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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and 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.
328 pages, Hardcover
First published October 17, 2017
About the author
Raj Patel
32 books286 followersRaj Patel has worked for the World Bank and WTO and been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against them. Writer, activist, and academic, he is currently a Research Professor at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 182 reviews
July 6, 2017
buy it for your friends who don't know what capitalism is, why it sucks, or how race, gender, and climate crisis play into the whole mess.
March 14, 2019
Capitalocene — The Age of Chickens Holocaust
Capitalocene is designed to nudge us away from evolutionary determinism, and from a sense of collective culpability for climate change, towards an understanding of the way in which the destruction of nature has largely been the result of an economic system organised around a minority class and its pursuit of profit.
In the early pages of their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W Moore ask us to consider the McNugget as the reigning symbol of the modern era:
Consider the McNugget. Consider not merely its proprietary combination of succulence and crispness and flavour, but also its usefulness as a symbol of the time in which we find ourselves. Consider its substance, derived from the world’s most common bird, bred to reach maturity within weeks, and with a breast so large it can barely walk. Consider that 60 billion of these birds are slaughtered every year, resulting in an abundant source of cheap food, and that this work necessitates a vast pool of cheap human labour. And consider that, long after humans have disappeared from the Earth, what will remain of us, along with the immortal residue of nuclear waste, is a fossil record that will register the truly insane volume of chicken carcasses we left behind...
It’s the Holocaust II — a genocide with a whole new crew!
http://mcdonaldscruelty.com/
P.S.: Apart from the Holocaust II idea, this text is an excerpt from a Guardian’s review
Capitalocene is designed to nudge us away from evolutionary determinism, and from a sense of collective culpability for climate change, towards an understanding of the way in which the destruction of nature has largely been the result of an economic system organised around a minority class and its pursuit of profit.
In the early pages of their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W Moore ask us to consider the McNugget as the reigning symbol of the modern era:
Consider the McNugget. Consider not merely its proprietary combination of succulence and crispness and flavour, but also its usefulness as a symbol of the time in which we find ourselves. Consider its substance, derived from the world’s most common bird, bred to reach maturity within weeks, and with a breast so large it can barely walk. Consider that 60 billion of these birds are slaughtered every year, resulting in an abundant source of cheap food, and that this work necessitates a vast pool of cheap human labour. And consider that, long after humans have disappeared from the Earth, what will remain of us, along with the immortal residue of nuclear waste, is a fossil record that will register the truly insane volume of chicken carcasses we left behind...
It’s the Holocaust II — a genocide with a whole new crew!
http://mcdonaldscruelty.com/
P.S.: Apart from the Holocaust II idea, this text is an excerpt from a Guardian’s review
December 9, 2021
Capitalocénico — A Era do Holocausto dos Frangos
Chegámos ao Capitalocénico — uma era geológica onde evolução e destruição coexistem, ambas motivadas pela busca despótica do lucro, que não olha a meios para concretizar fins!
“A vida inteligente futura saberá que estivemos cá porque alguns seres humanos atulharam o registo fóssil com maravilhas como radiação de bombas atómicas, plásticos da indústria petrolífera e ossos de frango”
Socorrendo-se, entre outros exemplos, da exploração industrial dos frangos de aviário, os autores propõem-se demonstrar como interagem as 7 pedras basilares do sistema atual, na construção do mundo moderno.
São elas: natureza, dinheiro, trabalho, cuidados, comida, energia e vidas.
Retornando ao frango de aviário ou Gallus, gallus domesticus, posso adiantar-vos que se trata duma ave geneticamente modificada, criada especificamente para consumo:
“Essa ave mal consegue caminhar, alcança a maturidade numa questão de semanas, tem um peito desproporcionado e é criada e abatida em quantidades que têm um impacto geológico significativo (mais de sessenta mil milhões de aves por ano)”
https://www.mudaomundo.org/factos/fra...
“Os vestígios fossilizados de um bilião de aves de capoeira irão durar mais do que os humanos que as criaram e marcarão a sua passagem neste planeta.”
Este ícone do capitalismo é apenas um dos múltiplos exemplos capazes de ilustrar o poder destrutivo dum sistema que “está a matar tudo, desde megafauna a microbiota, a taxas cem vezes superiores à taxa normal de extinção”...
Chegámos ao Capitalocénico — a era do Holocausto dos Frangos! 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Chegámos ao Capitalocénico — uma era geológica onde evolução e destruição coexistem, ambas motivadas pela busca despótica do lucro, que não olha a meios para concretizar fins!
“A vida inteligente futura saberá que estivemos cá porque alguns seres humanos atulharam o registo fóssil com maravilhas como radiação de bombas atómicas, plásticos da indústria petrolífera e ossos de frango”
Socorrendo-se, entre outros exemplos, da exploração industrial dos frangos de aviário, os autores propõem-se demonstrar como interagem as 7 pedras basilares do sistema atual, na construção do mundo moderno.
São elas: natureza, dinheiro, trabalho, cuidados, comida, energia e vidas.
Retornando ao frango de aviário ou Gallus, gallus domesticus, posso adiantar-vos que se trata duma ave geneticamente modificada, criada especificamente para consumo:
“Essa ave mal consegue caminhar, alcança a maturidade numa questão de semanas, tem um peito desproporcionado e é criada e abatida em quantidades que têm um impacto geológico significativo (mais de sessenta mil milhões de aves por ano)”
https://www.mudaomundo.org/factos/fra...
“Os vestígios fossilizados de um bilião de aves de capoeira irão durar mais do que os humanos que as criaram e marcarão a sua passagem neste planeta.”
Este ícone do capitalismo é apenas um dos múltiplos exemplos capazes de ilustrar o poder destrutivo dum sistema que “está a matar tudo, desde megafauna a microbiota, a taxas cem vezes superiores à taxa normal de extinção”...
Chegámos ao Capitalocénico — a era do Holocausto dos Frangos! 🌟🌟🌟🌟
December 30, 2017
Some authors aren’t intimidated by scale, and these two surely fall into that category. In A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore pursue a project of enormous magnitude, tracing the history of modern capitalism from its origin to the present day.
Through the lens of “cheapening,” capitalism is sliced sidelong, exposing the sum for its parts. The authors argue that the modern world has been made through seven cheap things: Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy, and Lives. However, “cheap” isn’t a price tag – rather, it is a “set of strategies to control a wider web of life” (3). By devaluing these “things” on a mass scale, capitalism exploits labor in the name of profit.
But not “labor” in the traditional sense. In a stark reframing of how we usually understand the natural world, they argue that “Nature” isn’t a static universe with which humans interact. We make meaning of nature – first and foremost by separating ourselves from it. And we transform nature. Under capitalism, this transformation looks like the exploitation of nature’s processes – in other words, its labor. We don’t just work the land – we make the land work.
If we understand capitalism in this way, then its ideological keystone becomes the Nature/Society divide, a product of Enlightenment thought that privileges the rational, Liberal subject over the irrational, wildness of Nature. These logics act as a license for Society – i.e. White, property-owning men – to dominate all else.
By this logic, labor performed by that which is deemed non-human isn’t really labor at all – a contention that leaves its marks smeared across history. Colonizers understood Indigenous people as savage and thus deserving of enslavement. Feminized labor – like caring for children – never really qualified as “work.” And crucially, the work of the natural world – its ability to nurture trees that we turn into fuel, for one - is utterly disposable. Capitalism’s ledger doesn’t account for this unthinkably massive amount of labor. It is cheapened to the point of invisibility.
This inherently volatile system survives only through the creation and exploitation of new frontiers – the obvious, foundational example being European colonialism. Like water, capitalism floods vacuums, and in moments of crisis, forges new pathways for expansion. Unsustainable growth begets crisis, begets unsustainable growth.
Oversimplifying at times, and in moments an ideological stretch, the work ambitiously attempts to neatly package the whole of world history. At points, it shows. The paradigm occasionally loses its precision, such as in the final chapter about Lives. In these weaker portions, the term “cheapen” could just as easily be replaced by “degrade,” “exploit,” or a number of other loosely related terms.
And in the final throes, Patel and Moore leave the reader hanging. They contend that “decentering humans and undoing the real abstractions of Nature and Society can only be done concretely,” but sketch out blueprints for doing so only in the vaguest terms. The work of crafting material strategies for transformation is largely left to the reader.
Granted, a work ambitiously titled A History of the World should probably leave us with more questions than answers. And in a political climate of sheer desperation, there’s perhaps an unfair propensity to expect salvation from works as comprehensive and critical as this one.
