A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

By Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore

Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy, and Lives.

These are the seven things that have made our world and will continue to shape its future. By making these things cheap, modern commerce has controlled, transformed, and devastated the 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 uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate how throughout history, crises have always provided fresh opportunities to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism.

At a time of crisis for all these seven cheap things, innovative systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.

‘One of the most important works of political economy you’ll ever read.’ —Mark Bittman

‘Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore have transformed ‘cheapness’ into a brilliant and original lens that helps us understand the most pressing crises of our time. As we come together to build a better world, this book could well become a defining framework to broaden and deepen our ambitions.’ —Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything

‘An eye-opening account that helps us see the startling reality behind what we usually dismiss as the obvious and everyday.’ —Bill McKibben

‘A compelling interpretation of how we got to where we are now and how we might go on to create a more just and sustainable civilization. It’s a vision you can put to use.’ —Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy

‘Patel and Moore have provided not only an elegantly written and insightful narrative but also a path to imagining a noncapitalist future.’ —Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

‘A powerful, well-argued, passionate counterpoint to the belief that we have transited to a post-capitalist world.’ —Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Apr 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781743820438

Raj Patel

Raj Patel is an award-winning author, film-maker and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He worked at the World Bank and WTO, and has been teargassed on four continents protesting against them. A James Beard Foundation Leadership Award winner, he has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US, UK and EU governments, and is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved, the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, and the coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, all of which have been translated and taught across the world, as have his scholarly publications in economics, philosophy, politics, and public health journals. His first documentary, filmed over the course of a decade in Malawi and the United States, is The Ants & The Grasshopper. He is a board member of the Deep Medicine Circle.

Reviews for A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

[opinionated_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Its unusual that a 200 page book spends 40 pages on the Introduction, and after that introduction, usefully focused on the island of Madeira as a case study though it is, you feel as though you have the general idea, And the conclusions are hard to argue with; yes capitalism has succeeded through cheapening most elements of life - although I might dispute the conclusions around the cheapening of care. Yes, care and work in the home is undervalued but its hard to quantify that value when noone outside a particular home cares whether that work is done or notBut in general its very easy to agree with the authors' well argued case. But its less clear what, if anything can be done about it. For me the leap between the Marxist analysis of the problem and the World-Ecology basis of the solution was too great; for me the problem, or the history, was absorbing but the solution was unclear and unconvinving