _IESHR_ 7:2 (1970), pp. 231, 246β9.
.Ibid., p. 251. On sugar, see Shahid Amin, _Sugar and Sugarcane in Gorakhpur: An Inquiry into Peasant Production for Capitalist Enterprise in Colonial India_ , Delhi 1983.
.Raghavan, p. 336.
.Shahid Amin, "Small Peasant Commodity Production and Rural Indebtedness: The Culture of Sugarcane in Eastern U.P., c. 1880β1920" in Sugata Bose (ed.), _Credit, Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India_ , Delhi 1994, p. 124.
.Sarkar, pp. 30β31.
.Bipan Chandra quoted in D. Rothermund, _Phases of Indian Nationalism_ , Bombay 1970, p. 264 fn19.
.Burton Stein, _A History of India_ , London 1998, p. 263.
.Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback, _Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Economics of British Imperialism_ , Cambridge 1988, pp. 101 (quote) and 135.
.Vasant Kaiwar, "The Colonial State, Capital and the Peasantry in Bombay Presidency," _Modern Asian Studies_ 28:4 (1994), p. 800.
.David Washbrook, "Economic Development and Social Stratification," p. 69.
.Bagchi, pp. 6 and 38.
.Kaiwar, p. 793.
.Guha, pp. 27 and 70.
.Scott, p. 21.
.Osborne, p. 554.
.Charlesworth, pp. 193β5.
.Quoted in ibid., p. 40.
.C. Baker, "The Markets," in Sugata Bose (ed.), _Credit, Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India_ , Delhi 1994, p. 192.
.David Washbrook, "Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c. 1720β1860," _Modern Asian Studies_ 22:1 (1988), p. 90.
.Christopher Baker, _An Indian Rural Economy, 1880β1955: The Tamilnad Countryside_ , Bombay 1984, p. 156.
.B. Chaudhuri, "Agrarian Relations in Bengal: 1859β1885," in N. Sinha (ed.), _The History of Bengal (1757β1905)_ , Calcutta 1967, pp. 318β20.
.Kaiwar, p. 800.
.Martha Chen, _Coping with Seasonality and Drought_ , Delhi 1991, p. 119.
.David Ludden, _Peasant History in South India_ , Princeton, N.J. 1985, p. 122.
.Chetan Singh, p. 44.
.Satya, p. 299.
.Atuluri Murali, "Whose Trees? Forest Practices and Local Communities in Andhra, 1600β1922," p. 100.
.Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, "State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India," in Hardiman (ed.), _Peasant Resistance_ , p. 275.
.Hardiman, "Introduction," pp. 47β8.
.Satya, p. 120.
.Baker, pp. 157 and 161.
.V. Saravanan, "Commercialisation of Forests, Environmental Negligence and Alienation of Tribal Rights in Madras Presidency, 1792β1882," _IESHR_ 35:2 (1998), p. 139; and Ramachandra Guha, "An Early Environmental Debate: The Making of the 1878 Forest Act," _IESHR_ 27:1 (1990), p. 67.
.Nash, pp. 21, 125 and 164β5.
.Ludden, "Introduction," pp. 23β4.
.Jos Gommans, "The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. AD 1000β1800," _Journal of World History_ , 9:1 (1998), p. 17.
.Ludden, "Introduction," pp. 23β4.
.Neeladri Bhattacharya, "Pastoralists in a Colonial World," p. 70.
.Charlesworth, pp. 77 and 295.
.Sumit Guha, pp. 58β61, 65β6.
.Bandyopadhyay, p. 163.
.Kaiwar, p. 57.
.Bhattacharya, p. 65.
.Ibid., pp. 56β7.
.Kaiwar, "Nature, Property and Polity," p. 14.
.Sumit Guha, pp. 83 and 121β3. See also H. Mann, _A Study of Rainfall in the Bombay Deccan, 1865β1938_ , Bombay 1955.
.Satya, pp. 72, 116 and 122.
.Hardiman, "Well Irrigation in Gujarat," p. 1534.
.Satya, ibid.
. _The Finances and Public Works of India_ (pp. 7β8), quoted in Elizabeth Whitcombe, _Agrarian Conditions in Northern India_ , vol. 1, _The United Provinces Under British Rule, 1860β1900_ , Berkeley, Calif. 1972, p. 2.
.Under Company rule, of course, infrastructural investment had been infamously nugatory. Thus John Bright once demonstated in Parliament that the Corporation of Manchester spent more on public works in 1856 than the East India Company had expended on all of India during the preceding fourteen years (cited in Lady Hope, p. 258).
.Elizabeth Whitcombe, "Irrigation," in Dharma Kumar (ed.), _The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume Two: 1757βc. 1970_ , Cambridge 1983, p. 703.
.General Sir Arthur Cotton, _The Madras Famine_ , London 1877, p. 5. See also Florence Nightingale, letter to the _Illustrated News_ , 29 June 1877.
."Discussion with Woodrow Wyatt," _The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi_ , vol. 83 (no. 473, 13 April 1946), Ahmedabad 1981, pp. 404β5.
.S. Sharma, "Irrigation," in V. Singh, _Economic History of India: 1857β1956_ , Bombay 1966, pp. 165; and Whitcombe, "Irrigation," pp. 678, 703β7.
. _Famine and Agrarian Problems_ , p. 232.
.Ian Stone, _Canal Irrigation in British India_ , Cambridge 1984.
.Whitcombe, _Agrarian Conditions_ , p. 11.
.Quoted in Stone, p. 88.
.Ibid., p. 154; and Whitcombe, _Agrarian Conditions_ , p. 81.
.Tomlinson, p. 76.
.Whitcombe, _Agrarian Conditions_ , pp. xi and 75.
.Quoted in Whitcombe, "The Environmental Costs of Irrigation in British India: Waterlogging, Salinity, Malaria," p. 247.
. _Papers on the Revenue Returns of the Canals of the North-Western Provinces_ (1865), quoted in Stone, p. 75.
.Ibid., p. 260.
.Whitcombe, "Irrigation," pp. 716β17 and 720 (quote).
.C. J. O'Donnell, _The Failure of Lord Curzon_ , London 1903, p. 99.
.Ludden, "Introduction," pp. 104 and 146.
.Kaiwar, "Nature, Property and Polity," pp. 23 and 25.
.The _Nasik Gazetteer_ , 1883, quoted in Kaiwar, ibid.
.Hyndman, _The Bankruptcy of India_ , p. 128.
.See Ranabir Chakravarti, "The Creation and Expansion of Settlements and Management of Hydraulic Resources in Ancient India," in Grove, Damodaran and Sangwan, pp. 87β105.
.Hardiman, "SmallβDam Systems of the Sahyadris," p. 204.
.Jonathan Mabry and David Cleveland, "The Relevance of Indigenous Irrigation," in Mabry (ed.), _Canals and Communities: Small-Scale Irrigation Systems_ , Tucson, Ariz. 1996, pp. 227β8 (quote) and 236 (efficiency).
.M. Quraishi, _Drought Strategy_ , Delhi 1989, p. 42. On the other hand, private exploitation of underground water resources since the 1960s has led to a profligate drawing down of the water table and a wholly avoidable water crisis.
."But for their listless acceptance of the worst miseries in the hand of fate, India would ages ago have been fertilized by a system of irrigation, and saved almost from the possiblity of Famine. The Natives are one of the most improvident as well as helpless races on earth" ( _The Times_ , 23 Jan. 1877).
.Col. J. Anderson of the Madras Engineers quoted in "Philindus," "Famines and Floods in India," _Macmillan's Magazine_ , Jan. 1878, p. 237.
.Grove, pp. 134β5.
.Lady Hope, p. 194. See also G. Rao, "Canal Irrigation and Agrarian Change in Colonial Andhra: A Study of Godavri District, c. 1850β1890," _IESHR_ 25:1 (1988).
.Quoted in Zook, pp. 163β4.
.Bagchi, pp. 28β9.
.William Wedderburn, _Agricultural Banks for India_ , p. 27.
.Fawcettt in _The Times_ quoted in George Chesney, "Indian Famines," _The Nineteenth Century_ , Nov. 1877, p. 618.
.Berar, p. 197.
.H. M. Hyndman, _The Indian Famine_ , London 1877, p. 12; and John Dacosta, _Facts and Fallacies Regarding Irrigation as a Prevention of Famine in India_ , London 1878, pp. 2β4. Similar arguments are advanced in "A Journalist," _The Great Lesson of the Indian Famine_ , London 1877 (pamphlet collection, Trinity College Library, Dublin).