But maybe the reminder to think beyond the framework of “humankind” – and the call to understand our politics in relation to the entirety of the “web of life” – is enough. If the reader is left with anything, it is that ontologies are fundamental to how capitalist power operates – and as we imagine new ones of our own, we sow the seeds for revolution.
Through the lens of “cheapening,” capitalism is sliced sidelong, exposing the sum for its parts. The authors argue that the modern world has been made through seven cheap things: Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy, and Lives. However, “cheap” isn’t a price tag – rather, it is a “set of strategies to control a wider web of life” (3). By devaluing these “things” on a mass scale, capitalism exploits labor in the name of profit.
But not “labor” in the traditional sense. In a stark reframing of how we usually understand the natural world, they argue that “Nature” isn’t a static universe with which humans interact. We make meaning of nature – first and foremost by separating ourselves from it. And we transform nature. Under capitalism, this transformation looks like the exploitation of nature’s processes – in other words, its labor. We don’t just work the land – we make the land work.
If we understand capitalism in this way, then its ideological keystone becomes the Nature/Society divide, a product of Enlightenment thought that privileges the rational, Liberal subject over the irrational, wildness of Nature. These logics act as a license for Society – i.e. White, property-owning men – to dominate all else.
By this logic, labor performed by that which is deemed non-human isn’t really labor at all – a contention that leaves its marks smeared across history. Colonizers understood Indigenous people as savage and thus deserving of enslavement. Feminized labor – like caring for children – never really qualified as “work.” And crucially, the work of the natural world – its ability to nurture trees that we turn into fuel, for one - is utterly disposable. Capitalism’s ledger doesn’t account for this unthinkably massive amount of labor. It is cheapened to the point of invisibility.
This inherently volatile system survives only through the creation and exploitation of new frontiers – the obvious, foundational example being European colonialism. Like water, capitalism floods vacuums, and in moments of crisis, forges new pathways for expansion. Unsustainable growth begets crisis, begets unsustainable growth.
Oversimplifying at times, and in moments an ideological stretch, the work ambitiously attempts to neatly package the whole of world history. At points, it shows. The paradigm occasionally loses its precision, such as in the final chapter about Lives. In these weaker portions, the term “cheapen” could just as easily be replaced by “degrade,” “exploit,” or a number of other loosely related terms.
And in the final throes, Patel and Moore leave the reader hanging. They contend that “decentering humans and undoing the real abstractions of Nature and Society can only be done concretely,” but sketch out blueprints for doing so only in the vaguest terms. The work of crafting material strategies for transformation is largely left to the reader.
Granted, a work ambitiously titled A History of the World should probably leave us with more questions than answers. And in a political climate of sheer desperation, there’s perhaps an unfair propensity to expect salvation from works as comprehensive and critical as this one.
But maybe the reminder to think beyond the framework of “humankind” – and the call to understand our politics in relation to the entirety of the “web of life” – is enough. If the reader is left with anything, it is that ontologies are fundamental to how capitalist power operates – and as we imagine new ones of our own, we sow the seeds for revolution.
August 12, 2018
I would never have bought this book if it wasn’t published by VERSO. As a general rule in life, I don’t read these airport bookstore feature books ‘3 ways to get smarter’ ’10 ways to get rich’ ‘100 places you must visit before you die’’ the junk food equivalent in books aimed to generate impulse purchases with a shallow, simplified theory of everything and recycled popular science and/or self-help rubbish.I should have known better that ‘A History of the World in seven cheap things’ (VERSO, 2018) is probably not a book I would enjoy.
It’s a recycled and non-academic version of Moore’s ‘world-ecology’ theory which the authors present as an extension of Marxism, Europe’s pillage of human and natural resources in the Americas in the ‘long 16th century’ established a capitalist world-ecology that continues to this day. All subsequent developments, including the industrial revolution, imperialism, monopoly capital and neoliberalism, are just adjustments within the 16th century framework, caused by long-term shifts in the cost of the ‘cheap things’, mainly raw materials and workers, that capitalism requires.
