Liz @ Adventures in reading, running and working from home is hosting Week 3 of Nonfiction November. The topic is book pairings:

“This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. You can be as creative as you like!”

I’ve read so little fiction this year I thought this one would be hard to write. Fortunately, two books I read in the last month fit the bill quite nicely. They are Babel: An Arcane History and The Nutmeg’s Curse. They’re very different but they’re connected by a common subject: colonialism.

Babel: An Arcane History

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence:
An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution
By R. F. Kuang
Harper Voyager, New York, 2022

Babel, by R. F. Kuang, is a historical fantasy set in the 1830’s in Victorian England. The main character, Robin Swift, is an orphan plucked from the slums of plague-infested Canton and sent to the prestigious Royal Institute of Translation at the University of Oxford, commonly known as Babel.

He quickly learns that translation isn’t simply an academic or cultural discipline. It’s a source of power – a magical power that comes from capturing what is lost in translation, the subtle differences in meaning when words are translated from one language into another. At Babel, Robin learns how to manifest this power through silver-working, engraving word pairs – a word and its translation — onto silver bars.

He also learns that these silver bars are the source of power for the British Empire, ensuring its continued dominance of the world.

I enjoyed Babel immensely. The book is incredibly well researched and tackles a broad set of issues including language and identity, colonialism, capitalism, the nature of power and the necessity of violence. Kuang does this in a way that’s neither dull nor lecturing; these themes are important to the plot. They also made me think. Especially about violence.

The question at the heart of the book is this: can societies be reformed from within, or must change be forced through violence?

The Nutmeg’s Curse

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis
By Amitav Ghosh
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021

The Nutmeg’s Curse, by award-winning novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh, starts with violence — the violence of colonial conquest.

The main idea of The Nutmeg’s Curse is that the origins of today’s climate crisis can be traced back to the beliefs, structures and methods of European colonialism.

The book opens with the harrowing story of how the Dutch East India Company committed genocide against the people of the Banda Islands in the early 1600’s in order to secure a monopoly on the world’s only source of nutmeg.

Ghosh draws the link from colonialism to the climate crisis through a series of connected essays that show how colonial powers viewed the Earth as just a repository of resources waiting to be extracted and exploited. They systematically “terraformed” conquered territories into “neo-Europes” by replicating patterns of land enclosure, plantations, driving away and killing off native game species and exterminating Indigenous peoples.

Ghosh points to Indigenous ways of relating to nature – seeing the world as alive and vital and interconnected – as an alternative approach.

Large parts of this book were uncomfortable reading, both because the events Ghosh describes are horrific and because they forced me, a white person living in a colonized country, to confront some of my own ignorance of history. 

Ghosh isn’t the first author I’ve read to call for a dramatic change in how we relate to the natural world but The Nutmeg’s Curse is one of the few books that approaches this from an historical perspective and points to possible alternatives.   

Thanks for reading.