Will I love The Nutmeg's Curse?

I love seeing an acclaimed novelist turn to non-fiction to write a book that is both about a distant past and at the same time our present.

Ghosh is able to bring us to faraway places, in this case, literally into the lives of a plant that provides the spice that ends up in our baked goods. After reading this book, I found myself thinking again and again about our interconnected world that arose with global capitalism.

Amitav Ghosh is a fantastic storyteller, and this one is especially hair-raising.

It begins with a gripping narrative about the massacre of the leaders of the people of the Banda Islands by frightened interlopers, officers of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC). The five small Banda islands supplied the world with nutmeg, and the VOC had, it thought, monopolized the trade by requiring that the locals trade only with them as part of a protection racket—but suspicions about smuggling were rife. In the end, a genocide was enacted in order to control the nutmeg trade.

Ghosh draws… show more.

Amitav Ghosh is one of the most original writers on the climate crisis, both in fiction and nonfiction. Here, he takes as his starting point the early seventeenth century Dutch trade in spices from the Banda Islands in what is now Indonesia. He charts how colonialism as an early expression of globalisation ripped apart indigenous vitalistic relations with plants, animals and place, as distant discoveries were pillaged for use as inert ‘resources’.

With a range of such stories, or ‘parables,’ from different places and times, he explores how we have arrived at the dilemmas that each of the books in… show more.

Taking the exploitation of the Nutmeg as a parable for the logic of extraction that precipitated our current planetary crisis, Ghosh’s book draws the direct historical connections that have upended so many worlds and now threatens to do the same to us all.

Climate change becomes the present manifestation of Western colonialism, with its deeply entrenched antipathy to vitalism, animism, and all the living entities that make up this precious home, Earth. Ghosh explains how our very survival depends now on the respect for and inspiration of Indigenous knowledge of ecologies.

His writing is pure with moral clarity and urgency,… show more.

Mr. Ghosh beautifully links the pandemic, a changing climate, immigration, and Black Lives Matter protests.

He opens by telling one history of nutmeg. He tells of colonialism, beginning with fear and murder. He tells of how people lost their home to others’ violence and desire for riches. Murder, colonialism, international markets are all grounded in colonizers’ efforts to dominate the earth. Mr. Ghosh’s heartbreaking book inspired me, encouraging me to believe we must expand what we define as governing a changing climate.

The dominant story of improving changing climate centers on clean energy, our rights to a better environment, and… show more.

Amitav Ghosh is an outstanding novelist who has now written two great books about global environmental change. His previous work, The Great Derangement, looks at the relationship between colonialism, the humanities, and the climate crisis. Now, The Nutmeg’s Curse expands that exploration provides more detail and depth, and covers the historical era of European expansion, paying close attention to how that process irrevocably and dangerously changed how we perceive the natural world. In so doing, Ghosh covers some of the most pertinent issues of contemporary environmental learning—race, equity, diversity, inclusion, and migration.

If you want to gain deeper insight… show more.