<nettime> The Colonial Roots of Present Crises. Interview with Amitav Ghosh

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

The Colonial Roots of Present Crises.
19 OCTOBER 2022

Looking around at the energy crisis, the drift to the extreme right and 
the mounting climate disasters that the world is facing, the common 
thread of colonial exploitation may not be obvious. On the sidelines of 
the Ecopolis festival, we spoke to acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh who 
offered a historical perspective on world events from the Pakistan 
floods to the war in Ukraine and the challenges ahead for green and 
progressive forces.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-colonial-roots-of-present-crises/

Green European Journal: This August, Pakistan was hit with floods that 
left 50 million people displaced and which killed over 1500 people. It 
will take months for the water to recede. As a south Asian writer who 
has written intensively on climate impacts on the region, what is your 
perspective on the floods and the global response?

Amitav Ghosh: Catastrophes in the Global South barely seem to register, 
but this time it was clear that people were paying attention. Maybe it’s 
the scale of the catastrophe but it did seem to make an impact on people 
around the world. Is it enough? No, I don’t suppose it is. Considering 
the scale of the catastrophe, it should have been front-page news 
everywhere.

This was a disaster foretold because there were major precursors to this 
flood, in 2010 and 2012. After Antarctica, Pakistan has the most 
glaciers – over 700. Himalayan glaciers are melting at an incredible 
pace. We’ve also seen the same problem with terrifying glacier lake 
outbursts flooding villages in India.

Pakistan is singularly ill-adapted to coping with a flood like this. 
Whenever we see these climate catastrophes – and it’s true as much of 
the Global North as it is Global South – these events are hugely 
worsened by historic interventions in the landscape. One of the reasons 
why so many people were displaced in these floods is because, going back 
to colonial times, many nomads who moved with the rhythms of the river 
were forced to settle by river banks. To colonial and modern 
developmental regimes, nomadism of any kind is very offensive. They want 
people to be stable and settled. The areas where these communities 
settled had a very strange land tenure system because the British gave 
out huge chunks of land to Punjabi aristocrats to maintain their support.

It is another example of how historical anthropogenic interventions are 
greatly worsening climate disasters. Many Pakistani spokespeople have 
been calling for reparations and the floods have amplified the calls for 
loss and damages, but let’s see what comes from it.

Green European Journal: In The Nutmeg’s Curse, you use the sci-fi term 
terraforming to describe how empire transformed the world’s terrain. Is 
the degree to colonialism transformed the land and how land is lived and 
organised undervalued?

Amitav Ghosh: Absolutely. The most terraformed part of India is the 
Punjab, where the British built many canals and distributed enormous 
quantities of land. Why? Because they wanted to maintain the support of 
their Punjabi soldiers, the mercenaries on who they depended after the 
great Indian uprising against colonial rule in 1857.

This intensive terraforming was worsened through the interventions of 
the Green Revolution, especially on the Indian side. Now a silent 
catastrophe is unfolding in this part of north India. Since the 1950s, 
farmers have been pumping up fossil water with subsidised electricity. 
Today the aquifer is completely exhausted and the traditional forms of 
irrigation used before the British canals have been neglected. 
Agriculture will soon become impossible within this region

Green European Journal: Mike Davies’s Late Victorian Holocausts 
describes how British imperialism destroyed all the mechanisms and 
institutions that had long existed in south Asia for famine control and 
water management.

Amitav Ghosh: Indeed. They were destroyed in the service of the ideology 
of free trade. In the past, Indian kings and emperors would prepare for 
and respond to famines with massive state interventions: distributing 
food, storing supplies, and so on. The British, literally while famines 
were unfolding, would refuse to do anything that would interfere with 
the laws of free trade. Charities were prevented from intervening, just 
as we see now in America where people are banned from distributing food 
to the homeless.

