“Mike was not that big on prioritizing his self-interest, and that was the great thing about him,” says Kenneth Pomeranz, renowned historian of the modern world economy and former colleague of Mike Davis at the University of California, Irvine. Now at the University of Chicago, Pomeranz was chair of the history department at UC Irvine in 2001, and led the successful recruitment of Davis away from Stony Brook University. In addition to City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, Pomeranz had read the recently completed manuscript of Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, to be published later in 2001.

I recently asked Pomeranz by phone about the influence and research style of Late Victorian Holocausts. Part of what made the book special, Pomeranz says, was Davis’s ability to look at and synthesize knowledge about multiple domains — colonialism, climate, and capitalism; Chinese, Brazilian, and Indian history — “to see things that you can’t normally see if you are seeking a complete description of every last detail.”

One thing Davis (who died in October) was able to see in Holocausts was the interplay of state violence and state neglect in creating colonial markets and infrastructures that, combined with El Niño patterns, enabled multiple famines throughout the Global South. Davis shows that while state violence is key to the enclosure and robbery of land, state indifference also accompanies the privatization of the commons — indifference to ecological devastation and to indigenous forms of planning and famine prevention.