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NY Times, Jan. 1 2017
What Nutmeg Can Tell Us About Nafta
By AMITAV GHOSH
GOA, India — For many years the word “globalization” was used as
shorthand for a promised utopia of free trade powered by the world’s
great centers of technological and financial innovation. But the
celebratory note has worn thin. The word is now increasingly invoked to
explain a widespread recoiling from a cosmopolitan earth. People in many
countries are looking nostalgically backward, toward less connected,
supposedly more secure times.
But did such an era ever exist? Was there ever an unglobalized world?
The question struck me during the final hours of the American election,
when I happened to be traveling by ferry in the Maluku archipelago of
Indonesia. Once known as the Moluccas, this corner of the world is
considered remote even within Indonesia. Two time zones removed from
Jakarta, it straddles one of the most seismically volatile zones on
earth; many of its islands are active volcanoes rising steeply out of
the sea. In size they range from small to minuscule. Surely if ever
there were a global periphery, it would be here.
Yet for millenniums these islands have been at the forefront of global
history. This is because their volcanic soils have nurtured two
miraculous trees, which grew nowhere else on earth: One is Syzygium
aromaticum, which produces the clove, and the other is Myristica
fragrans, of which nutmeg is the seed and mace the seed’s lacy outer
covering.
For thousands of years these spices were among the world’s most
sought-after commodities, making the sultans of the “Spice Islands”
famously wealthy. Cloves from around 1700 B.C. have been found at the
site of a settlement in Tell Ashara, Syria. To get there, they would
have had to travel more than 6,000 miles, through the ports of the
Indian Ocean and overland through Mesopotamia. At every stop, their
price would have multiplied hugely. In Renaissance Europe, the value of
some spices was thousands of times more than at their point of origin
The Republic of Venice possessed a virtual monopoly on the spice market
in the Mediterranean for centuries. Although pepper and ginger, mainly
from India, accounted for the bulk of the cargo, cloves, nutmeg and mace
from the Moluccas commanded much higher prices by weight.
It was in hopes of bypassing Venice and the Middle East that the
monarchs of Spain and Portugal funded the great voyages of the age of
discovery. The Portuguese mariners who pioneered the sea route to the
Indian Ocean brought with them not just their religion but also the
prevalent European faith in monopolies. This notion was alien to the
trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, where the rulers of the major
ports had always vied with one another to attract as great a variety of
merchants as possible. The Portuguese, and the Spanish, Dutch and
English who followed them, were unheeding of these traditions: They
never veered from their quest for monopolies, especially amid the
vulnerable islands of the Moluccas.
A murderous, decades-long struggle ensued in which the competing
European powers were pitted against one another, as well as the people
of the Moluccas. In the process the English gained their first Asian
possession, a pair of tiny islands, Ai and Run, part of a Moluccan chain
called the Bandas.
In the end it was the Dutch who won, but at the cost of atrocities that
included an attempted genocide. In 1621, on the orders of the Dutch East
India Company’s governor general, some 14,000 of the Banda Islands’
estimated 15,000 inhabitants were slaughtered or taken into slavery. Two
years later, officials of the Dutch East India Company beheaded 10
Englishmen and a number of others in a mass execution that is known
known as the Massacre of Amboyna.
Although the bloodshed sealed the Dutch hold on the East Indies, the
British did not relinquish their claim to the island of Run until
several decades later. So eager were the Dutch to get them out of the
Moluccas that in 1667 they agreed to an exchange in which the English
gave up their claim on Run in return for the recognition of their right
to territories that included another island on the far side of the
planet — Manhattan.
This connection may be forgotten in New York, but it is remembered by
many in Run, which is today a sleepy, sunbaked island with a population
of a few hundred. “Donald Trump made his money in Manhattan, didn’t he?”
an Indonesian friend joked when we visited the island, the day before
the election. “If he wins maybe he will build a tower in Run, to say
thank you for Manhattan.”
For many decades, Run, and the other spice-growing islands of the
Moluccas, provided the Dutch East India Company with huge and easy
profits. But then, as European tastes changed, the price of spices began
to fall. Drastic measures, like the uprooting of millions of trees and
the destruction of warehoused supplies, failed to prevent the company’s
collapse in the late 18th century.
By the mid-19th century, clove and nutmeg trees were being grown far
beyond their original habitat, and the long history of the Spice
Islands, as creators of great wealth, had come to an end.
The obvious lesson of this history is that it is impossible to imagine a
world without global connections: They have always existed, and no place
has escaped their formative influence. But this does not mean that there
is any inherent merit in interconnectedness, which has always been
accompanied by violence, deepening inequalities and the large-scale
destruction of communities. Nor should proponents of unfettered
globalization forget that in the 19th century “free trade” was invoked
by Britain and other Western powers to prevent China from stopping the
inflow of opium into the country, where it was causing widespread addiction.
These aspects of globalization are often overlooked because the advocacy
of interconnectedness has come to be equated with tolerance, while the
resistance to it is identified with prejudice. But neither
cosmopolitanism nor parochialism is a virtue in itself. We need to ask:
cosmopolitanism in the service of what? Protectionism to what end?
The story of the Spice Islands holds another alarming portent. In a
clove garden on the island of Ternate, I found that most of the trees
were leafless, their trunks the color of ash. I was told that clove
trees are dying all over the island, and the farmers cited the same
cause: The trees had been affected by changes in rainfall patterns over
the last several years. There was less rain, and it fell more
erratically. This, in turn, had led to the spread of blights and
disease. The island has also experienced forest fires of unprecedented
intensity.
If these changes continue, the clove, one of the earliest of
commodities, could be endangered in its ancestral home by greenhouse gas
emissions caused precisely by humanity’s ever-expanding appetite for
commodities.
Only in this one respect are we truly in a new era of interconnectedness.
Amitav Ghosh is the author, most recently, of “The Great Derangement:
Climate Change and the Unthinkable.”
--
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