Amitav Ghosh: In this time of monstrous anomalies, we must recognise that the Earth is judging us

It takes only a glance at a newspaper nowadays to see that much of what we once took for granted is either being cast aside or turned on its head. Indeed, with floods sweeping away entire cities, and the prospect of a nuclear war closer than it has ever been, I couldn’t bring myself to think about what I was going to say today until a couple of weeks ago; such are the uncertainties of our times that I wondered whether it would even be possible to hold this ceremony as scheduled.

On the day that I finally began to write these words, I happened to be at the far eastern end of Indonesia, in the Banda archipelago, which is the ancestral home of the tree that produces both nutmeg and mace. These spices were once immensely valuable, and they made those islands so rich and prosperous that they became a coveted prize for European colonialists and were ultimately conquered by the Dutch East India Company or VOC. In the year 1621, on the orders of the then governor general of the East Indies, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, almost the entire population of the islands was eliminated in the course of a few...

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