The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh Tathagata Som (bio) Amitav Ghosh. The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. U of Chicago P, 2021. Pp. 339. US $25 (cloth). Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) is an epic analysis of the historical and metaphysical conditions that have landed the planet in the present crisis of climate change. Although a work of non-fiction divided into nineteen chapters, The Nutmeg's Curse does not lack drama. The central tension in the book is between a worldview, engendered [End Page 160] by European colonialism, that sees nature as well as non-Europeans as inert and mute and an older worldview, still practised by many non-European and Indigenous peoples, that understands nature and all non-humans as imbued with agency and voice. The worldview that mutes nature, Ghosh argues, creates a hierarchy of subjects with European elites and colonists at the top. The title of the book comes from the seventeenth-century conflict between the Dutch East India Company and chiefs of the Banda Islands over the trade of nutmeg. As the Banda Islands were the only producers of nutmeg at the time, the Dutch wanted to establish a monopoly over the trade of the spice. The confrontation ended in the massacre and displacement of the Bandanese population at the command of Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen. In the first three chapters, "A Lamp Falls," "'Burn Everywhere Their Dwellings,'" and "'The Fruits of the Nutmeg Have Died,'" Ghosh sets the central theme of a metaphysical struggle between the European colonists and the colonized. Over the next fifteen chapters, Ghosh analyzes the relationship between the worldview the European colonists propagated about the inertness of the earth and contemporary global issues such as climate change, racism, the European refugee crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In the final chapter, Ghosh returns to the Banda Islands—this time as seen and experienced in person during his 2016 visit. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries' expansion of European colonialism established a metaphysical order that has resulted, Ghosh argues, in the current planetary crisis of climate change. He cites the ongoing denialism of the anthropogenic origin of climate change as a repetition of the historical denial of the role settlers played in the genocide of the Indigenous peoples in colonial societies. Specifically, Ghosh mentions how, apart from direct armed aggression from the European settlers, the Indigenous peoples in North America also suffered from "gradual environmental changes like the disappearance of deer, increased flooding, and the encroachments of livestocks" (165). Because these processes are slow and thus can give the illusion of being impersonal, European elites peddled the myth that they were natural and hence outside human control. The present disavowal of the anthropogenic nature of climate change echoes, in Ghosh's view, the "biopolitical conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (164), when European settlers believed that the Indigenous peoples would eventually become extinct because of supposedly natural processes such as disease and habitat changes. In both cases, Ghosh persuasively argues that the refusal to see the role of humans—especially those with privilege and capital—as engendering the crisis promotes inaction, which becomes a strategy of aggression toward those who are less privileged (167). Thus, the chapter "War by Another Name," in which Ghosh clearly delineates [End Page 161] the way inaction becomes a war strategy for the powerful, is an insightful addition to existing theories of violence and aggression through environmental degradation such as Rob Nixon's oft-cited theory of slow violence. The Nutmeg's Curse also expands on and clarifies points Ghosh makes in his earlier writing, in particular the 2016 non-fiction work The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and his 2019 novel Gun Island. For example, in The Nutmeg's Curse, Ghosh mentions that in Parma, Italy, he interviewed a Bangladeshi refugee who told him about his perilous journey from Bangladesh to Italy (156). Readers familiar with Gun Island will recognize that this interview partly inspired Rafi and Tipu's journey in the novel. Ghosh also furthers a narrative theory that...