Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Mike Davis (1947-2022) was a Marxist urban and environmental historian and winner of the highly competitive MacArthur Fellowship. He published 20 well-received monographs on topics dealing with the interconnected phenomena of urban development, political ecology, and social inequality. Davis’s working-class roots and activist background imprint his work, which challenges colonialist and capitalist tropes and ideologies.

Davis spent time in the 1960s and 70s doing manual labor and social justice activism before enrolling at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned an undergraduate degree and began a doctorate in history. Davis did not complete the degree, as his dissertation was rejected. The rejected dissertation later became his first book, the bestselling and enormously influential history of Los Angeles City of Quartz (1990). The success of City of Quartz led UCLA to offer Davis an endowed chair, though they soon withdrew the offer because of Davis’s support for striking campus workers. He went on to author Ecology of Fear (1998), a critical study of LA developers and political actors whose choices contribute to environmental disasters such as wildfires, floods, and droughts. Davis became interested in concurrent drought-famines, and their related epidemics of various diseases, while researching and writing Ecology of Fear.