.Bandyopadhyay, p. 115.
.Baker, p. 472.
.Ludden, _Peasant History_ , p. 146 (see Table 5).
. _The Hindu_ (Madras), 10 May 1900.
.Navtej Singh, _Starvation and Colonialism: A Study of Famines in the Nineteenth Century British Punjab, 1858β1901_ , New Delhi 1996, p. 8.
.Satya, p. 85.
.R. Carstairs, _The Little World of an Indian District Officer_ , London 1912, pp. 364β5.
.Kaiwar, "Nature, Property and Polity," p. 23.
.Nash, p. 2.
.Ravinder Kumar, _Western India in the Nineteenth Century_ , London 1968, p. 325.
.Ludden, "Introduction," pp. 104 and 146.
.David Mosse, "Colonial and Contemporary Ideologies of 'Community Management': The Case of Tank Irrigation Development in South India," _Modern Asian Studies_ 33:2 (1999), p. 315.
.Hardiman, "Well Irrigation in Gujarat," p. 1541.
**11. China: Mandates Revoked**
The epigraph is from Wolfgang Bauer, _China and the Search for Happiness_ , New York 1976, p. 257.
.Karl Wittfogel, _Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power_ , New Haven, Conn. 1957, p. 290.
.Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski, _Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century_ , New Haven, Conn. 1987, pp. 22, 146 and 219; and Will, _Bureaucracy and Famine_ , pp. 64β5.
.Huang, _Peasant Family_ , p. 42 (also pp. 74β6).
.Kamal Sheel, _Peasant Society and Marxist Intellectuals in China_ , Princeton, N.J. 1989, p. 94.
.Little, _Understanding Peasant China_ , p. 92.
.Sidney Gamble, _Ting Hsien: A North China Rural Community_ , New York 1954, pp. 52, 64 and 110.
.Huang, _Peasant Family_ , p. 5.
.Huang, _Peasant Economy_ , pp. 102β6 and 152.
.Nichols, pp. 128β9.
.Ibid., pp. 248β50.
.Huang, _Peasant Economy_ , p. 115.
.Laura Murray, "New World Food Crops in China: Farms, Food and Families in the Wei River Valley, 1650β1910," Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985, pp. 43β4.
.Ibid., pp. 45, 68, 82 and 138.
.Madeleine Zelin, "Modernization and the Structure of the Chinese Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," in Frederic Wakeman and Wang Xi (eds.), _China's Quest for Modernization: A Historical Perspective_ , Berkeley 1997, p. 93.
.Huang, _Peasant Family_ , pp. 102β6.
.Huang, _Peasant Economy_ , p. 124; and Will, pp. 178 and 180β81.
.Dr. J. Edkins, _Opium: Historical Note on the Poppy in China_ , Shanghai 1898, p. 66.
.Murray, pp. 74β5 and 79.
.Zelin, p. 108.
.Arthur Smith, _Village Life in China_ (1899), Boston 1970 (reprint), pp. 210β11.
.Naquin and Rawski, p. 143.
.Huang, _Peasant Economy_ , pp. 7 and 118β19.
.Ibid., p. 60.
.Pauline Keating, _Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement in Northern Shaanxi, 1934β1945_ , Stanford, Calif. 1997, p. 15.
.Huang, _Peasant Economy_ , pp.107β8 and 114.
.Kamal Sheel, _Peasant Society and Marxist Intellectuals in China_ , Princeton, N.J. 1989, pp. 54β7; and K. Chaudhuri, "Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments," in Dharma Kumar (ed.), _The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2_ , Cambridge 1983, p. 853.
.Calculated from Table 7 in Albert Feuerwerker, _The Chinese Economy, ca. 1870β1911_ , Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1969.
.Huang, _Peasant Economy_ , p. 132.
.Nichols, p. 248.
.Esherick, pp. 72β3.
.Wilkinson, pp. 198β9.
.Perkins, _Agricultural Development in China, 1368β1968_ , Chicago 1969, pp. 119 and 136.
.On long-distance commercial flows, see R. Bin Wong, "Food Riots in the Qing Dynasty," _Journal of Asian Studies_ 41:4 (Aug. 1982), pp. 768β9.
.Naquin and Rawski, p. 219.
.Esherick, p. 40.
.Will, p. 291.
."Decline and Its Opposition," in Will and Wong, p. 91.
.Manfred Domros and Peng Gongbing, _The Climate of China_ , Berlin 1988, p. 198.
.Randall Dodgen, "Hydraulic Evolution and Dynastic Decline: The Yellow River Conservancy, 1796β1855," _Late Imperial China_ 12:2 (Dec. 1991), pp. 51 and 55β6.
.Wang Yeh-chien, _Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750β1911_ , Cambridge, Mass. 1973, pp. 113, 121 and 125β6.
.Kung-Chuan Hsiao, _Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century_ , Seattle 1960, p. 146.
.Perkins, p. 164. (As explained in Chapter 9, however, the population in 1700 may have been much higher than Perkins assumes.)
.Will, p. 276.
.Wong, p. 783.
.Perkins, p. 164.
.R. Bin Wong, "The Grand Structure, 1736β1780," in Will and Wong, pp. 60β61.
.On the crisis in Shaanxi's granaries, see "Decline and Its Opposition," ibid., p. 78.
.Hsiao, p. 154.
.Perkins, pp. 150β51.
.Will, p. 289.
.Will, pp. 276β7.
.There were exceptions, of course, as in Gansu in 1810 where "the large sum of one million taels was allotted for a comprehensive and apparently successful effort to reach the stricken population" (Will, p. 296).
. _Land Utilization in China: Statistics_ , Nanking 1937, p. 344, Table 2.
.T. Kingsmill, "Inland Communications in China," _Journal of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society_ (for the year 1895β96), Shanghai 1899, pp. 3 and 147.
.Wright, p. 175 (also pp. 176β80).
.Keating, p. 25.
.Ibid., p. 314. "Corruption had always been a way of life in China, but in the nineteenth century it reached unprecedented proportions, not to be exceeded until the first half of the twentieth century" (Victor Lippit, "The Development of Underdevelopment in China," in Philip Huang (ed.), _The Development of Underdevelopment in China: A Symposium_ , White Plains, N.Y. 1980, p. 67).
.Jonathan Spence, _God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan_ , New York 1996, p. 158.
.Jen Yu-wen, _The Taiping Revolutionary Movement_ , New Haven, Conn. 1973, pp. 54 and 94. "Toleration of corrupt and rapacious officials" and the "selling of offices through bribes" were another two of the "ten major crimes" of the Qing (p. 94).
.Spence, p. 161.
.Roberts, pp. 181β2.
.E. Parker, "The Financial Capacity of China," _Journal of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society_ (1893β1894), Shanghai 1898, pp. 97β8.
.Murray, p. 270.
.Nichols, p. 235.
.Murray, pp. 315 and 318.
.Ibid., p. 183.
.Kenneth Pomeranz, EH.NET Forum: "Rethinking 18th-Century China," Internet, 16 Dec. 1997.
.Maddison, pp. 34β5.
.Hans Van De Ven, "Recent Studies of Modern Chinese History," _Modern Asian Studies_ , 30:2 (1996), p. 241.
.Robert Marks, _Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China_ , Cambridge 1998, pp. 277 and 307.
.Rhoads Murphey, "Deforestation in Modern China," in Richard Tucker and J. F. Richards (eds.), _Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy_ , Durham 1983, p. 111. He cautions, however, that "it is not known, or discoverable by any means, what China's forest cover was at any point in the nineteenth century, or the extent of net depletion in the course of that century" (p. 114).
.Anne Osborne, "The Local Politics of Land Reclamation in the Lower Yangtzi Highlands," _Late Imperial China_ 15:1 (June 1994), p. 2.
.Marks, ibid.; and Peter Perdue, _Exhausting the Earth_ , Cambridge, Mass. 1987.
.Eduard Vermeer, "Population and Ecology along the Frontier in Qing China," in Elvin and Liu, pp. 249β51 and 261. Since Qing tax rates were essentially capped, the easiest way to increase land revenues was by encouraging the expansion of land area under cultivation.
.Anne Osborne, "Barren Mountains, Raging Rivers: The Ecological Effects of Changing Landuse on the Lower Yangzi Periphery in Late Imperial China," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University 1989, p. 158.
