Violence, Exploitation and Dispossession: The Politics of Plantation in Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse

The Nutmeg's Curse (2021) presents the exploitative mechanism of seventeenth-century Dutch colonialism in the Banda Islands, with nutmeg as the primary focus. Nutmeg, used as a nonhuman actant in the text, moves beyond to symbolise the varied means of resource extraction in the Plantationocene, significantly contributing to the structural development and expansion of capitalism in neocolonial contexts. While the author focuses on the historical and philosophical vectors through which the nutmeg trade fractured the indigenous cultural ecosystems, he under-theorises the socio-ecological dynamics driving this transformation. Drawing upon Marxist ecological scholarship, the paper discusses how colonial strategies of control were systematically implemented to exploit both the inhabitants and the land, with particular attention to the plantation infrastructure that systematises capitalism and its infinite accumulation. It examines how far Ghosh is critical of the colonial capitalist processes of environment-(un)making, aligning effectively through a plantation mechanism that is intrinsically political, causing varied levels of violence, and is associated with the planetary transformations of the Plantationocene present.