Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today's planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding-and reclaiming-the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.
Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today's planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding-and reclaiming-the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.
A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic. He is
a Research Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public
Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin and a Senior Research
Associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University. He
is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the
World Food System and The Value of Nothing.
Jason W. Moore teaches world history and world-ecology at
Binghamton University, and is coordinator of the World-Ecology
Research Network. He is the author of several books, including
Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of
Capital, and numerous award-winning essays in environmental
history, political economy, and social theory.
If Patel and Moore don't quite make it to Mars, their book still
covers an awful lot of ground. They move rapidly between economic
analysis, history and political polemic, all in service of the
premise that all the cheapness has in fact been catastrophically
expensive... the overall impression is one of sweeping erudition,
and an impressive ability to synthesise disparate elements.
*Guardian*
Their central argument - that the inevitable trajectory of
capitalism is a race to the bottom in which we all end as losers -
is surely one that needs to be heard.
*New Internationalist*
By shifting our attention away from the question of global warming
to focus on the larger ideological manoeuvrings underpinning the
way capitalism seeks to organise nature, Moore and Patel
persuasively demonstrate that our responses to the crises of
capitalism and climate that we are facing should not be exclusively
about preventing catastrophic ecological change by blocking runway
expansions. Instead, their work suggests that we are potentially
seeing an unravelling of a much more complicated and convoluted set
of longer running crises of capital that are becoming increasingly
unmanageable, and not just because of heat waves or rising sea
levels.
*New Socialist*
[A] highly readable, heavily-sourced book
*Freedom News*
Making the persuasive argument that capitalism is more than just an
economic system, Patel and Moore illustrate how it has succeeded in
creating an overwhelming planetary ecology, separating humans from
the rest of nature, organising every relationship between them and
exploiting all available resources to work for it as cheaply as
possible.
*Morning Star*
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