.Murray, p. 278.
.Von Richtofen's letters to the _North China Herald_ (1870β72) are discussed in W. Lowdermilk, "Forestry in Denuded China," _Annals of the American Academy_ 15 (Nov. 1930), pp. 137β8.
.Frank Leeming, _The Changing Geography of China_ , Oxford 1993, p. 50.
.Murray, p. 69.
.Murphey, p. 119.
.Keating, pp. 23β4.
.Vermeer, p. 235.
.Eliot Blackwelder, "A Country That Has Used Up Its Trees," _The Outlook_ 82 (24 March 1906), pp. 693β700.
.Murphey, p. 116.
.Lowdermilk, p. 137.
.Ibid., p. 139.
.Pomeranz, p. 124.
.On this process in Shandong and Liaotung, see Cressey, pp. 208β9.
.Will, p. 129.
.Lowdermilk, pp. 130 (proverb) and 140 (erosion rate).
.Murphey, pp. 126β7.
.W. Lowdermilk, "A Forester's Search for Forests in China," _American Forests and Forest Life_ 31 (July 1925), p. 239.
.Vermeer, pp. 273β4.
.Murphey, p. 125.
.Charles Greer, _Water Management in the Yellow River Basin of China_ , Austin, Tex. 1979, p. 18.
.Murphey, pp. 124β5.
.Greer, p. 33.
.Ibid. The struggle to control the Mississippi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced its own version of warring hydraulic schools with the Army Corps as unconscious Confucians and civilian engineers like Charles Ellet and James Eads as spontaneous Taoists. See the fascinating account (pp. 19β93) in John Barry, _Rising Tide_ , New York 1997.
.Randall Dodgen, "Hydraulic Evolution," pp. 36 fn1 and 50β51. In a significant dissent from the mainstream of late Imperial historians, Dodgen argues that the "crisis of the Yellow River control system was the product of riparian realities, and was not primarily determined by Qing institutional vitality or decline" (p. 59).
.Vermeer, p. 265.
.Mark Elvin and Su Ninghu, "Action at a Distance: The Influence of the Yellow River on Hangzhou Bay Since A.D. 1000," in Mark Elvin and Liu Ts'ui-jung (eds.), _Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History_ , Cambridge 1998, pp. 344β407.
.Randall Dodgen, "Controlling the Dragon: Confucian Engineers and the Yellow River in the Late Daoguang, 1835β1850," Ph.D. diss., Yale Univesity 1989, p. 40.
.Will, p. 292; also Naquin and Rawski, p. 24.
.Dodgen, "Hydraulic Evolution," p. 55.
.Ibid., p. 56.
.Jonathan Spence, _The Search for Modern China_ , New York 1990, p. 185; and Teng, p. 40.
.Wright, pp. 161β3.
.Esherick, pp. 14β15.
.Ibid.
.Pomeranz, _The Making of a Hinterland_ , p. 179.
.Jurgen Osterhammel, "Britain and China," in Andrew Porter (ed.), _The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century_ , Oxford 1999, p. 160.
.Ibid., pp. 3, 15β16, 131 and 157β60.
.Esherick, p. 292.
.Pomeranz, p. 183.
.Ibid., p. 16.
.Buck quoted in Kueh, p. 117.
.Maddison, p. 30.
.Murray, pp. 128 and 266.
.Naquin and Rawski, p. 24.
.Modern studies of the impact of irrigation in Shaanxi cited in E. Vermeer, _Water Conservancy and Irrigation in China_ , The Hague 1977, p. 182.
.Murray, pp. 276β7.
.Vermeer, p. 172 fn26; and Sidney Gamble, _Ting Hsien_ , p. 235.
.Vermeer, pp. 7, 182, 187 and 288β9 (quote).
.James Kynge, "Yellow River Brings Further Sorrow to Chinese People," _Financial Times_ , 7 Jan. 2000.
**12. Brazil: Race and Capital in the Nordeste**
The definition in the epigraph is from G. Dia et al., "Drought as a Social Phenomenon in Northeastern Brazil," in Rolando Garcia and JosΓ© Escudero, _Drought and Man, Volume 3: The Roots of Catastrophe_ , Oxford 1986, p. 106.
.Cf. Bradford Burns, _A History of Brazil_ , Berkeley, Calif. 1970, p. 102; Andre Gunder Frank, _Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil_ , New York 1967, pp. 162β4; and Emilia Viotta da Costa, _The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories_ , Chapel Hill, N.C. 1985, pp. 21β4.
.Nathaniel Leff, "Economic Development in Brazil, 1822β1923," in Stephen Haber (ed.), _How Latin America Fell Behind_ , Stanford, Calif. 1997, pp. 1, 35; and Warren Dean, "The Brazilian Economy, 1870β1930," in Leslie Bethall (ed.), _The Cambridge History of Latin America_ , vol. 5 (1870β1930), Cambridge 1986, p. 685.
.Jaime Reis, "Hunger in the Northeast: Some Historical Aspects," in Simon Mitchell (ed.), _The Logic of Poverty: The Case of the Brazilian Northeast_ , London 1981, pp. 50β52.
.Cain and Hopkins, p. 298.
.Stephen Haber and Herbert Klein, "Hunger in the Northeast: Some Historical Aspects," in Haber (ed.), p. 251; and Alan Manchester, _British Preeminence in Brazil: Its Rise and Decline_ , Chapel Hill, N.C., pp. 337β40.
.Bertha Becker and Claudio Egler, _Brazil: A New Regional Power in the World-Economy_ , Cambridge 1992, p. 32.
.Dean, p. 708.
.Stephen Haber, "Financial Markets and Industrial Developments," in Haber (ed.), p. 151.
.Ruthanne Deutsch, "Bridging the Archipelago: Cities and Regional Economies in Brazil, 1870β1920," Ph.D. diss., Yale University 1994, p. 190.
.Levine, _Vale of Tears_ , p. 55.
.Quoted in David Jordan, _New World Regionalism_ , Toronto 1994, p. 35.
.Dean, p. 708.
.Leff, p. 53β4.
.Cain and Hopkins, p. 303.
.Ibid., pp. 303β4.
.Deutsch, p. 167.
.Dean, p. 723; and Winston Fritsch, _External Constraints on Economic Policy in Brazil, 1889β1930_ , London 1988, p. 3.
.Dean, p. 696.
.Nathaniel Leff, _Underdevelopment and Development in Brazil_ , vol. 1, London 1982, p. 7.
.Deutsch, pp. 3β5. In Jeffrey Williamson's well-known 1960s study of regional inequality in twenty-four major countries, the polarization between Brazil's Northeast and its Center-South was the most extreme. (See the discussion in "Regional Inequality and the Process of National Development: A Description of the Patterns," in L. Needleman (ed.), _Regional Analysis: Selected Readings_ , Baltimore 1968, pp. 110β15.)
.Leff, "Economic Development," p. 35.
.Deutsch, p. 86.
.Leff, "Economic Development," p. 35.
.Levine, p. 55.
.Leff, "Economic Development," pp. 27, 35β6.
.Eul-Soo Pang, _PCCLAS Proceedings_ 8 (1981β82), p. 2.
.Levine, p. 49.
.Leff, "Economic Development," p. 39; and Deutsch, p. 163.
.Gerald Greenfield, "The Great Drought and Imperial Discourse in Imperial Brazil," _Hispanic American Historical Review_ 72:3 (1992), pp. 385 and 396.
.Greenfield, "Migrant Behavior and Elite Attitudes," p. 83.
.Eul-Soo Pang, _Bahia in the First Brazilian Republic_ , Gainesville, Fla. 1979, p. 62.
.Ibid., p. 56.
.Leff, "Economic Development," p. 39.
.J. Galloway, "The Last Years of Slavery on the Sugar Plantations of Northeast Brazil," _Hispanic American Historical Review_ 51 (Nov. 1971), fn54.
.Quoted in Joseph Love, _Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil_ , Stanford, Calif. 1996, p. 163.
.Sir Richard Burton, visiting the _sertΓ£o_ in 1867, described one vast fazenda that used to run 66 kilometers along the SΓ£o Francisco river divided into scores of impoverished and failing ranches (Hall, _Drought and Irrigation_ , p. 33).
.Webb, pp. 68, 81. In the twentieth century, palma, a spineless cactus, would be adopted as a forage crop ideally suited to the aridity of the _sertΓ£o_ (pp. 84β5).
