In this ambitious successor to The
Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the
origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism's
violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.
A powerful work of
history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book
traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the
New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg's
Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted
in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western
colonialism. At the center of Ghosh's narrative is the now-ubiquitous
spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and
exploitation--of both human life and the natural environment. In
Ghosh's hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our
environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always
been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane,
opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the
result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only
as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force
of its own, full of agency and meaning.
Writing against the
backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests,
Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our
shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us
today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global
history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist
spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The
Nutmeg's Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and
speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is
shaped by non-human forces.