In 2000, the historian Mike Davis published a book that made what was to some a controversial claim: the horrors of the twentieth century had precedents in the era of colonial plunder. In Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, Davis explained the scale of what he understood to be the manmade famines that swept through much of the Global South in the nineteenth century. He was far from the first, or the only, writer to make this comparison.

For “most people outside the West . . . the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity,” noted Pankaj Mishra in a London Review of Books lecture. Here’s how French resistance fighter and poet Simone Weil put it in 1943: “Hitlerism consists in the application . . . [of] . . . colonial methods of conquest and domination” to Europeans — the very same “evil, which Germany has tried . . . to inflict upon us, we have inflicted upon others.” Colonized populations had seen such colossal cruelty from Europeans for centuries. The Nazis’ main opponents, the British Empire, had also been in the business (as we’ll see the term business is apt) of mass extermination and ethnic cleansing.

Commendably, David Wallace-Wells recently sought to address this holocaust-hiding historical memory hole. In his New York Times newsletter, he wrote about Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts and linked his arguments to next year’s likely El Niño, a climate event that warms the ocean’s surface temperature along the central and eastern pacific and occurs every two to seven years.