.Chandler, _The Feitosas_ , pp. 129β30.
.Ibid., p. 137.
.Webb, p. 115.
.Webb summarizes Guimaraes Duque's landmark study, _Solo e agua no poligono das secas_ (1949), pp. 85β8.
.Allen Johnson, _Sharecroppers of the SertΓ£o: Economics and Dependence on a Brazilian Plantation_ , Stanford, Calif. 1971, pp. 17, 47β8.
.Cunniff, pp. 14β15, 25 and 28β9.
.Levine, p. 43.
.Cunniff, p. 37.
.Hamilton de Mattos Monteiro, _Crise agaria e luta de classes: o Nordeste brasileiro entre 1850 e 1889_ , Brasilia 1980, pp. 157β63.
.Hall, p. 17.
.Cunniff, pp. 33β4.
.Hall, p. 3.
.Cunniff, pp. 55, 61; Webb, pp. 112β13.
.Chandler, pp. 131β2.
.Cunniff, pp. 65β6.
.Hall, p. 4.
.Cunniff, p. 80.
.Webb, p. 116.
.Ibid., p. 83.
.Hall, p. 36.
.Cunniff, 87β93.
.Ibid., p. 96.
.Cunniff, 104β6
.Monteiro, p. 47.
.Ibid., pp. 129β33 and 191β3.
.Cunniff, p. 102.
.Dean, p. 690.
.Hall, p. 5.
."... one indication of how little times have changed lies in the reports of root poisoning suffered by the desperately hungry in 1970, reminiscent of the graphic accounts given by Theophilo a century earlier" (Hall, p. 12).
## **Index**
**A**
Abbade, JoΓ£o,
Afghan wars, , ,
Africa: 13; imperialism and, 13β14, 108β10, , 145β6, ; long-term effects of drought-famines, 216β17
Algeria,
Angola, ,
Argentina,
Arnold, David, , ,
Asia, development compared with Europe, 297β301
Australia, ; climatology of, 269β70
**B**
Bengal, ,
Bennett, James Gordon,
Bihar,
Bjerknes, Jacob, , 242β7, ,
Blanford, Henry, 229β32, ,
Boer War, 173β5
Bombay Presidency, , , , ,
Borneo,
Boserup, Esther,
Boxer Rebellion, , 187β97,
Brazil, ; British influence, , 398β402; climatology of, 271β4; cotton boom, , 398β400; drought-famine of 1876β78, 86β8, , ; drought-famine of 1888β91, , ; Nordeste, 86β96, , 200β205, , , 402β14; relief programs, , 93β4; racism, 403β4; refugees, 89β96; Republic, 198β9, ; slavery in, 96β7
British Empire: agriculture and grain imports, 68β9; and Brazil, , 398β400; China, , 82β5, 307β8; India, 32β6, , 60β61, , ; military interventions, 313β14; South Africa, 109β10, 174β5; trade balances and flows, , , 312β14
Bruckner Cycle,
Buckingham, Duke of, , ,
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward,
Burke, Edmund, ,
Burma, ,
**C**
Cambuemba,
Canada,
canals, , , , , , , 327β8, , , , , 351β3, , , , 373β4
Cane, Mark, ,
Canudos , 198β205,
Carnarvon, Lord, 110β12
Catholic Church, , , , , 201β5
CearΓ‘, , 89β90, 92β5,
Ceylon,
Chile, and ENSO events,
China: British imperialism and, , 82β5; climatology 262β6; drought-famine of 1877, 5β6, 74β80, 123β4; drought-famine of 1897β99, 188β9, economic development of, 361β70; famine relief in, , 73β8, ; Gold Standard and, ; Grant's visit, 5β6; Great Leap Forward, , , ; handicraft production, 368β70; La NiΓ±a floods, ; long-term impacts of drought-famine, 218β21; Opium Wars, , , ; peasant living standards, 297β8; Qing famine relief, 297β301, ; Qing government, , , , , , , 298β9, , 362β4, ; revolts in, , 70β71, 76β7, , 187β9, 192β8, , , , ; river control in, 392β6
_Christian Herald, The_ , , ,
climate: world system, , 68β9, 240β5, 253β9, 270β6, 280β9
Conselheiro, Antonio, 198β205
Council of India, , ,
_cultuurstelsel_ , , ,
Curzon, Lord, , , , 172β7
**D**
da Cunha, Euclydes, , , ; _Os SertΓ΅es_ , , ,
Deccan, , , 37β9, 43β67, , 170β72,
deforestation, , , , 381β7
de Waal, Alexander, ,
Diamond, Jared,
Dias, Jill,
Digby, William, , , , 44β8, , , , ,
Disraeli, Benjamin, , , 47β8, ,
Dutch East Indies, , 101β2, , ,
Dutt, Romesh Chunder, , , , , , , , ; _Famines in India_ , ; _Economic History of British India_ ,
**E**
East Africa, and ENSO events, 279β82
East India Company, , , ,
Eliot, Sir John, 238β9
El NiΓ±o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), 14β15, , , ; chronology of 275β80; multidecadal regimes 247β9; regional climatologies and, 259β86; sunspot theories of 231β9; teleconnections and, 254β9
economic theory, 9β12, , , , , ,
Egypt: famine of 1877, 3β4, ; Grant's visit, 2β3
Elgin, Lord, , 155β6, 161β3,
England: decline of agriculture in,
epidemics: , , , , , , , , ,
Estelita, Caetano,
Ethiopia: climatology of, 279β82; drought-famine of 1888β92, 136β46; drought-famine of 1895β1902, 145β7; Italian colonialism and, ,
Europe: development compared with Asia, 305β8; and possible ENSO impacts, 266β9
**F**
famine: and colonialism, , , 9β11, ; Malthusian explanations of, 326β8; and systemic responses, 296β304; vulnerability to, 305β8
Famine Commissions, , , 62β3, , , , , , , , , ,
Fiji, climatology of,
France: colonial policies, 107β8
Fujian province, , ,
Furtado, Celso,
**G**
Garcia, Rolando, _Nature Pleads Not Guilty_ ,
Germany: colonial policy in Africa, , 215β16; in China, , , ,
global warming, 250β51, ,
gold standard, , , , , 319β23, ,
Grant, U.S., 1β6
grain trade, , 128β9, , , , ; exports during famines, , 30β32, , , , , , , , , , , 338β9
Guancheng, Fang, ,
Guangdong,
Guguan Pass, 79β80
Gujarat, , , 180β86
**H**
Hawai'i, climatology of,
Hawthorne, Julian, 165β8
Hebei,
Henan,
Hildebrandsson, Hugo,
Hubei,
Henan, , , 83β5, , , , , , , , ,
Hobsbawm, Eric, , , ,
Huang, Philip, 218β20, , 362β70
Hume, Allan Ocatavian, 59β60, 64β5, , ,
Hyderabad, , , , ,
Hyndman, H. M., , , , , , ,
**I**
imperial expansion, , , , , ,
India: British policy in, , 9β10, , , 35β44, , 61β65, , , , , , 315β17; climatology of 258β65; drought-famine of 1876β78, 28β65; drought-famine of 1896β97, 151β69; drought-famine of 1899β1902, 169β86; drought-famine of 1907β08, ; economic performance under British rule, 329β59; enclosures, 344β50; gold standard and, 319β21; Grant's visit, ; long-term effects of drought-famine, 185β6, ; Mogul and Maratha famine relief, 301β4; nationalism, 59β65, , ; peasant living standards, ; relief programs, 37β45, , , 57β8, , , , 154β77
Indian Mutiny, , , 47β8, ,
Indian National Congress, , , , , , ,
Indo-Australian Convergence Zone, , ,
Indonesia: climatology, 266β7; _see also_ Dutch East Indies
Industrial Revolution, 311β13,
Inhamuns _sertΓ£o_ ,
Inter-tropical Convergence Zone,
Ireland, , , , , ,
irrigation: neglect by the Raj, , , 350β59; neglect in Brazil, 327β8, 408β9
Italy: and Ethiopia, 12β13,
**J**
Japan: Grant's visit, ; and Korea, 99β100, 132β3; opening to Western trade, 312β14
Java, , 206β8
Jevons, Sir Stanley, 235β7
Jiangsu, , , , ,
Joshi, Ganesh,
_JoΓ£seiro_ , , , , , ,
**K**
Kashmir, 55β6
Kenya, , , ,
Kiangsu, ,
Kipling, Rudyard, ,
Kitchener, Lord, ,
Knight, Robert,