Green European Journal: As we speak, Europe is going through a deep 
energy crisis as the resources that it depends on the rest of the world 
for are no longer easily available because of war and sanctions and 
because other countries want them too. Are the legacies of colonialism 
and extraction backfiring on Western countries?

Amitav Ghosh: The more I look at the world, I see colonial practices 
which were previously inflicted upon populations in the colonised world 
deployed in the home countries. For example, the present British 
government is again subsidising the fossil fuel companies, while making 
people bear the costs of the energy hike. In the United States, there is 
an uncanny similarity between the opioid epidemic and what Britain and 
the United States did to China in the 19th century. The Big Pharma 
companies that began to target vulnerable populations in mining and 
industrial regions are engaging in the same predatory practices as the 
old colonial elites. It is the same logic that deems some people 
disposable. These same populations will bear the burden of climate 
change too. Who will pay for the people displaced by the catastrophic 
flooding in Le Marche this September? It was hardly mentioned in the 
Italian elections.

In Europe, I see an intensifying rage against the political class. We’ve 
already seen it in France a few years ago with the gilets jaunes 
movement. By the end of this winter, I think you’re going to see popular 
uprisings of various kinds across Europe. Sadly, I think they will 
manifest themselves in ways which feed the radical right.

Green European Journal: The radical right were the main winners in both 
the Swedish and the Italian elections. We’re clearly living through a 
period of crises and uncertainty, but can we draw a connection between 
the environmental crisis itself and the anger that these parties draw upon?

Amitav Ghosh: Absolutely. One of the things that’s striking when you 
look around the world right now is that even with 1.3 degrees of 
warming, we see incredible disruption. Not just in physical or economic 
systems but in political ones too.

Britain has presented itself as a bastion of stability for centuries. 
Who would have thought that Brexit would initiate a profound 
destabilisation of the country in the space of four or five years? What 
prompted Brexit? Migration, and there’s a clear and accelerating 
connection between migration and climate change. Demographically 
speaking, there may not have been a vast number of migrants going to 
Britain, but it was enough to create a kind of fundamental instability. 
So much so that many of the decisions taken by large numbers of British 
people seem inexplicable. You just can’t place them within a normal 
framework of politics.

The danger of technocracy is that you cannot tap into the general 
discontent with the political class because you are completely 
identified with the political class.

This instability is going to intensify, and it will empower the Right. 
The Left – and here I’m also talking about the Greens – made the 
decision some time ago to move towards a technocratic centre. They 
started doing all this wonkery and addressing policy to establish their 
credentials as serious politicians and administrators. Of course, it’s 
necessary to be serious about administration and governance. But the 
problem appears when you leave out the political impulse. The danger of 
technocracy is that you cannot tap into the general discontent with the 
political class because you are completely identified with the political 
class.

The Right, on the other hand, has been viscerally political. They create 
symbols and run a nonstop outrage machine enabled by social media. But 
the Left seems to lack imagination and is unable to tap into the energy 
of young climate activists. Are you going to try to persuade people that 
your wonkery is going to solve these issues? Everyone can look around 
and see that it’s not.

Green European Journal: Green politics can trace its roots back to the 
countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Do you think that they 
might have swung too far from idealism to pragmatism?

Amitav Ghosh: The movements of the 1960s and ‘70s were trying to address 
the industrial rat race which has built an industrial doom machine. Many 
of these concerns were present in the imagination of the counterculture. 
Allen Ginsberg, for example, one of the great godfathers of the hippy 
movement, was talking about climate change back in the ‘70s. But over 
time, Green parties put on their suits and ties and washed their hands 
of the counterculture.

Looking back now, it does seem to have been a mistake because they’re 
not able to tap into the energy of the young. I was travelling in Italy 
recently and Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future are very strong 
there. Young people turn out in huge numbers, but it does not generate 
the political clout that it should. The ground for visceral, 
anti-establishment, politics has been seized by the Right. It’s such an 
irony because what the Right is doing, and not just in Italy but 
everywhere – Britain, the US – is using populism to hand everything over 
to the big corporations and billionaires.

