The roots of planetary peril

The title of the book would lead you to expect a conventional history, like Mark Kurlansky’s Salt and Cod, James Walvin’s Sugar or Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton. These books focus on an agri-commodity to trace a global history. Sugar and Empire of Cotton, for instance, take a hard look at colonial power struggles to control both commodities by institutionalising slavery. Amitav Ghosh puts the nutmeg at the centre of an extended discourse on climate change.

Climate change and the West’s indifference to it have been bothering Mr Ghosh for some years. At the launch of his 2016 book apocalyptically titled