Kondratieff, Nikolai,
Korea, , , 71 99β100, 132β3, , ; Japan and, , ; Tonghak Revolution ,
Kueh, Y., ,
**L**
Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, _Times of Feast, Times of Famine_ ,
laissez-faire, , , , , , , , , , , 315β16
_Lancet, The_ ,
Landes, David, _Wealth and Poverty of Nations_ , 8β9
La NiΓ±a (ENSO Cold Phase), , , , , , , , 246β8, , , , , , , 275β91, ,
Li Hongzhang, 5β6
Lockyer, Sir Norman, , , , , , ,
Loti, Pierre, , 178β9
Luxemburg, Rosa, 11β13, ,
Lytton, Lord: policies as viceroy and famine 32β41; and U.S. Grant, 4β5
**M**
Mackinder, Halford, 213β14, ; _The Geographical Pivot of History_ , 239β40
Madden-Julian Oscillation,
Madras: famine of 1876, , 29β33, , , 40β44, , 120β22
Mahdists, 138β44
Malthus, Thomas, , , , , , , 323β5, ,
Mao Tse-tung, , , , , , ,
markets: acceleration of famine and, 31β2; growth of world, 9β12, , , , , , , , , , 305β6; theory of, 8β10,
Marxism, , ,
Marx, Karl, , , , , , ,
Masai, 213β14
Mashonaland,
Matabeleland,
Mayers, W., ,
Medick, Hans,
Menelik II, , , 138β41,
Mexico, and ENSO events, 275β7,
Michel, Louise,
millenarian revolutions, , , , , , , 187β221, , ,
missionaries: accounts of famine, , , , 64β5, 73β7, 81β4, , 136β7, , , , , , , 194β5; evangelism, , 190β201; famine relief by, 77β8, 84β5
monsoons, 29β30; failure of, , , , , , , , , , 169β70, , , ,
Morocco, , 115β17, ,
mortality from famines, 7β8, 23β4, , , 55β65, , 120β24, , , , , , , , 183β5, 212β13
Mote, F. W., , ,
Mozambique, , , , ,
Mwari cult,
Mysore, , , 50β51,
**N**
_Nature_ , , 231β2
Naoroji, Dadabhai, , , , , , ; _Poverty and Un-British Rule in India_ ,
Ndebele, ,
Negros, 103β5, , , ,
Netherlands, , , 207β8, ,
New Caledonia, 105β7; climatology of
Nichols, Francis, 187β8, 363β4,
Nigeria, famine in colonial, ,
Nightingale, Florence, , , , , , ,
North Africa, and ENSO events, 112β17, ,
North America, 128β31; and ENSO events, , , 275β7,
North Western provinces (India), , , , , , , 152β3, , ,
**O**
opium trade, , , , , , ,
Opium Wars, , , , , ,
**P**
Pacific Decadal Oscillation,
Pacific Dry Zone,
Pernambuco, , ,
Peru, and ENSO events, , ,
Phadke, Basudeo Balwant,
"Philindus,"
Philippines, , , , 208β10, ; climatology of, 267β9
Polanyi, Karl, _The Great Transformation_ , 9β11
political ecology, , 295β308
population growth, , , , 324β6
Pomeranz, Kenneth, , , , 325β7
Portugal, 398β400; colonial policy in Angola, , 108β9, ; in Mozambique , , , 278β9
Price, Eva, 195β7
proletarianization, 219β20
Punjab, 55β6, , , , , , 184β5, , , , , , 353β4,
**Q**
Quinn, William, , , 290β92,
**R**
railroads, , , , , 68β70, , , , , , , , , , , , , , 351β3,
Ranade, Mahdev Govinda, ,
Rand, W. C., 160β61
Rajputana,
Ranger, Terence,
relief camps (India), 43β58, , ,
relief strike (India, 1877), 45β51
_Report on the Famine in the Bombay Presidency_ , 21β2
Richard, Timothy, , , ,
rinderpest, , , 136β7, 208β9, , ,
RomΓ£o, CΓcero, , 198β200, , 204β5,
Russia: drought-famine of 1891, 133β4; ENSO events and 284β6
Rwanda,
**S**
Sabha (Civic Association), 46β9,
Sahel, and ENSO events, , 82β3,
Salisbury, Lord, , 33β4, 36β7, 40β41, ,
Sen, Amartya,
Shaanxi, , , , , 187β8, , , 363β4, 369β70
Shandong, , 73β7, , , 188β93, ,
Shanxi, , , 80β83, , , , ,
Shona Rebellion, ,
sleeping sickness,
Smith, Adam, ; _The Wealth of Nations_ ,
Social Darwinism,
Social Democratic Federation, ,
Southeast Asia: climatology of, ,
Southern Africa, 108β12; and ENSO events, 278β9
Southern Oscillation, , 240β47, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Strachey, Sir John, ,
Strachey, Sir Richard, , , 62β3, ,
Sudan, 141β6
Suppiah, Ramasamy,
**T**
Taiping Revolution, , , , , , , , 378β9
Tamil Nadu, ,
Tanganyika,
Tawara (Shona), ,
tax collection during famines, 55β8, 60β62, , , 158β9, 161β3
Taylor, Hudson,
teleconnections, 254β9
Temple, Sir Richard, 40β46,
"Temple wage," 43β4
Third World, development of, , 295β328
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, ,
Tonghak Rebellion, , ,
Tongzhi Restoration, 70β71
**U**
Uganda, 213β15
United Provinces,
United States: anti-Chinese movement in, ; famine relief donations, ; and Philippines, , 208β11
Utilitarianism, , 40β42, , , , ,
**V**
Victoria, Queen, , , , , , 141β2, 151β2,
Vietnam, , ; peasant revolt in, 100β101
**W**
Walker, Sir Gilbert, , 239β44,
Wallace, Alfred Russel,
Warm Pool, , 243β6
Watts, Michael, _Silent Violence_ , , , 304β5
Wedderburn, William, , , ,
wheat boom, 127β30
Will, Pierre-Etienne,
Williams, Samuel Wells,
Wyrtki, Klaus, ,
**Y**
Yangzi Valley, , , 272β3
Yellow River hydraulic control, 387β96
Young, John Russell, 1β2, 3β4
**Z**
Zebiak, Stephen,
Zhili,
Zululand, 110β12,
|
{
"pile_set_name": "Books3"
}
|
Q:
Fragment transitions in Android with MVVMCross
In MVVMCross is easy to develop Activity transitions, but i'm finding so many troubles trying to develop this with fragments.
I got an application with a Hamburger Menu, and I wanna be capable to edit my own transitions between fragments. I've been searching in the internet but i cant find any solution.
Thank you for your attention.
A:
If you are using MvxCachingFragmentCompatActivityas the base type for your activity you can override OnBeforeFragmentChanging method to set a custom transition animation.
public override void OnBeforeFragmentChanging(
IMvxCachedFragmentInfo fragmentInfo,
Android.Support.V4.App.FragmentTransaction transaction)
{
transaction.SetCustomAnimations(
// Your entrance animation xml reference
Resource.Animation.slide_in_from_right,
// Your exit animation xml reference
Resource.Animation.slide_out_to_left);
base.OnBeforeFragmentChanging(fragmentInfo, transaction);
}
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
Are Hemodialysis Patients at a Lower Risk for COVID-19 Infection? {#sec1_1}
=================================================================
Hemodialysis patients are a population displaying impaired lymphocyte and granulocyte function, and, by strict definition, they are, at least theoretically, at an increased risk for infection by COVID-19 given also the characteristics of the average dialysis center, where social distancing is difficult to achieve \[[@B1], [@B2]\].
However, the scant available data indicate somewhat otherwise; in a report from a university dialysis facility (Zhongnan Hospital) in Wuhan, China, with 201 patients, the prevalence was equal to 5 (2.5%). In addition, cases had no severe symptoms or died \[[@B3]\].
