Kind of… it’s a small part.

The Great Drought and the Global Famine cast a long shadow on the politics and economy across the tropics. The demographic disruption cast by the famines often lasted for generations: in the Chinese province of Shanxi, for example, it took until 1953 to regain 1875 population levels (Davis 2001). The decimation of agricultural workforces, along with the destruction of local means of production (in northern China starving peasants actually ate their homes, constructed of sorghum stalks), pros- trated traditional Asian and African societies in the face of the colonizing wave of the late nineteenth century. Starvation among the African population facilitated the French colonial expansion in North Africa and the even- tual British defeat of the famine-weakened Zulu Nation in summer 1879 [see Davis (2001) and references therein]. In a very real sense, the El Niño and climate events of 1876–78 helped create the global inequalities that would later be characterized as ‘‘first world’’ and ‘‘third world.

Basically saying that it contributed in part and led to easier colonial expansion and steamrolling by those unaffected by drought and famine famine

The authors go on to actually warn with climate change going the way it’s going, it’s more of a warning that we could be due for another agricultural collapse of sorts.