2023-12-22 23:02:53
If humanity is heading towards a world that is three degrees warmer, is nutmeg to blame? Not immediately, but, Amitav Ghosh believes, it can serve as an emblem of an almost cosmic doom. With this book, the globally read and honored novelist and essayist moves deeper than ever into the realm of “non-fiction”. With six hundred notes, a bibliography of almost five hundred titles (which is missing in the German edition as well as an index) and extensive quotations from a wide range of well-selected literature, Ghosh claims to offer more than a horror story and a sermon of repentance. He wants to explain how and why we have ended up in a mess that is even more extensive than accelerating climate change, in an inescapable “planetary crisis” that also includes environmental destruction, mass uprooting, political regression, pandemics, racism and scandalous social and international crises Inequalities include.
What does this have to do with nutmeg? On the Banda Island of Lonthor (now Banda Besar), about two thousand kilometers east of Jakarta (which had been founded two years earlier as the Dutch fortress “Batavia”), European soldiers and colonial agents did the same thing in April 1621 as they had done in other parts of Southeast Asia at the same time and in the two Americas: they dispossessed, expelled, enslaved, tortured and murdered the native population. The conquistador and governor general Jan Pieterszoon Coen ordered such a “final solution” (Ghosh) on the one hand out of paranoid fear of uprisings, and on the other hand in order to be able to use the deserted land for nutmeg plantations, which would be worked by imported slaves. The Banda Archipelago was transformed by “terraforming” – the translator has adopted this English portmanteau unchanged – into the famous “Spice Islands”, one of the sources of Dutch wealth in the Golden Age.
Amitav Ghosh: “The Curse of Nutmeg”. Parable for a planet in turmoil. : Image: Matthes & Seitz
You don’t learn much more about later local developments in the rest of the book. Amitav Ghosh, the accomplished novelist, no longer wants to tell long-form stories, not of centuries of colonial rule in the Dutch East Indies, not of the surviving and refugee Bandanese, not of nutmeg as a global trade commodity, not of the European “subjugation of the world” by Wolfgang Reinhard spoke. Lonthor 1621 serves him as a primal scene of a destructive relationship to the world, which has changed little since then. The events there repeated themselves in a similar way from 1636 to 1638 in the war between English colonists and the Pequot in southern New England and then again and again up to today’s massacres and ethnic cleansing. Lonthor was not the beginning of a continuous historical development. It serves as a “model for the present” to Ghosh across time. The good connoisseur of historical literature has no interest in history, i.e. in nuance and change. That’s why he can suddenly jump between Coen’s soldiery from 1621, in which Japanese mercenaries stood out for their particular brutality, to racist murderers in the USA today. Because in his view the cause of all these terrible acts is the same.
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