Book review: The Nutmeg’s Curse, by Amitav Ghosh

“Do not tell yourself that you already know its contents, because you don’t,” says the Naomi Klein endorsement on the back of The Nutmeg’s Curse, by Amitav Ghosh. It made me smile, because I read a lot of books about climate change and they do tend to fall into a pattern. Man runs the numbers and tells us what we should do; journalist visits a series of vulnerable places, etc. Klein is entirely right about this one. In terms of content and of depth, there’s nothing quite like it.

Ghosh is a novelist first and a climate commentator second. The Great Derangement, which I also reviewed here, bridges the two and reflects on climate fiction – among other things. The Nutmeg’s Curse steps entirely into the climate sphere, and it does so with a rare eloquence and a unique approach.

The book opens with a description of the Banda islands, the Indonesian archipelago where the nutmeg originates. We learn how colonial forces from the Netherlands arrived to trade in spices, seeking monopolies and treaties. When they didn’t get what they wanted they occupied the land, burned the villages and expelled its people, replacing the population with slaves. Then they went to work on the land itself. Each island in the archipelago would specialise in a particular spice, and the ‘wrong’ trees that grew in the forests needed to be cut down.

From the experience of the Banda islands Ghosh unpicks the thinking behind colonialism – the legitimising of conquest, and the desire to control nature. Dipping back into the literature of empire, he shows how indigenous communities were purposefully suppressed, pushed to the margins and sometimes eradicated entirely. Sometimes this was legitimised with theology, claiming that God willed the ascencion of a ‘superior’ race. Evolution provided another tool to misuse, making it natural and inevitable that ‘inferior’ people would give way. They were part of nature, which was there to be used, moulded, “terraformed” to meet our needs.

This era of conquest and settler colonialism set a pattern, a way of seeing the world, that was reinforced in policy and in culture and in institutions. “Much, if not most, of humanity today lives as colonialists once did – viewing the Earth as though it were an inert entity that exists primarily to be exploited and profited from, with the aid of technology and science.”

There are books on climate change that connect climate change and colonialism, but few get under the skin of the issues quite like this. Blending history, literature, politics and ecology, Ghosh reveals a way of thinking about the world that leads to inequality and destruction – eventually self-destruction. Countering this will require a ‘vitalist politics’ of life, spirit, and wisdom, and the book hints at some of the places this might be found, in indigenous understanding of nature, in Black radicalism, in the resistance of Standing Rock.

Along the way, the book looks at the geopolitics of climate change, migration and climate refugees, the connection between fossil fuels and the military, and much else besides. We return frequently to the story of the Banda islands, their destruction and their partial recovery, their story serving as a “parable for a planet in crisis”.

There’s a lot to explore in this rich and beautifully written book, one that starts from a different place from so many Western books on climate change and sees connections that we often avoid. “At the heart of the crisis lie geopolitical problems, and inequities of power, inherited from the era of colonization,” warns Ghosh. “Those issues cannot be wished away.”

• The Nutmeg’s Curse is available from Earthbound Books UK and US