Green European Journal: In The Nutmeg’s Curse, you call for a more 
“vitalist politics” that recognises the value of all life on Earth and 
that stands in contrast to an economistic way of looking at the world. 
In North America and other parts of the world, there are indigenous 
cultures that bring different views of life and being and so on. But 
most European societies are highly urbanised and industrial if not 
post-industrial. Isn’t it much harder to create a vitalist politics when 
its basis, which may have existed for example in peasant traditions, has 
been lost?

Amitav Ghosh: It is true that in Europe there is a complete cleavage 
between the lives people lead and the lives that were tied to the soil 
even a generation ago. You see that most clearly in France. The European 
Union has also encouraged this divorce by pursuing an agricultural 
policy based on the centralisation and industrialisation of agriculture. 
Incentives were created for farmers to take up industrial agriculture, 
even though it is highly unsustainable as we see in the nitrogen crisis 
in the Netherlands. Small farmers who literally eke out a marginal 
living have no option but to carry on down the path of industrial 
agriculture.

There has been this massive fracturing and people can see that things 
have gone radically wrong in Europe and the wider West. There is a 
resurgence of earth-centred religions and beliefs. A counterculture does 
exist, it just hasn’t achieved critical mass yet. In a time of instant 
communication, it could happen very quickly and take us all by surprise.

Green European Journal: Greta Thunberg’s strikes rippled around the 
world in a matter of weeks and months so there is the potential…

Amitav Ghosh: Whether it will happen one can’t say, but I think it 
certainly could. So far, it almost seems history is conspiring against 
us. The climate movement was gathering momentum throughout 2019 and it 
crested in 2020. Then, the pandemic intervened and forced everybody to 
get back into their isolated little corners. Collective movements became 
impossible and people were forced to retreat into their interior spaces. 
I think that will be considered a real historical catastrophe. It also 
teaches us that so much of history is actually just accidental or 
contingent. Who knows where the movement could have gone?

An even greater catastrophe is the Ukraine war. Not only has it taken 
away all attention from the climate crisis, but it’s also given the 
fossil fuel industries a new lease of life. In every way, it seems like 
every faltering step we take forward leads to ten steps backwards. If 
there are historians in the future, they’re going to look back on this 
period as one where accidents and contingent factors deepened the crisis 
at every turn.

Green European Journal: We’re speaking ahead of COP27 which will take 
place in Egypt. Last year in Glasgow, many fine promises were made but 
now it seems like the world is more divided than ever. What is your view 
on the state of global climate politics?

Amitav Ghosh: We mustn’t delude ourselves. When we look at what’s going 
on in the world, we cannot indulge in fantasies. Even before Glasgow, it 
was perfectly clear that global institutions have essentially 
disintegrated. The pandemic had a lot to do with it; the world’s failure 
to mount a global response with systems for distributing vaccines is 
evidence of the complete fracturing of global institutions.

Three of the most important players didn’t turn up for COP 26: Xi 
Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro literally thumbed 
his nose at the Glasgow meeting. He was in Italy at the time, he could 
have gone but he didn’t. COP 26 ended up as a sort of parade for the 
Anglosphere. That’s all it was – a show. What was promised doesn’t even 
come close to rising to the urgency that’s needed.

What we are really seeing is a massive fracturing of the global order 
into new power blocs. Xi Jinping has withdrawn from climate cooperation 
with the US. China and Russia are two of the biggest players in this 
whole scenario and how do you expect countries that are under severe 
sanctions to cooperate on other issues? It’s just not realistic.

If we had to look for hope then all we can point to right now are the 
youth movements. But we shouldn’t think about this in terms of hope and 
despair. We should think of this in terms of duty and what we have to 
keep on doing. But that doesn’t require us to be blind to the situation 
as it is.



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