This connection may be forgotten in New York, but it is remembered by many in Run, which is today a sleepy, sunbaked island with a population of a few hundred. “Donald Trump made his money in Manhattan, didn't he?” an Indonesian friend joked when we visited the island, the day before the election. “If he wins maybe he will build a tower in Run, to say thank you for Manhattan.”
For many decades, Run, and the other spice-growing islands of the Moluccas, provided the Dutch East India Company with huge and easy profits. But then, as European tastes changed, the price of spices began to fall. Drastic measures, like the uprooting of millions of trees and the destruction of warehoused supplies, failed to prevent the company's collapse in the late 18th century.
By the mid-19th century, clove and nutmeg trees were being grown far beyond their original habitat, and the long history of the Spice Islands, as creators of great wealth, had come to an end.
The obvious lesson of this history is that it is impossible to imagine a world without global connections：They have always existed, and no place has escaped their formative influence. But this does not mean that there is any inherent merit in interconnectedness, which has always been accompanied by violence, deepening inequalities and the large-scale destruction of communities. Nor should proponents of unfettered globalization forget that in the 19th century “free trade” was invoked by Britain and other Western powers to prevent China from stopping the inflow of opium into the country, where it was causing widespread addition.
These aspects of globalization are often overlooked because the advocacy of interconnectedness has come to be equated with tolerance, while the resistance to it is identified with prejudice. But neither cosmopolitanism nor parochialism is a virtue in itself. We need to ask：cosmopolitanism in the service of what? Protectionism to what end?
The story of the Spice Islands holds another alarming portent. In a clove garden on the Island of Ternate, I found that most of the trees were leafless, their trunks the color of ash. I was told that clove trees are dying all over the island, and the farmers cited the same cause：The trees had been affected by changes in rainfall patterns over the last several years. There was less rain, and it fell more erratically. This, in turn, had led to the spread of blights and disease. The island has also experienced forest fires of unprecedented intensity.
If these changes continue, the clove, one of the earliest of commodities, could be endangered in its ancestral home by greenhouse gas emissions caused precisely by humanity's ever-expanding appetite for commodities.
Only in this one respect are we truly in a new era of interconnectedness.
