Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: A reading group

Beginning 6 September, the first Equator Reading Group will be dedicated to exploring critical global history, political ecology, and the legacies of empire through Mike Davis’s landmark work Late Victorian Holocausts. The sessions start at 4pm BST and are fully online, open to all; they will be moderated by Dennis M. Hogan and Gavin Jacobson.

Revisiting Davis’s book is particularly timely given the impending ‘super’ El Niño. Each month, the group will read about 100 pages together and meet in large Zoom sessions to hear from scholars, writers, or thinkers for whom Davis has been a key influence. These guest speakers will not lecture, but be in conversation about their own reading of the text – highlighting key moments, clarifying subtleties, and suggesting questions for further dialogue in advance of a general Q&A and small group discussions. We also encourage members to self-organise in-person or virtual satellite meetups. Video recordings of each session will subsequently be available to registered participants.

This reading group operates on a pay-what-you-can arrangement. Copies of the book can be purchased from the Verso website.

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Readings:
Session 1: 6 September | Part I: The Great Droughts, 1876–1878
Reading: Chapters 1–3
Guests: Mrinalini Sinha, Alexander Zevin, Chinnaiah Jangam
Description: Our opening session introduces the reading group and sets the broad nineteenth-century context for Davis’s study. Focusing on Part I, we examine the devastating wave of global droughts in the late 1870s, paying attention to the intellectual history of British liberal imperialism and its role in shaping colonial policy. Through a deep dive into the Victorian administration in India, we explore how market dogmas and imperial governance transformed extreme climatic events into catastrophic human disasters.

Session 2: 4 October | Part II: El Niño and the New Imperialisms, 1888–1902
Reading: Chapters 4–6
Guests: Rebecca Karl, Esmat Elhalaby, Ernesto Semán
Description: Moving to the turn of the twentieth century, our second session charts the era of "New Imperialism" across much of the same global geography as Part I. We will trace how the consolidation of world markets and colonial rule deepened ecological vulnerability from Asia to Latin America. Crucially, this session highlights the wave of anticolonial resistance and millenarian uprisings that erupted across the global periphery in response – from China’s Boxer Rebellion to insurgencies in Brazil and India – showing how famine and imperial expansion generated new horizons of political struggle.

Session 3: 1 November | Part III: Deciphering ENSO
Reading: Chapters 7–8
Guests: Geoff Mann, Deepti Singh, Sunil Amrith
Description: In Part III, Davis turns to the global climate system itself. This session examines the scientific discovery of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the complex teleconnections that link oceanic currents in the Pacific to monsoon failures across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We will explore how historicising climate science allows us to understand natural climate variability as a planetary force that interacts with human societies and political systems.

Session 4: 6 December | Part IV: The Political Ecology of Famine
Reading: Chapters 9–12
Guests: Richard Seymour, Susanna Hecht, Bruce Robbins, Ericka Beckman
Description: The final reading section of the book presents Davis’s major theoretical synthesis. In this session, we discuss the political economy of famine, colonial enclosure, and market integration to understand how the modern “Third World” was violently constructed in the late nineteenth century. Applying a Marxist political ecology framework, we interrogate how integrating traditional peasant economies into global commodity markets stripped communities of their ecological resilience and manufactured poverty on a global scale.

Session 5: 13 December | Concluding Roundtable
Monsters of Our Own Making: Mike Davis and the Origins of the Modern World
Guests: David Wallace-Wells, Mukul Kumar, Laleh Khalili, Marc Saint-Upéry, Cormac Ó Gráda
Description: Our final session takes the shape of a special concluding roundtable event. We will bring together a panel of guest speakers – including former students of Mike Davis, translators of his books, and major scholars – to reflect on his broader intellectual legacy and synthesise the historical trajectory traced throughout the series. Moving from nineteenth-century imperial famines to twenty-first-century climate emergency, this discussion centers on Davis’s thesis: that the catastrophic "monsters" of modern history are not unpreventable natural disasters, but manufactured outcomes of capital and empire.

Time & Schedule:
All sessions take place on Zoom at 4 PM BST. 

Please note that for sessions 1 and 2, in September and October, BST is one hour ahead of GMT. For sessions 3, 4 and 5 – in November and December – GMT and BST will coincide.

SIGN UP FOR THE READING GROUP: LATE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUSTS