00:00Think it takes a world war to starve millions to death.
00:02Wrong.
00:03In 1877, a stretch of seawater did it.
00:07No guns.
00:08No armies.
00:09No declarations of war.
00:11And yet, in just 16 months, it killed 50 million people from India to China to Africa.
00:17It toppled empires.
00:19It redrew the map of the world.
00:21And the most disturbing part.
00:22It was just 3 degrees of heat.
00:253 degrees.
00:26That's all it took.
00:28But here's the thing nobody tells you.
00:30The heat itself didn't kill a single person.
00:33What killed 50 million was what those 3 degrees did to the rain.
00:37Try to picture the Pacific Ocean as a machine.
00:39A machine that's been running for millions of years, faithfully delivering rain to half the planet.
00:44Normally, the trade winds blow from east to west, like a giant hand, pushing warm water to the western side,
00:49toward Asia.
00:50That warm water rises, becomes clouds, becomes rain.
00:54Year after year, it always comes.
00:57It's the monsoon.
00:58The lifeblood of billions.
01:00But in 1877, that hand let go.
01:03The wind stopped.
01:05It even started blowing backward.
01:07The huge pool of warm water, with nothing pushing it, slid right back to the middle of the ocean.
01:12Empty water, in the middle of nowhere.
01:14And here's the key.
01:16Rain follows the warm water.
01:18So the rain that should have fallen on Asian farmland fell into an empty sea instead.
01:22While on land, billions looked up at a sky so blue it hurt.
01:26Not a single drop.
01:27The machine stalled for 16 months.
01:30Two years of monsoon, choked.
01:33Scientists gave it a name, El Nino.
01:34And the 1877 El Nino was the most brutal ever recorded.
01:39The ocean surface warmed by three and a half degrees.
01:42Now, you might think, fine, a super drought, people start.
01:46But it's not that simple.
01:48Because India and China had been dealing with drought for thousands of years.
01:52Dynasties rose and fell.
01:54They'd learned one trick, store grain.
01:57Save it in good years, release it in bad.
01:59So even a terrible drought usually didn't kill millions.
02:03So why this time?
02:04Why did this one kill 50 million?
02:06Because this time, heaven only pulled the trigger.
02:09The bullets, loaded one by one into the chamber, were loaded by men.
02:13Start with India.
02:15When the drought hit, India was actually still producing grain.
02:18It really did have food.
02:19But in those two years when millions were starving,
02:22the British shipped out of India a staggering number, 320,000 tons of wheat.
02:27Shipped where?
02:28Back to Britain.
02:30320,000 tons.
02:32Enough to feed millions of famine victims for an entire year.
02:35Picture that scene.
02:37On the docks of Madras, sack after sack of wheat,
02:40piled into mountains, waiting to be loaded onto ships.
02:43And a few steps away from that wheat, people were collapsing and dying,
02:46one by one, unable to get up again.
02:48Even British officials couldn't stand it.
02:51They said these people were starving to death right in front of full grain warehouses.
02:55And the viceroy of India, a man named Lytton, how did he respond?
02:58He said, we can't stop.
03:01This is the free market.
03:02The government must not interfere.
03:04But it gets worse.
03:06In January 1877, at the height of the famine, this same viceroy threw a week-long grand celebration in Delhi.
03:12For what?
03:13To mark Queen Victoria being crowned Empress of India.
03:17A lavish banquet for 60,000 people, nobles dripping in gold and jewels, feasting for days.
03:22A few hundred kilometers away, people were eating dirt.
03:26Speaking of eating, the ration Britain set for famine victims was called the destitute allowance.
03:31A whole day of heavy labor earned you roughly a handful of grain.
03:34Historians later calculated, that ration delivered fewer calories than the bread ration in a Nazi concentration camp decades later.
03:41You might say, well, that's nature's fault.
03:44But listen to this.
03:45Just three or four years before, the Indian state of Bihar had suffered a famine too.
03:50That time, the British official in charge urgently shipped grain in from Nepal and fought desperately to relieve it.
03:56Almost no one died.
03:57Same British rulers.
