Four hundred years ago, the Dutch cornered the nutmeg market by slaughtering an island full of Bandanese women, men and children. The little-discussed genocide helped launch the modern spice trade and ensure the stratospheric growth of the Dutch East India Company. Two years earlier and halfway across the world, the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, marking the start of slavery and the colossal rise of what would later become the United States of America.

The brutality and violence of European colonialism have no corollary in history. In the century leading up to those two events, European colonisation killed an estimated 90 per cent of the indigenous population of the Americas—about 10 per cent of the global population.

Why have so many of us normalised atrocity in the name of geopolitics, asks the writer Amitav Ghosh.

• Tags: Abby Seiff, Amitav Ghosh, Indonesia, Issue 26