The second is the scientific history of the phenomenon that became known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (Enso): the cyclical pattern of extreme weather conditions that created the droughts in the first place. The first is a political history of the droughts and famine that killed millions in the colonial world just as it was being wiped out in western Europe. Late Victorian Holocausts is two great books in one. The famine and its aftermath did the rest. Within two years the French had thrown the Kanaks off 90 per cent of the best land and destroyed the tribal culture.

In a policy developed first in Algeria, the French replaced potentially troublesome local chiefs with pliant placemen loyal to the new regime.

Since the French invasion of 1853 the indigenous Melanesians of the Pacific island of New Caledonia had been driven off the fertile land on the west coast into reserves in the mountainous interior. He maintains that the droughts that struck across Asia, Africa, South America and the Pacific at the end of the nineteenth century were at best exacerbated by the colonial powers and at worst turned into vehicles of extermination by European governments blinded by the yoked ideologies of neo-Darwinism and free-market capitalism. When they sent the head of Atai, I wondered who the real headhunters were as Henri Rochefort had once written to me, 'the Versailles government could give the natives lessons in cannibalism'.'Ītai's simple but dramatic demonstration before the French governor and Michel's more conventional colonial narrative both express the central argument of Mike Davis's book. In her memoirs Michel wrote movingly of the failed rebellion: 'The strength and longing of human hearts was shown once again, but the whites shot down the rebels as we were mowed down in front of Bastion 37 and on the plains of Satory. But Louise Michel, The Red Virgin of Paris, took the Kanak side and even gave half her famous red scarf to two rebel friends.

It is a grim irony that many of those who fought in the war of extermination against the Kanaks were themselves exiles from the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871.

Late victorian holocausts review