Late Victorian Holocausts

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781683603
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

Late Victorian Holocausts

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859847398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Book Description
Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe, Davis shows how the ruling elites helped produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. 15 photos. 8 maps.

Planet of Slums

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 1844671607
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
Celebrated urban theorist Davis provides a global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor.

Buda's Wagon

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784786640
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York's Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda's prototype the car bomb has evolved into a "poor man's air force," a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City. In this provocative history, Mike Davis traces the its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies-particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan-in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with "rings of steel" against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.

City of Quartz

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0712666230
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Book Description
Recounts the story of Los Angeles. He tells a tale of greed, manipulation, power and prejudice that has made Los Angeles one of the most cosmopolitan and most class-divided cities in the United States.

Be Realistic

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608462307
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 46

Book Description
With wit and a remarkable grasp of the political marginalization of the 99%, Mike Davis crafts a striking defense of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This pamphlet brilliantly undertakes the most pressing question facing the struggle– what is to be done next? Mike Davis is the author of more than twenty books.

Ornamentalism

Author: David Cannadine
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195157949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Ornamentalism is a vividly evocative account of a vanished era, a major reassessment of Britain and its imperial past, and a trenchant and disturbing analysis of what it means to be a post-imperial nation today.

Magical Urbanism

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859847718
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams Award. This paperback edition of Mike Davis's investigation into the Latinization of America incorporates the extraordinary findings of the 2000 Census as well as new chapters on the militarization of the Border and violence against immigrants.

Set the Night on Fire

Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 648

Book Description
Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power-where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation-and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of 'Asian America' as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, centre of California counterculture. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos). Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.

Silent Violence

Author: Michael J. Watts
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820344451
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 815

Book Description
Why do famines occur and how have their effects changed through time? Why are those who produce food so often the casualties of famines? Looking at the food crisis that struck the West African Sahel during the 1970s, Michael J. Watts examines the relationships between famine, climate, and political economy. Through a longue durée history and a detailed village study Watts argues that famines are socially produced and that the market is as fickle and incalculable as the weather. Droughts are natural occurrences, matters of climatic change, but famines expose the inner workings of society, politics, and markets. His analysis moves from household and individual farming practices in the face of climatic variability to the incorporation of African peasants into the global circuits of capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Silent Violence powerfully combines a case study of food crises in Africa with an analysis of the way capitalism developed in northern Nigeria and how peasants struggle to maintain rural livelihoods. As the West African Sahel confronts another food crisis and continuing food insecurity for millions of peasants, Silent Violence speaks in a compelling way to contemporary agrarian dynamics, food provisioning systems, and the plight of the African poor.