Amitav Ghosh’s success as a novelist has rather obscured his exceptional non-fiction. Time may have played a part in this; his last collection of essays, Incendiary Circumstances, was published 11 years ago, and In an Antique Land, a classic now, was published in 1992. Ghosh’s fiction works with huge canvases: The Glass Palace (2000) spanned a century of change in Burma; the eye-opening Ibis trilogy, a grand projet if ever there was one, consumed a decade of the writer’s life and dealt with the British-run opium trade between India and China and the trafficking of indentured labour between British colonies. His vision is always of the big picture across geographical and temporal boundaries, of the long, hidden prehistory and surprising linkages of what we now call “globalisation”.
One can see an early foreshadowing of his new book in a long review titled “Petrofiction: the oil encounter and the novel”, which he wrote nearly 25 years ago. There he considers why the global oil trade has produced hardly any notable work in the arts, when a previous global trade with immensely far-reaching consequences, in spices, gave rise to such a rich and prolonged period of literary production. This piece, and its central inquiry, reappears in The Great Derangement as a continuing meditation on a richly productive line of thinking.
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