According to another report, related to another university dialysis facility (Renmin Hospital) in Wuhan, China, in the period between January 14, 2020, when the first confirmed case was diagnosed, and February 17, 2020, when the epidemic was declared extinct, among 230 hemodialysis patients 37 (16%) COVID-19 cases were diagnosed. During the epidemic, 7 hemodialysis patients died (18.9%). Symptoms were mild in most surviving patients and there were no cases admitted to the intensive care unit. Laboratory exams showed an impaired cellular immune function (especially lymphocytes of T cells, Th cells, killer T cells, and NK cells) and an incapability of mounting the "cytokine storm" linked to pneumonia, compared to COVID-19 patients not on hemodialysis. The cause of death was related instead to cardiovascular complications \[[@B4]\].
In an Italian experience, among 200 patients 18 were infected and isolated (9%), and in another unit of 170 patients only 4 were infected \[[@B5]\]. In the Piedmont and Aosta regions, among 2,893 patients 98 were infected (3.4%) during the first month of the epidemic \[[@B6]\]. By the way, in none of the mentioned studies was the mode of anticoagulation during hemodialysis mentioned. While they cast doubts on the open-space hospital model now implemented in many hospitals, which is incompatible with the need to counteract epidemics \[[@B7]\], these reports also create uncertainty regarding the concept that these patients are at a particularly increased risk for COVID-19.
Hemodialysis and Anticoagulation {#sec1_2}
================================
Heparin actually consists of a heterogeneous mixture of sulfomucopolysaccharides, containing also a minimum peptide component of 2 amino acids (glycine and serine). Heparin exerts a binding capacity to both the endothelial surface and various plasmaproteins (Fig. [1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}). The molecular weight range of unfractionated heparin (UFH) is 5,000--30,000. Low-molecular-weight heparin (LMWH) fractions effectively inhibit the activated factor X (Factor X~a~), while exerting a less inhibitory effect on thrombin, compared to the unfractionated forms. It has been shown that LMWH preparations retain their efficacy toward thromboembolisms and, compared to UFH, show increased bioavailability and the need for less frequent administration. Heparin biological activity crucially depends on the endogenous antithrombin anticoagulant \[[@B8], [@B9]\]. The serine protease inhibitor activity of antithrombin is exerted toward thrombin and Factor X~a~, resulting in the inhibition of both (Fig. [1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}) \[[@B10]\]. Congenital or acquired antithrombin deficiency is indeed associated with a high risk of thromboembolic complications and an impaired interaction with heparin. Administration of antithrombin is generally indicated for the prophylaxis of thromboembolic accidents in nephrology (e.g., in patients with nephrotic syndrome) \[[@B11]\]. In addition, it has been shown that during sepsis activation of the extrinsic coagulation pathway, together with a relevant decline of both coagulation inhibition and fibrinolytic mechanisms, may result in a procoagulant state, leading to microvascular thrombosis and multiorgan dysfunction \[[@B12]\]. Antithrombin levels decrease in sepsis and, when low, may predict high mortality \[[@B13]\]. In addition, heparin is utilized in this context, also for its immunomodulatory and anti-inflammatory role \[[@B14]\].
During hemodialysis it is necessary to perform anticoagulation of the dialysis circuit to avoid blood clotting in the system due to Factor VII, platelet, and leukocyte activation. Anticoagulation is usually performed utilizing heparin, often in Western Europe in the low-molecular-weight form \[[@B15], [@B16]\], which has some advantages over UFH. Relative to UFH, in fact, LMWH could induce less undesired bleeding after completion of the dialysis session and perhaps less triglyceride reduction.
Evaluating the Risk of Heparin-Induced Thrombocytopenia {#sec1_3}
=======================================================
Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) is an immune complex-mediated condition defined as a decrease in platelet counts below 150,000 per mm^3^, with a median nadir of about 55,000 per mm^3^, associated with a positive test for heparin-dependent antibodies \[[@B17], [@B18]\]. The typical onset pattern (60% of the cases) results in a platelet decline 5--10 days after exposure. The rapid onset pattern (30% of cases) occurs right after the exposure. The delayed onset pattern (βΌ10%) occurs 9.2 days after the start of heparin administration therapy, on average, although signs and symptoms may occur up to 3 weeks after the exposure \[[@B18]\].
Careful evaluation and monitoring should be indeed applied toward the risk of HIT \[[@B19]\]. LMWH offers the advantage of a reduced binding to platelet factor 4, thus decreasing the HIT risk \[[@B20]\]. On the other hand, the shorter size of LMWH may hamper the effectiveness of protamine as an antidote \[[@B20]\]. Useful information is provided by reporting a thrombocyte count of less than 50%, which represents an important red flag \[[@B19], [@B20]\]. Laboratory tests can then be used to confirm the presence of platelet factor 4 (PF4)/heparin antibodies \[[@B21]\]. Attention should be payed when reporting the presence of activating antibodies against PF4-heparin complexes (PF4-H) to the cut-off point for a positive test (e.g., 1 U/mL) \[[@B19]\]. A score has been developed based on 8 clinical features, each scoring between β2 and +3 \[[@B22]\]. Other scoring systems are also available \[[@B18]\].
LMWH and COVID-19 {#sec1_4}
=================
LMWH has some antiviral properties in vitro and it is routinely used in COVID-19 patients to prevent or circumvent the activation of the coagulation cascade induced by inflammation \[[@B23]\]. This is a particularly severe and lethal complication, leading to disseminated intravascular coagulation and venous thromboembolism. In a retrospective study, LMWH therapy reduced interleukin-6 release and activity, which is responsible of the "cytokine storm," and treated patients had also a higher percentage of lymphocytes \[[@B24]\]. LMWH therapy is also associated with better outcomes in severe COVID-19 patients with sepsis-induced coagulopathy and markedly elevated D-dimer levels \[[@B25]\].
It should be pointed out that uremia offers a unique microenvironment in which the coagulation and anticoagulation balance can be dysregulated in many ways. For example, the presence of anti-protein C and anti-protein S antibodies has been detected \[[@B26]\], which may critically underscore the acute onset of a procoagulant situation in these patients (already characterized by an increased thrombotic risk). These data indeed may prudentially pose the indication of monitoring protein C and free protein S (Fig. [2](#F2){ref-type="fig"}). It can be hypothesized that, upon SARS-Cov-2 infection, the presence of antibodies with potential inhibitory activity on protein C and protein S may even increase the functional effect of an activated protein C (APC) resistance condition, whereas already present in the patient. Testing for APC resistance is indeed advised in these patients.
COVID-19, LMWH, and Hemodialysis: Future Perspectives {#sec1_5}
=====================================================
It is therefore possible that hemodialysis patients could be protected with respect to COVID-19 virus infection by the LMWH used in every hemodialysis session. We propose monitoring, in these patients, of the Anti-Factor Xa activity assay \[[@B27]\], as well as antithrombin, and D-dimer levels, and not just aPTT, in order to possibly even increase the LMWH dosage, in this pandemic period (Table [1](#T1){ref-type="table"}).
The availability of these exams could therefore lead to optimization of LMWH in this patient population.
Disclosure Statement {#sec1_6}
====================
A.F.P. and D.I. received funding from Gnosis, SpA, and EUTox.
Funding Sources {#sec1_7}
===============
None.
Author Contributions {#sec1_8}
====================
All of the authors contributed equally to the writing of this paper.
