Short book review: Amitav Ghosh’s “The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis”

Amitav Ghosh is an accomplished and celebrated Indian writer and a social anthropologist from Calcutta, based in New York City. But it was through his nonfiction work that I first came in contact with him. First, I read his 2016 “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable” in which he discusses how modern literature has not really grappled with the climate crisis. But it was his latest book that made me a fan. Published in 2021, “The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis” is an erudite and yet lyrical and highly accessible work that, in telling the history of the nutmeg, demonstrates how the climate crisis is intrinsically linked to colonialism, imperialism and capitalism: “Capitalism is, and has always been, a war economy, repeatedly rescued from collapse by geopolitical conflagrations. […] capitalism was never endogenous to the West: Europe’s colonial conquests and the mass enslavement of Amerindians and Africans were essential to its formation. […] it was the military and geopolitical dominance of the Western empires that made it possible for small minorities to exercise power over vast multitudes of people: their bodies, their labor, their beliefs, and (not least) their environments” (Ghosh 2021: 119).

Although my brief description above may sound a bit depressing (the book is about the climate crisis, after all), that does not capture the book’s tone and core. In telling the history of the nutmeg, Ghosh upends the orthodoxy that holds up “Western” Enlightenment as opposed to the “backwardness” of “primitive” indigenous peoples. In doing so, he shows that “planetary crisis” in which we live was brought about by 500 years of European-led colonization that views “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” (Ghosh 2021: 257), and the only way out of this predicament is that we hear to “voices like that of Davi Kopenawa, voices that have stubbornly continued to insist, in the face of unrelenting, apocalyptic violence, that nonhumans can, do, and must speak” and that their voices “be restored to our stories” (Ghosh 2021: 257).