In the last quarter of the Victorian era, epic drought repeatedly devastated agriculture throughout the tropics as well as in northern China. More than fifty million poor rural people perished in ensuing famines and epidemics. Once-verdant countrysides were turned into howling deserts, and mortality in some parts of Ethiopia, China and Brazil was comparable to the effect of a nuclear holocaust. Although this was the greatest human tragedy since the Black Death, its global history -- and lasting impacts on world economic development -- are now analysed for the first time.

Mike Davis recounts the gripping scientific detective story -- the hundred-year quest for the "mystery of the monsoons" -- that has led contemporary researchers to find the fingerprints of "El Nino/Southern Oscillation" all over the catastrophic crop failures of the 1870s and 1890s. Yet nature alone is rarely so deadly. El Nino's murderous accomplices, as Davis shows in meticulous case-studies, were the Gold Standard and the New Imperialism. The lineaments of a future "third world" -- the irreparable division of humanity into haves and have-nots -- was decisively shaped by fatal interactions between world climate and world economy that occurred in the twilight of the nineteenth century.