Some leading capitalist families, gentile and Jewish, managed to escape these problems, but the eyes of the angry populace were trained on the Jews rather than the gentiles. The very language of rights in Canada has been strongly influenced by immigrants and their descendants, and the anti-racist movements of the late 20th century. Huge inflation in 1923 and the depression of 1929 increased Germany’s problems. Jews had been the Republic’s strong supporters and a few of them were the architects of its constitution, a fact that Hitler capitalized upon. Winner of the World History Association Book Award Blending global environmental history with political history, this bestselling book explores late-nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Nio weather patterns at that time (Independent) Examining a series of El Nio-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third. The short-lived Weimar Republic could not deliver Germany from the severe economic hardships it experienced after World War I. It also had the same ugly heritage of anti-Jewish sentiment as all Christian Europe. Germany was populated with more Jews than any country in Western Europe when Hitler came to power. Demagogues, however, were only too happy to put the ancient Christian rhetoric of anti-Judaism in its service. It was primarily politically and economically motivated.

From the early 19th century on, however, anti-Jewish sentiment of Catholic and Protestant Europe, itself increasingly secularized, had other roots no less mythical.

But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.ĭavis 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.The antipathies of Poles, Germans, Russians and others against Jews are often explained as if they were religiously based in the patristic and medieval manner. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China and Northeastern Brazil. Winner of the World History Association Book Awardīlending global environmental history with political history, this bestselling book explores “late-nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time” ( Independent)Įxamining 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 sparknotes