![Mechanism of action of UFH and LMWH with the major ligand-binding interactions involved. One of the key proteins for the activity of heparin is antithrombin, a serine protease inhibitor (SERPINSC1) that inactivates several clotting factors. Mechanistically, heparin binds to antithrombin, thus exposing the antithrombin protease inhibitor binding site and forming equimolecular complexes with its ligands. Antithrombin uses unique and extensive conformational change mechanisms to inhibit its protease ligands \[[@B8]\]. Heparin increases by orders of magnitude the tendency of antithrombin to interact with a number of plasma proteins. The resulting complex, in particular with thrombin (factor IIa) and factors IXa, Xia, and Xa, inhibits the protease activities of these clotting factors. Heparin indeed works as an antithrombin-protease-inhibiting cofactor without being consumed, and, once the antithrombin-protease complex is formed, heparin is released in its intact conformation, thus repeatedly activating new antithrombin molecules. Heparin biological activity crucially depends indeed on the endogenous antithrombin anticoagulant activity. The role of antithrombin is pivotal in coagulation regulation by shifting thrombin from procoagulant to anticoagulant activity. The presence of heparin dramatically increases the complex stability of antithrombin with the above-mentioned coagulation factors \[[@B8], [@B9]\]. One important difference between UFH and LMWH is that the interaction of antithrombin with UHF almost equally induces inhibition and degradation of both Xa and thrombin, while LMWH preferentially determines degradation of factor Xa. Various other potential benefits of heparin in COVID-19 have been put forward recently \[[@B28]\].](kbr-0045-0357-g01){#F1}
![Scheme of the anticoagulant activity of the protein C anticoagulant pathway. Protein C is activated by thrombin (not shown), forming APC \[[@B29]\]. Protein S in turn is a cofactor of APC for the inactivation of activated coagulation factors VIII~a~ and V~a~. Only free protein S, i.e., the fraction which is not bound to C4b-binding protein (not shown) in circulation, retains its anticoagulant activity. Activated factor V (factor V~a~) procoagulant activity is inactivated by APC-catalyzed cleavage at the Arg506 level, yielding factor V~i~. Beyond its intrinsic procoagulant activity, Factor V~a~ also exerts an anticoagulant activity as a cofactor for APC and protein S, in inactivation of the procoagulant factor VIII~a~ yielding factor VIII~i~ \[[@B30]\]. This function is also compromised in the presence of factor V resistance to cleavage by APC (APC-R; hatched box), mainly due to the Arg506Gln mutation (factor V~Leiden~), which indeed represents the most common cause of APC resistance in the population.](kbr-0045-0357-g02){#F2}
######
Proposed laboratory test profile to monitor LMWH therapy and the risk of adverse reactions
Test Rationale/purpose References
------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- ------------
aPTT Intrinsic and common coagulation pathway 19
Antithrombin[^1^](#T1F1){ref-type="table-fn"} Involved in heparin activity and X~a~ binding 20
Platelet count[^2^](#T1F2){ref-type="table-fn"} Adverse effect monitoring (HIT) 19, 20
HIT[^2^](#T1F2){ref-type="table-fn"} Antibodies against PF4-H complexes 19--22
D-dimer Clot degradation products 23
Anti-Factor X~a~ activity assay Monitoring the clinical effectiveness of LMWH 27
Antithrombin effects are explained in Fig. [1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}.
Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia is defined as a decrease in platelet count below 150,000 per mm^3^, with a median nadir of 55,000 per mm^3^, starting 5 or more days after the beginning of heparin administration, associated with a positive test for heparin-dependent antibodies \[[@B17], [@B18]\].
|
{
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Central"
}
|
Q:
When did Firefox change its Function.prototype.toString() behaviour?
Nowadays, when you call a function's .toString(), browsers return the function's original declaration.
But I remember that Firefox used to return an optimized version, eg.
function fn() {
return 2+3;
}
fn.toString() // Used to give: function fn() {return 5;}
On which browsers is it safe to use this feature?
A:
From MDN:
Since Gecko 17.0 (Firefox 17 / Thunderbird 17 / SeaMonkey 2.14), Function.prototype.toString() has been implemented by saving the function's source. The decompiler was removed, so that the indentation parameter is not needed any more. See bug 761723 for more details.
|
{
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
}
|
731 So.2d 626 (1998)
Lamar Christovia NETTLES
v.
STATE.
CR-96-2409.
Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama.
June 19, 1998.
Opinion on Return to Remand November 20, 1998.
*627 John Bertolotti, Jr., Mobile, for appellant.
Bill Pryor, atty gen., and J. Thomas Leverette, asst. atty. gen., for appellee.
COBB, Judge.
Lamar Christovia Nettles appeals from his convictions on charges of kidnapping in the first degree, a violation of Β§ 13A-6-43, Ala.Code 1975, and second-degree burglary, a violation of Β§ 13A-7-6, Ala.Code 1975. At an earlier trial, Nettles was convicted of both offenses, and he appealed to this court. On March 8, 1996, this Court reversed the convictions and returned the case for a new trial. Nettles v. State, 683 So.2d 9 (Ala.Cr.App.1996). On May 21, 1997, Nettles was retried before a jury on charges that he kidnapped Tim Phillips at gunpoint to get the door keys to the Mc-Donald's restaurant where Mr. Phillips was assistant manager and the combination to the restaurant's safe, and then used the keys and the safe combination to burglarize the restaurant. Following the guilty verdict, the trial judge sentenced Nettles to life imprisonment for the first-degree kidnapping and to 20 years' imprisonment for the second-degree burglary. This appeal follows.
Nettles argues that the trial court erred in not granting a hearing outside the presence of the jury to determine the admissibility of the confession Nettles made to a police investigator.
The evidence tends to show the following. Nettles was caught inside the Mc-Donald's restaurant on October 2, 1993. He was arrested and was taken to the police station, where he was interrogated by police investigator James Graham. Investigator Graham was called as a witness during the State's presentation of its case. *628 As Investigator Graham began to testify as to the confession he took from Nettles, trial counsel interrupted, stating:
"MR. QUINLIVAN: Judge, I would like to have a hearing on the voluntariness of this outside the presence of the jury."
(R. 75.) The trial judge denied the request, stating that he would explore the matter more fully on the record when the jury was "on break."
As Investigator Graham began to identify signatures on the Miranda rights form, trial counsel again objected:
"MR. QUINLIVAN: Judge, I am going to have to object to any testimony by this officer about any kind of statement given unless there is a proper predicate laid both outside the presence of the jury and before the jury as to the voluntariness and constitutionality of it."
(R. 76.) The trial judge reminded trial counsel that he had already ruled on his request for a hearing outside the presence of the jury, but told the prosecutor to lay the proper predicate for the admission of the confession. Investigator Graham testified that he read Nettles his Miranda rights from a form provided to officers by the Mobile Police Department; he then enumerated the specific rights he had read to Nettles and said that Nettles appeared to understand his rights. Graham then testified that no one threatened, coerced, or sought to induce Nettles to give a statement; that no one told Nettles that it would be better or worse for him if he made a statement; and that no one offered Nettles any hope of reward in return for a statement. He then said that Nettles waived his rights and made a confession. Over the repeated objections of trial counsel, the trial court then admitted the taped confession, it was played to the jury, and the State rested.
After the jury was released for its lunch break, the trial court made the following statement concerning its decision to deny a hearing outside the presence of the jury to determine the voluntariness and admissibility of the confession:
"THE COURT: ... I am not sure how much of this was on the record, but it was brought to the Court's attention earlier that the state intended to use the statement, which statement was used at the previous trial. That further the Court was advised that at that trial a hearing was held outside the presence of the jury concerning the voluntariness and other essentials of the admissibility of the statement, and that following that hearing the judge at that trial ruled that the statement was admissible. The Court does not believe that a second hearing is necessary for that purpose, the evidence having been presented to a judge and ruled on by him and the matter having winded its way up to and back from the appellate court on that record. So I denyΒon that basis the Court denied the request for a second hearing on the same subject outside the presence of the jury. Anything else?"
(R. 86-87.) The trial counsel argued that this was a new trial with a new trial judge and a new defense lawyer, and that Nettles should be entitled to have a new hearing for the trial judge to determine whether the confession was freely, voluntarily, and intelligently made. He further argued that Nettles was entitled to a hearing outside the presence of the jury and that Nettles had a right to testify before the trial judge then presiding over his case. He then proffered that, had he been given the opportunity to testify, Nettles would have said that he was intoxicated and under the influence of marijuana when he confessed. The trial judge responded that Nettles had had the right to testify at the hearing that took place during the first trial and that if he chose not to testify, the right to another hearing to determine the admissibility of the confession was not revived by the fact that his first conviction was reversed. The trial judge concluded:
"THE COURT: ... [T]here is no question but that there was a hearing held *629 and that a [duly] acting judge of this court made a ruling on the facts presented, which ruling ... the Court finds is a matter decided."
(R. 88.)
While the record of the first trial was not made a part of the record in the present appeal, this Court may take judicial notice of its own records in this situation. Hull v. State, 607 So.2d 369, 371 n. 1 (Ala.Cr.App.1992). In reviewing the admission of Nettle's confession in his first trial, we note that Nettles testified outside the presence of the jury regarding his having drunk alcohol and having smoked marijuana before making the statement and that his confession was subsequently admitted into evidence without a motion to suppress or an objection to its admission.
The record of the first trial showed that Nettles was permitted to question Investigator Graham on voir dire regarding the circumstances surrounding the taking of the statement. This was done in the presence of the jury. Trial counsel then asked the judge to allow Nettles to testify about the confession outside the presence of the jury. The trial judge granted that request. The pertinent parts of that testimony are as follows:
"Q [Defense counsel]: Okay, Lamar, you remember giving a statement, remember talking to the police officer?
