Archive of Mike Davis
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Buda’s Wagon: The Gates of Hell
Mike Davis’ writing on history and the city has been celebrated across the world. To mark the significance of his work, we're re-releasing his classic works in these beautiful new editions and we have 40% off all his writing until Jan 22.
Here we present an extract from Buda’s Wagon, Davis' brilliant and disturbing 100-year history of the “poor man’s air force,” the ubiquitous weapon of urban mass destruction
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Late Victorian Holocausts: The Origins of the Third World
Mike Davis’ writing on history and the city has been celebrated across the world. To mark the significance of his work, we're re-releasing his classic works in these beautiful new editions and we have 40% off all his writing until Jan 22.
Here we present an extract from Late Victorian Holocausts, Davis' magisterial melding of global ecological and political history, disclosing the nineteenth-century roots of underdevelopment in what became the Third World.What historians ... have so often dismissed as “climatic accidents” turn out to be not so accidental after all. Although its syncopations are complex and quasi-periodic, ENSO [El Niño-Southern Oscillation] 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. 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. The power of ENSO events indeed 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 Niño, or by El Niño acting upon 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. Was this true?
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Planet of Slums: Illusions of Self-Help
Mike Davis’ writing on history and the city has been celebrated across the world. To mark the significance of his work, we're re-releasing his classic works in these beautiful new editions and we have 40% off all his writing until Jan 22.
Here we present an extract from Planet of Slums, Davis' best-selling account of the rise of the world’s slums, where, according to the United Nations, one billion people now live.It would be foolish to pass from one distortion – that the slums are places of crime, disease and despair – to the opposite: that they can be safely left to look after themselves. - Jeremy Seabrook
As Third World governments abdicated the battle against the slum in the 1970s, the Bretton Woods institutions – with the IMF as “bad cop” and the World Bank as “good cop” – assumed increasingly commanding roles in setting the parameters of urban housing policy. Lending for urban development by the World Bank increased from a mere 10 million dollars in 1972 to more than 2 billion dollars in 1988. And between 1972 and 1990 the Bank helped finance a total of 116 sites-and-services and/or slum-upgrading schemes in 55 nations. In terms of need, of course, this was a mere drop in the bucket, but it gave the Bank tremendous leverage over national urban policies, as well as direct patronage relationships to local slum communities and NGOs; it also allowed the Bank to impose its own theories as worldwide urban policy orthodoxy.
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Not a Revolution – Yet
We should resist the temptation to over-interpret Trump’s election as an American Eighteenth Brumaire or 1933. Progressives who think they’ve woken up in another country should calm down, take a stiff draught, and reflect on the actual election results from the swing states.
Data, of course, is incomplete. The leading exit polls, like Pew and Edison, are hardly flawless in their harvesting of opinion and the final word on the turnout and its composition must await the Current Population Survey’s reports over the next year or two. Nonetheless, the county-level returns authorize some pertinent observations. -
The Undead
This post first appeared on The Rag Blog.
I finally think I’ve understood why we’re so obsessed with zombies.
The discarded shroud, the rustling in the weeds, the vaporous apparitions seen from Pocatello to Lake Wobegone, the ghost army of admirers… we were forewarned that he was back but failed to pay attention.On Halloween eve the “New” Nixon Library launched an expensive newspaper advertising campaign, inviting us to “discover how Richard Nixon’s legacy continues to shape our world.” He was the hero, the ads claim, who “protected the environment… desegregated schools, ended the Vietnam War.” “Buy tickets now,” the Library urges.