Have you ever considered the role of a single nutmeg in the contemporary climate crisis?
Amitav Ghosh does in his newest work of non-fiction The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) where he traces the dynamics of climate change today back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. While colonial conquest ultimately brought prosperity to Western nations, it brought violent exploitation and devastation to nations in the Global South, once rich in highly desirable natural resources, like the nutmeg, tea, and sugarcane.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Kolkata and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He is the author of ten novels—from historical fiction to magical realism and eco-literature—and ten works of non-fiction, including collections of essays and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).
Ghosh holds four Lifetime Achievement awards and six honorary doctorates. In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors, by the President of India and in 2018, the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. In 2024, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize and was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ghosh delivered a powerful lecture on the “parables” of his new book, reorienting how we think about climate change—and how we tell the story of climate change and its impacts—in Dublin, Ireland, on December 1, 2024, at a Notre Dame Forum event, co-sponsored by Notre Dame Dublin and Field Day.
"Ghosh is one of the few intellectuals who shirks neither brute, material facts nor the flicker of deeper, immaterial truths," said Professor Barry McCrea after the event. "His lecture was at once a fearless, clear-sighted detailing of the terrible challenges that face us, and a visionary glimpse into what lies beyond and beneath them." McCrea is the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies and Concurrent Professor of English, Irish Language & Literature, and Romance Languages & Literatures at the University of Notre Dame.
“In the 15th and 16th centuries, a handful of nutmegs could buy a house or a ship in Amsterdam or Lisbon.”
Ghosh began the lecture recounting the history of the Banda Islands, a tiny archipelago in the Indian Ocean that was the sole source of nutmeg and mace for centuries. In the 16th and 17th centuries, spices were considered luxury items—symbols of affluence for the upper classes—and could be resold at an enormous markup in medieval Europe.
The increasing appetite for nutmeg and the potential for huge profits brought the Portuguese first to the shores of the Banda Islands in 1511. Over the next century, the Bandanese people were colonized and their land extracted of natural resources. Though few in numbers, the people put up resistance to Westerners, until a brutal massacre by the Dutch in 1621 that nearly wiped out the native population. Only a few hundred Bandanese escaped to a nearby island, where they preserve the culture of the Bandas to this present day.
The tragedy of the Banda Islands exemplifies the “resource curse,” where natural riches bring exploitation and devastation rather than prosperity.
To Ghosh, the story of the nutmeg and the Bandanese acts as a parable for global colonial history and the commodification of nature. European colonialism reoriented the place of humans in the natural world, purporting a mechanistic vision that reduced nature—and people—to resources for exploitation. This perspective silenced non-human and indigenous voices, ignoring their complex relationships within our environment.
In Ghosh’s writing, fiction and nonfiction alike, botanical matter is not inanimate but sentient, and can have great power over and influence on human life—like oil and natural gas, fossilized botanical matter, does today.
“The horror of the story of the Bandanese lies in no small part in the fact that the narrative of their elimination from their land revolves around a tree,” Ghosh says.
Through The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh challenges the assumption that storytelling and meaning-making are uniquely human traits, pointing out that indigenous peoples often see trees, animals, and geological features as active participants in history. He argues for a more inclusive understanding of narrative to recognize the agency of non-human entities.
“Storytelling, far from setting humans apart from animals, is actually the most important residue of our formerly wild selves.”
Ghosh’s “How Should We Think About Climate Change?” lecture was co-hosted by Field Day, a home for creative and critical discourse in Ireland through publishing, talks, and theatre.
Field Day was born out of the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980, an artistic collaboration between actor Stephen Rea and playwright Brian Friel in response to The Troubles in Northern Ireland. With the addition of writer and academic Seamus Deane—the inaugural Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies in the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies—Field Day became an intellectual space, in addition to a creative space, where scholars sought to question the paradigm of Irish history and literature and, in so doing, contribute to the international debates in postcolonial theory and various strands of cultural history.
“Ireland is where the British created all their colonial methods, it’s where they tried it out first,” said Ghosh, speaking to the Irish Times ahead of his lectures in Ireland.
In Stephen Rea’s introduction, he drew parallels between Ghosh’s writing on Western colonization of the Global South and Ireland’s own colonial history, the island’s ecological destruction by English colonial powers, and the current global environmental crises. Rea argued that Ireland, with its history of exploitation and hardship, has a moral duty to lead on climate advocacy.
“The issues we began to explore in Brian Friel’s Translations—territory, belonging, language, and dispossession through renaming—are still current around the world for indigenous peoples,” Rea said, connecting Ghosh’s philosophy to the work of Field Day. “Amitav has made a singular contribution to our understanding of the ways in which issues such as climate justice are closely bound up with our histories of colonialism.”
Originally published by at dublin.nd.edu on December 18, 2024.