The Nutmeg’s

Curse: parables for

a planet in crisis
Amitav Ghosh
 • Jan Coen, a VOC leading a 50-vessel fleet, urged locals to surrender after

1621, Banda accusing them of trading nutmeg and mace with other partners.

islands • VOC Council: “burn everywhere their dwellings”, “take away or destroy
their remaining boats”, “leave the Bandanese no choice but to come to us
or depart from the country”.
 From Banda to
Connecticut
• The tactic employed by the Dutch was the
brandschattingen – burning peasants’
villages to the ground.

• It was also used during the Thirty Years’ War

and later in North America (Connecticut)
against the natives.

• From Banda to Connecticut: massive

capture, enslavement, and extinction of the
local population.
 The intellectual
legitimation
• Francis Bacon despised the “routs and shoals of
people” who “have utterly degenerated from the
laws of nature”.

• Emer de Vattel: “nations are justified in uniting

together as a body with the object of punishing,
and even exterminating, such savage peoples”.

• Raoul Peck: “It’s not education that we lack”...

 The nutmeg: a
curse

“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, a species of
incomparable value, gifted to the islanders
by the region’s volcanic ecology”.
 Limits to traditional
historiography
• Writing the history of Banda islands demands us to move
away from traditional methods of writing history that use
only written documents as sources.

• In such traditional methods, “entities that lack language

figure only as backdrops against which human dramas are
enacted”.

• A new historiography is needed that “accords a degree of

agency to the landscape (…) and all that lies within it,
including the entire range of nonhuman beings”.
 Limits to traditional
historiography
• For Malukans, an island not far from Banda,
“volcanoes are makers of histories as well as
tellers of stories”.

• In Java, “volcanoes are considered connected

to human society to achieve a universal
harmony between society, nature, and the
cosmos”.

• “Features of the landscape speak to people

just as loudly as the human voices”.
 Assignment: telling history through spaces

• Imagine someone is directing a documentary about your

life, but they have no written sources about your
undergraduate years.

• The director comes to Habib and tries to film one special

place on campus that helps them understand your history
at Habib.

• Take a picture of that place and upload it to the Canvas

assignment tab (10 MINUTES ONLY!)
 “Official modernity”
• By admitting the landscape as a key historical actor, we break up
with the modern obsession with disenchanting the world.

• The West disenchanted the world and hated those who still had an
enchanted attachment to it (indigenous, “witches”, etc.).

• The idea of a “dead nature” legitimized colonial conquest (just like

the notion of “virgin land”).

• But modernity was also a subjugation of nonhuman beings: trees,

animals, landscapes, all of which considered mere sources of profit.
 Before the black hole of
Calcutta
• 1623: the British East India Company used the execution of
10 Englishmen by the VOC in Amboyna as a “origin myth of
the empire”.

• The EIC saw this episode as “a narrative of English innocence

and victimhood in which blameless English traders were
subjected to a ‘massacre’”.

• At the same time, the British completely ignored the

massacres of indigenous people.
 The right to terraform

• “Ecological interventions were not just an incidental

effect of European settlement in the Americas. They
were central to the project (…)”

• The settlers claimed native land under the argument

that such lands were savage, wild, vacant, virgin,
because it was not private property.

• The domestic animals they brought – cows and pigs

– increased erosion, destroyed crops, and turned
forests into farmland.
 The present “pregnant
with the past”

• Cattle-raising and soybean plantations are the

main causes of deforestation of the Amazon
rainforest.

• Ailton Krenak: “These fazendeiros (squatter

farmers) want to chase us off the land where our
ancestors lived by claiming that it belongs to
them now! We are surrounded by their barbed
wire and their cattle”.
 Final remarks

• “Now, as humanity faces the possibility

of a future in which living will indeed
have turned into a battle for survival, it is
becoming increasingly clear that
Indigenous understandings of
terraforming were, in fact, far more
sophisticated than those of today’s
techno-futurists”.