The Origin of the Third World

Abstract

What historians have so often dismissed as “climatic accidents” turn out to be not so accidental after all. Although its syncopations are complex and aperiodic, El Nino/Southern Oscillation (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 (Ladurie, 1971:119). 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 (Williams, 1980:67). Indeed, the power of ENSO events 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 Nino, or by El Nino acting on 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. Is it true? Antipode 32:1, 2000, pp. 48–89 ISSN 0066-4812