Amitav Ghosh and Rosie Boycott on The Nutmeg's Curse
Amitav Ghosh and Rosie Boycott discuss his ground breaking new book The Nutmeg's Curse.
In 1621, Dutch East India Soldiers went on a genocidal rampage in The Banda islands, a tiny archipelago which produced the world’s entire supply of valuable nutmeg. In the fate of these islanders - massacred for a tree – Amitav Ghosh sees that moment when man began ‘muting and subduing the earth’. It was nothing less than the origin of our contemporary climate crisis. Tracing the current threats to our future to this moment, the best-selling author of The Ibis Trilogy and other novels, argues that the dynamics of climate change are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism.
The story of the nutmeg becomes a parable revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials – spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, Ghosh 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.