"A: Yeah, I remember them taking me to the precinct.
". . . .
"Q: Did you understand your rights?
"A: At the time, I did, yes, sir.
"Q: Had you had any sort of alcohol?
"A: Yes, sir.
"Q: Tell the Court how much alcohol you had consumed or drugs [you had taken] that night.
". . . .
"A: Yes, sir. It was about two [or] three fifths of Thunderbird [wine]. We had been smoking marijuana laced joint[s] practically all day.
"Q: Do you remember saying a lot of thisΒyou read the statement?
"A: Yeah, I remember saying this.
"Q: Do you remember saying what you read in this statement?
"A: Some of the information I remember, some of it, I don't. It's been quite a while. I don't remember making some of those statements.
"Q: Did the alcohol and the drugs have an affect on you, if you recall, when you were at the station?
"A: Yes, it did."
(R. in first trial 75-76.)
Then the prosecutor and trial judge asked Nettles some questions:
"Q [Prosecutor]: You told Mr. White at the time you gave your statement you did understand your rights, correct?
"A: Yes, I understood what the officer was saying.
"Q: And you understood you have a right to a lawyer and you could [have] stopped the interview, right?
"A: Yes, sir....
"Q [Trial judge]: ... [D]id any of these officers there or anyone there in their presence threaten or intimidate you in any way?
"A: As far as interrogating for questioning, that's all that went on there. Wasn't no physical threat, anything by word of mouth.
"Q [Prosecutor]: Did this officer here or Officer Bush or anyone else in their presence promise you anything to get youΒthey didn't promise you anything, did they?
"A: Just that they would try to do their best to try to help this case when I go to court. That's only thing I know. They said they would try to help as best they could.
"Q: They did not promise you any kind of sentence, did they?
"A: No.
"Q: And they didn't threaten?
"A: No.
*630 "Q: And you understood what was going on?
"A: Yes."
(R. in first trial 76-77.)
After a discussion of the mechanics of presenting the tape recording of the statement or a transcript of it, the trial judge turned to the trial counsel and said, "Well, I wondered, Mr. White, why you wanted to bring him up here and give testimony the way he did. Only thing about it is this Court is going to submit his statement as being prima facie and voluntary and that, of course, is for the jury to weigh." Trial counsel candidly admitted that Nettles's testimony was not what Nettles had told him before he took the witness stand. There was no objection to the trial court's finding that the State had met its burden of proving the confession was voluntary, and there was no objection when the trial court admitted the statement into evidence at appellant's first trial.
The procedure for determining the voluntariness of a confession has been wellsettled for over 30 years. The Alabama Supreme Court first outlined the procedure in Duncan v. State, 278 Ala. 145, 176 So.2d 840 (Ala.1965), in response to the United States Supreme Court's mandate in Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. 368, 84 S.Ct. 1774, 12 L.Ed.2d 908 (1964). In Duncan, the Court set out the following procedure:
"We are clear to the conclusion that whenever a motion is made for the question of the voluntariness of the confession to be determined outside the presence of the jury, the motion should be granted. In such a hearing, the trial judge sitting alone should make a determination upon a proper record of the issue of voluntariness. At such a hearing the defendant may take the stand and testify for the limited purpose of making a record of his version of the facts and circumstances under which the confession was obtained. By so doing, the defendant will not waive his right to decline to take the stand in his own defense on the trial in chief nor will he waive any of the other rights stemming from his choice not to testify. If the confession is held voluntary and admitted, the jury's consideration of that confession and surrounding circumstances shall proceed in accordance with the `Orthodox' procedure, that is, the jury considers the voluntariness as affecting the weight or credibility of the confession."
Duncan v. State, 278 Ala. at 165, 176 So.2d at 859.
The question before us is whether the trial court's compliance with that procedure during the first trial was sufficient to allow the trial court in the second trial to decline to hear testimony outside the presence of the jury and then decline to determine the voluntariness of the confession before admitting it into evidence.
We hold that, under the circumstances presented at this trial, the trial court at the second trial could not consider the admissibility of the confession "a matter decided."[1] An unqualified reversal would require a new trial and place the parties in the trial court in the same position as if the case had never been tried. In this case, the voluntariness of the confession was not an issue before this court on the appeal from the first trial. Thus, absent direction by this court limiting relitigation, or an opinion by this court determining the issue of the voluntariness of the confession at the first trial, trial counsel had to object to the admission of the confession at the second trial to preserve the issue for review, and the trial court was required to consider the admissibility of the confession when it was offered. See People v. Mattson, 50 Cal.3d 826, 849, 789 *631 P.2d 983, 999, 268 Cal.Rptr. 802, 818, cert. denied, 498 U.S. 1017, 111 S.Ct. 591, 112 L.Ed.2d 595 (1990). The trial court erred when it declined to consider evidence and determine the voluntariness of the confession when it was offered. When Nettles requested a hearing outside the presence of the jury and informed the trial court that he wished to testify concerning the voluntariness of his confession, the trial court was required to grant that request, pursuant to Jackson v. Denno, supra.
Although we find that the trial court erred in failing to grant Nettles a hearing outside the presence of the jury, we do not agree that Nettles is entitled to a new trial. Heard v. State, 584 So.2d 556, 562 (Ala.Cr.App.1991). Instead, we hold that Nettles is entitled to a post-trial evidentiary hearing to determine whether the confession was voluntary under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. at 393-94, 84 S.Ct. 1774; Ex parte Smith, 554 So.2d 451, 452-54 (Ala. 1989). We therefore remand the case to the trial court for a post-trial hearing to determine the voluntariness and admissibility of the confession. Return is to be made to this Court within 60 days.
REMANDED WITH DIRECTIONS.
All the Judges concur.
On Return to Remand
COBB, Judge.
On June 19, 1998, this Court remanded this cause to the trial court for a post-trial hearing to determine the voluntariness and admissibility of the appellant's confession. Nettles v. State, 731 So.2d 626 (Ala.Cr.App.1998). The trial court "reached back to the first trial and considered the testimony" of both the defendant and the police investigator in the admissibility hearing conducted by another trial judge in Nettles's first trial. The trial court then independently concluded that the findings and conclusions made by the trial judge in the first trial were correct and it adopted those findings in admitting the confession.
The trial court did not err in considering and adopting the findings made by the first trial court and in determining that the confession was admissible. In Bass v. State, 626 S.W.2d 769, 774 (Tex.Crim.App. 1982), the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held:
"Furthermore, if a procedurally and substantively adequate hearing has been held on this issue, a trial judge may consider evidence presented before a different fact-finder and adopt the findings and conclusions of the fact-finder in determining the admissibility of a confession, without the necessity of holding a second hearing to hear the same evidence. We emphasize the narrowness of our holding in this case: absent a claim of new evidence on the issue of a confession's voluntariness, and as long as a procedurally and subtantively[substantively] adequate hearing has been held before a fact-finder other than a jury which determines the defendant's guilt or innocence, the United State's Constitution does not require that a trial judge hold a second hearing to determine the voluntariness of a confession. He may make his determination based upon the evidence presented at the earlier hearing and may adopt the findings and conclusions of the fact-finder at the earlier hearing."
We agree with that court, and we believe this procedure is acceptable in Alabama courts.
We hold that the trial court's finding that Nettles's confession was voluntary and admissible based on its adoption of the findings and conclusions of the first trial court is correct. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966); O'Shields v. State, 689 So.2d 227, 230 (Ala.Cr.App.1996).
*632 The judgment of the circuit court is affirmed.
AFFIRMED.
LONG, P.J., and McMILLAN, BROWN, and BASCHAB, JJ., concur.
NOTES
[1] Because the trial court considered the issue already settled by the first trial court, we must hold for another day the question whether it could have reached back to the first trial and considered the testimony of Nettles at that hearing and then adopted the findings and conclusions of the first trial judge in making its own determination as to the voluntariness of the confession. See Bass v. State, 626 S.W.2d 769, 774 (Tex.Crim.App. 1982).
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Alan Gatherer
Alan Gatherer is an electrical engineer with Huawei Corporation in Plano, Texas. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 for his contributions to systems-on-chip for 3G and 4G cellular systems.
References
Category:Fellow Members of the IEEE
Category:Living people
Category:21st-century American engineers
Category:Year of birth missing (living people)
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