The book's main conclusion is that the deaths of 30–60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by the laissez-faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments.

This book explores the impact of colonialism and the introduction of capitalism during the El Niño–Southern Oscillation related famines of 1876–1878, 1896–1897, and 1899–1902, in India, China, Brazil, Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and New Caledonia.

The book's main conclusion is that the deaths of 30–60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by laissez-faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments.

In addition to a preface and a short section on definitions, the book is broken into four parts: The Great Drought, 1876–1878; El Niño and the New Imperialism, 1888–1902; Decyphering ENSO; and The Political Ecology of Famine.

[6] Davis explicitly places his historical reconstruction of these catastrophes in the tradition inaugurated by Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital, where she sought to expose the dependence of the economic mechanisms of capitalist expansion on the infliction of 'permanent violence' on the South.

In addition to incessant proxy warfare with Russia on the Afghan frontier, the subcontinent's masses also subsidized such far-flung adventures of the Indian Army as the occupation of Egypt, the invasion of Ethiopia, and the conquest of the Sudan.