03:59Same kind of drought.
04:01One time, nearly no deaths.
04:03The other, millions dead.
04:05So you see, those millions didn't have to die.
04:08This famine in India killed about 8 million people.
04:11That's the equivalent of wiping an entire South Korea off the map.
04:14And on the other side of the planet, something even more nightmarish was unfolding.
04:19A 300-year-old dynasty was marching toward the same end, in its own way.
04:23This is the chapter from our own history they call the Dingwu Great Famine.
04:27Five provinces of North China.
04:29Shangxi.
04:30Henan.
04:32Shangxi.
04:33Jili.
04:34Shandong.
04:35Three years without rain.
04:37Especially Shangxi, where it was catastrophic.
04:40The governor of Shangxi, Zheng Guokuan, wrote to the emperor eight words,
04:44200 years, no such disaster.
04:46A thousand miles of scorched earth.
04:48Millions of refugees.
04:50When the bark was eaten, when the roots were dug up, people began eating a kind of white clay called,
04:55Guanine earth.
04:56It fills the stomach, but it doesn't digest.
04:59It swells inside you, and within days, it kills you, your abdomen splitting open.
05:04And after that came the unthinkable.
05:06In the city of Taiyuan alone, out of a million people, 950,000 died.
05:11Only one in 20 survived.
05:13Three million refugees from Shandong fled northeastward, across the border, in what would become the Great Migration known as Chuangkwondo.
05:20Children were sold, weighed, traded.
05:22And the Qin dynasty, exhausted by decades of civil war, its treasury and granaries emptied, could do almost nothing.
05:29Zheng Guokuan later said a heavy sentence,
05:31This disaster, though called an act of heaven, was truly a disaster of men.
05:35This time, 9 to 13 million lives.
05:38And now, the part that makes my skin crawl the most.
05:41For those empires, a famine that killed millions wasn't a tragedy.
05:45It was an opportunity.
05:47The same 1877, in southern Africa, the drought brought the most powerful African kingdom, the Zulu, to its knees.
05:53The British saw their chance.
05:56Strike while the enemy is weak.
05:58They launched a war and seized the entire region.
06:00And the system of racial segregation they built there, decades later, would harden into the infamous apartheid.
06:06The same script repeated all over the world.
06:09Brazil.
06:10Southeast Asia.
06:11Australia.
06:13The Mediterranean.
06:14Half of Africa.
06:16Wherever drought emptied the granaries, the armies of empire followed, marched right in.
06:21When you add it all up, more than 50 million people dead.
06:24The American historian Mike Davis wrote an entire book about this.
06:27His argument, this was never just a natural disaster.
06:31The thing we call the third world today, that entire belt of poverty and underdevelopment, was in a sense carved
06:36out, branded, by this single global famine.
06:38So let's go back to the question we started with.
06:41Was it really the seawater that killed those 50 million people?
06:44The most chilling truth that 1877 left us is this.
06:48The sea only pulled the trigger.
06:50But the gun, the bullets, and the finger on that trigger, were human, from beginning to end.
06:55The ocean has no good or evil.
06:57It just sits there.
06:59A little warmer, a little colder.
07:01Breathing in, breathing out, for millions of years.
07:04It doesn't care whether the rain falls on a rice field or on an empty sea.
07:08What turned one ordinary shift in weather into the most horrifying catastrophe in human history was never those three degrees.
07:14It was greed.
07:15It was empire.
07:17It was the choice to watch people starve to death beside full warehouses.
07:21And now, one last thing.
07:23Something that might keep you up tonight.
07:25That same ocean.
07:26That same machine.
07:28This year, it's starting to warm again.
07:31Scientists say they're seeing signals in the ocean almost identical to the ones before 1877.
07:36Whether, today, we can see coming in advance.
07:39The real question 1877 left us was never whether the ocean would warm.
07:43It was another question, a question about ourselves.
07:46Because the real monster was never the sea.
07:49It was us.
07:50More than a hundred years have passed.
07:52Do you think we've changed?
07:54Tell me your answer in the comments.
07:56I'll see you in the next one.
