Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 1850&1501945 [Hardcover]

Policymakers and scholars have come to realize that getting food, water, and services to the millions who live in the world’s few dozen megacities is one of the twenty-first century’s most formidable challenges. As these populations continue to grow, apocalyptic scenarios—sprawling slums plagued by hunger, disease, and social disarray—become increasingly plausible. InFeeding Manila in Peace and War,1850–1945, Daniel F. Doeppers traces nearly a century in the life of Manila, one of the world’s largest cities, to show how it grew and what sustained it.
            Doeppers follows key commodities for the city—rice, produce, fish, fowl, meat, milk, flour, coffee—and their complex interconnections. In the process he considers the changing ecology of the surrounding region as well as the social fabric that weaves together farmers, merchants, transporters, storekeepers, and door-to-door vendors.

The first book to explore the critical problem of provisioning the “megacity.” A historical study of Manila looks at the continuing challenges of getting food, water, and services to the millions of people who live in the world’s megacities.

“After forty years’ research in the streets of Manila and archives on three continents, Doeppers has produced a landmark study in the fields of urban history and human geography. Empirically, this book is the first to chart Manila’s rise from a small port to a nascent metropolis, spinning a narrative that ends tragically midst the mass starvation and fiery destruction of World War II. Theoretically,Feeding Manilaoffers a path-breaking analysis of the urban-rural linkages that sustained this rapid urbanization over the span of a century, illuminating a problem increasingly critical in a world of hungry megacities. Methodologically, Doeppers deftly merges a mlÊ