Beings Seen and Unseen

Summary

Amitav Ghosh discusses his book ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ and the colonial roots of capitalism. Of Europe’s “ideology of conquest and supremacy”, Ghosh says “it wasn’t the ideas leading to the mastery; rather, it was the mastery leading to the ideas”. Violence against peoples became violence against the Earth. So storytellers inherit a task: “imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans”.

Rationale

Ghosh reverses a causality we could be read as assuming: conquest came first and ideas of supremacy followed. A check on treating separation as a root upstream of power.