Amitav Ghosh and Luke Kemp on learning from collapsed empires

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Today on Big Ideas, two heavyweight big thinkers, including Booker Prize nominated author Amitav Ghosh. They're making gripping connections across history to really help you understand a very modern existential moment. Or is it really that modern? Natasha Mitchell with you on ABC Radio National. Welcome to the show.

As a social anthropologist and blockbuster author, Dr. Amitav Ghosh writes fictional characters whose lives play out on a backdrop of epic social, environmental and political tumult. As does his non-fiction. His book, The Nutmeg's Curse, Parables for a Planet in Crisis, for example, traced the roots of our climate emergency back through the history of colonial conquest to a single humble spice. Dr. Luke Kemp is a research associate with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and honorary lecturer in environmental policy at the ANU. In his book, Goliath's Curse, The History and Future of Societal Collapse, he is sifting through the wreckage of fallen civilizations, Rome, the Mayans, Ancient Egypt, for warning signs helpful for us right now.

So to talk big histories and why navigating the present means understanding the past, at the 2026 Sydney Writers Festival on Gadigal Country. Let's go join them with historian and award-winning author, Professor Clare Wright from La Trobe University.

Clare Wright (2:22)

Luke, I'm going to start with you on some of the basics here. Okay? So we hear a lot about risk. Managing risk, mitigating risk, appetite for risk in these highly corporatised times, when even universities have been hijacked by the language and the logic of neoliberalism.

Tell us what exactly is existential risk?

Luke Kemp (2:44)

Existential risk is the risk of global societal collapse or human extinction. Essentially, the very worst case scenarios. Think extreme climate change, nuclear war, things along those lines.

Clare Wright (2:58)

So tell us how historical systems analysis, which is what you're obviously known for, help us mitigate against existential risk. It sounds a little to me like the master's tools being used to dismantle the master's house. Very close to. To quote from Audre Lorde.

Luke Kemp (3:14)

Absolutely.

Part of this is trying to understand what are the root causes behind the greatest challenges we face today. So the centre I work at, if it existed in 1945, there's only really one thing we study, nuclear weapons. We study some things like asteroid strikes, etc. But in terms of human produce risk, it would be largely just nuclear weapons. Today, I have colleagues working on advanced AI systems, lethal autonomous weapons, aka killer robots, engineered pandemics, and of course global ecological collapse.

So the key question for me is, why do we keep on producing risk over time? In order to answer that, you have to take a historical perspective. You have to understand how the systems developed in the current world. Apart from that, if you want to understand how the world could fall apart, we have good analogues in the past of how major empires, interconnected systems of cities and societies have fallen apart as well. You essentially have 300,000 years of data. You shouldn't ignore it.

Clare Wright (4:17)

Amitav, risk is not a word in the index of The Nutmeg's Curse, but the whole book is in a sense an elegant exploration of the unforecastable effects of uncertainty, precarity and unpredictability, which are all synonyms of risk.

So The Nutmeg's Curse, for those who haven't read it, starts with the massacre of the Bandhanese people in 1621, and the way their elimination from the land was inextricably linked to their possession of nutmeg trees. You ponder why their neighbours, whose islands were endowed with clove trees, escape similar extermination. And you ask this question, was it just chance or happenstance, merely a chain of events that unfolded differently? So how does the poetics of risk, as opposed to the empirical or technocratic, as Luke's been describing to us, inform your narrative, particularly as you tell us, because the cloves and the nutmegs can't tell their stories?

Amitav Ghosh (5:22)

I'm glad you mentioned the whole question of risk and, you know, predictability and so on, because these are essentially, at the end of the day, mathematical concepts. And, you know, we live in a world where we are really imprisoned by numbers. I mean, that is what it means to be modern, you know? I mean, to be contemporary.