The Nutmeg’s Curse

My 17 highlights

• In this lies a fundamental difference between settler- colonial conflicts and the colonial wars fought by Europeans in Asia and Africa. The wars waged by the British in India, for example, conformed to the usual patterns of Eurasian warfare: soldiers fought each other with human- made weapons, and the wars were usually limited in duration. Settler- colonial conflicts were of a completely different order of warfare. Indigenous peoples faced a state of permanent (or “forever”) war that involved many kinds of other- than- human beings and entities: pathogens, rivers, forests, plants, and animals all played a part in the struggle.

• THE PREVALENCE OF the word “New” in maps of the Americas and Australia points to one of the most important aspects of European expansion: ecological and topographic transformation. It was this aspect of European colonialism that the pioneering ecological historian Alfred Crosby sought to highlight when he coined the term “Neo- Europes” to describe the changes that were wrought upon the flora, fauna, demography, and terrain of Australia and the Americas (and also of islands like the Canaries and New Zealand).13

• Although the Dutch played no part in the Pequot War, the site of the worst massacre— Mystic, Connecticut— lay right upon the border of New Netherland, the Dutch colony that had its seat in New Amsterdam, on the island of Manhattan; the Dutch too had extensive dealings with the Pequot, and competition over trade was one of the factors that precipitated the conflict.

• The model of the logistics city is now increasingly being adopted in North America: workers in major logistics hubs like Oakland and Vancouver also have to go through very extensive (and racially slanted) processes of security screening and are forced to sign away many of their rights. In effect, wherever they exist, logistics cities are “states of exception” outside the normal rule of law. Ironically, many of these cities— like Dubai, Basra, Singapore, and Oakland— are also exceptionally vulnerable to climate change. Modern “logistics cities” may be new in appearance, but they are, of course, directly descended from the slave forts, trading posts, and “company towns” of the Dutch and English East India Companies. They are in fact the very apotheosis of Jan Coen’s dictum: “No war without trade, no trade without war.” In effect, the state of exception that was imposed on the islands of Maluku by European colonists is now slowly spreading across the globe.

• It is surely no coincidence that these are the exact locations that European colonial powers fought over when the Indian Ocean’s most important commodities were cloves, nutmeg, and pepper. The Portuguese understood very early that trade in this region could be controlled by seizing the channels where the veins of the Indian Ocean narrow into pulse points. By the middle of the sixteenth century they had their thumbs poised near all of them, with bases in Hormuz, Malacca, Socotra, the tip of Africa, and also Macau, which overlooks another strategically crucial channel: the entrance to the Pearl River. Portugal’s Asian capital, Goa, was like the center of a spider’s web, connected to every outpost by an invisible filament.

• Girolamo Benzoni, the Italian- born conquistador whose History of the New World was published in 1565, described Indigenous perceptions of Europeans with these words: “They say that we have come to this earth to destroy the world. They say . . . that we devour everything, we consume the earth, we redirect the rivers, we are never quiet, never at rest, but always run here and there, seeking gold and silver, never satisfied, and then we gamble with it, make war, kill each other, rob, swear, never say the truth, and have deprived them of their means of livelihood.”19

• On the Malukan island of Kai, not far from the Bandas, there are a few villages that are, to this day, populated mainly by descendants of the survivors of the genocide of 1621.14 The names of these villages evoke the lost homeland, and their inhabitants still speak turwandan, the Banda language; their songs and stories still bring to life not just the “Banda mountain,” but also its blessing (or curse), the nutmeg.

• Renaming was one of the principal instruments with which colonists erased the prior meanings of conquered landscapes.

• As a turning point of empire [Amboyna] put English innocence at the center of a national fiction that disguised and distorted the violence that was the hallmark of Britain’s own imperial aggression”

• “The building of dams,” writes Dina Gilio- Whitaker, “has historically delivered some of the most devastating blows to Native communities. Flooding caused by dams dislocated entire towns and destroyed fishing sites, contributing to starvation and poverty inflicted by US policies.”25

• THE MATERIAL CHARACTERISTICS of oil make it even more potent than coal in its ability to reinforce structures of power. For the ruling classes, coal had one great drawback, which was that it had to be extracted by large numbers of miners, working in conditions that ensured their radicalization; this was why miners were at the forefront of the world’s labor movements through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Timothy Mitchell has shown, this was one of the reasons why Anglo- American elites decided to engineer a transition from coal to oil as the world’s main source of energy. Unlike coal, the extraction and transportation of oil does not require large numbers of workers.5 It frees capital from local entanglements and allows it to roam the world at will.

• IT WAS PRECISELY because fossil fuels possess the property of reinforcing structures of power that they triumphed over other sources of energy in the nineteenth century.

• In the case of the Pequot, their extinction was made official by the treaty that ended the war: the survivors were forbidden to use the very name “Pequot.”14 Celebrating this triumph, a Puritan historian wrote: “the name of the Pequots (as of Amalech) is blotted out from under heaven, there being not one that is, or (at least) dare call himself a Pequot.”15

• The petrodollar emerged out of the geopolitical turmoil of the postwar years and the strategic struggles of the Cold War. In 1974, a group of Arab nations imposed an oil embargo in retaliation for the US’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. In response President Richard Nixon sent his Treasury Secretary, William Simon, to Saudi Arabia on a vitally important mission. Simon was to offer security guarantees as well as preferential access to American Treasury bonds, in return for which Saudi Arabia would undertake to conduct all its sales of oil in dollars. The mission succeeded, and because of Saudi Arabia’s heft in the global oil market, every other oil- producing nation also had to conduct its sales in dollars from then on. As a result, every country that buys oil must first buy dollars, and this cycle has become one of the foundations of the contemporary American economy.

• Originally a military concept, logistics has now become so central to business practices that it has taken the fusion between trade and war to an entirely new level.

• The emergence in the 1880s of history as an academic discipline put another stamp of approval on the myth, with a string of supposed English martyrdoms being linked back to Amboyna by professional imperial historians.

• “The [steam] engine,” writes Malm, “was a superior medium for extracting surplus wealth from the working class, because, unlike the waterwheel, it could be put virtually anywhere.”4