El Niño, Agricultural Productivity, and Biological Well-Being in Mexico's Long Nineteenth Century

In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis proposes that global capitalism and formal and informal imperialism reduced the ability of peasant communities and countries to deal with climatic variability, more particularly El Niño events. El Niño had disastrous effects in agriculture, raised prices and drove millions to hunger and starvation. Mike Davis presents Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century as a case that fits his overall model. In this paper, I assess Davis' interpretation in more detail from the late colonial period under Spanish domination to the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. Using information on agricultural production and series of adult height, I assess the effect of climatic variability on food supply and biological well-being. While inequality in the access to food was a major force in poor living standards, I find that aggregate food supply per capita explains much of the variation in heights over the long term and that nutritional conditions were more precarious and more exposed to variations in climate by the end of the colonial period than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The different dynamic in both periods presents the case for a nuanced view on the connection between climate, societal adaptations and popular movements.