Despite the fact that most radical historians view the birth of capitalism differently (focusing on industrial capitalism in the 19th century as a distinctive new stage), I am not sure what the analytical value is of locating the birth of capitalism in the 15/16 century and showing through the 7 cheap things (nature, money, work, care, food, emergency, lives) that, duh, profit-seekers try to buy low and sell high. There are interesting bits and pieces of historical information (and many truisms) but this cannot substitute for a theory of capitalism, let alone the absence of power and ideology. The last chapter on the ‘way forward’, I suppose, is a little cringe worthy advising us to ‘practice new ways of producing and caring for one another together, a praxis of redoing, rethinking, reliving our most basic relations” lol, yeah. Will do.
It’s a recycled and non-academic version of Moore’s ‘world-ecology’ theory which the authors present as an extension of Marxism, Europe’s pillage of human and natural resources in the Americas in the ‘long 16th century’ established a capitalist world-ecology that continues to this day. All subsequent developments, including the industrial revolution, imperialism, monopoly capital and neoliberalism, are just adjustments within the 16th century framework, caused by long-term shifts in the cost of the ‘cheap things’, mainly raw materials and workers, that capitalism requires.
Despite the fact that most radical historians view the birth of capitalism differently (focusing on industrial capitalism in the 19th century as a distinctive new stage), I am not sure what the analytical value is of locating the birth of capitalism in the 15/16 century and showing through the 7 cheap things (nature, money, work, care, food, emergency, lives) that, duh, profit-seekers try to buy low and sell high. There are interesting bits and pieces of historical information (and many truisms) but this cannot substitute for a theory of capitalism, let alone the absence of power and ideology. The last chapter on the ‘way forward’, I suppose, is a little cringe worthy advising us to ‘practice new ways of producing and caring for one another together, a praxis of redoing, rethinking, reliving our most basic relations” lol, yeah. Will do.
July 14, 2019
Powerful book which forces you to connect the dots between many seemingly unrelated issues in world history. Must read.
August 25, 2021
3.5 Stars!
OK I’ll try and keep it brief, some of the things I learned from this include, in 1452 Pope Nicholas V wrote to King Alfonso V of Portugal to give him permission to invade other nations, shed blood, capture unbelievers and reduce them to perpetual slavery if he so wished. As long as it’s all done in the good ole name of Catholicism. Apparently some commentators have said 1571 was the birth year of global trade when Manila was founded. We are also reminded that there are now more slaves in the world than in the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade.
The main body of this maybe only 212 pages, but do not be fooled, this makes for pretty deep and dense reading. This often feels like a thesis, which isn’t all bad, but it does mean that there is an academic feel that it can’t quite shake off, which is reflected in the publishing house it came out of too. This had some great historical detail and I learned a lot of good stuff from this, but there’s just something about it all that didn’t quite sit right as a collective work, it sometimes felt like a number of disparate essays and ideas brought together with more than a few parts not smoothed down.
August 28, 2021
Kapitalist düzene, gerekliliği ve yaratımının bir parçası olan yedi ucuz şey üzerinden bakan, ufuk açıcı bir kitap oldu benim için. Bakış açısını genişletmek isteyen okurlar için tavsiyemdir.
August 14, 2018
Welcome to the Capitalocene. Humans, at least some of them, are killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times faster than the background rate. The scale of destruction can’t be simply extrapolated from the excesses of our knuckle-dragging forebears. What has really changed since the 1400s is capitalism - and this is what the book is about: showing how the modern world has been made through seven cheap things - nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives.
Take the humble chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, product of post WW2 freely-sourced genetic manipulation to produce the most profitable fowl. It reaches maturity in six weeks, can barely walk, has an oversized breast, and is slaughtered en masse, at the rate of sixty billion a year. Cheap Nature. In the United States two cents for every dollar spent on fast-food chicken goes to the poultry workers. Cheap Work. Eighty-six percent of workers are in pain because of repetitive hacking and twisting on the production line. Denial of injury claims is common. The result is a fifteen percent decline in income for ten years after injury, so recovering workers depend on family for support - outside the production circuit but central to maintaining the workforce. Cheap Care. So chickens don’t fart methane like cows, but they are bred in huge barns that need fuel to keep them warm. Low-cost chickens require loads of propane. Cheap Energy. Franchising and public subsidies for private profit mitigate the financial risks of commercial sales, right through to the land on which soy is grown to feed the chickens, in China, Brazil and the United States. Cheap Money. Last, persistent acts of chauvinism against animal and human lives - women, the colonized, the poor, people of colour and immigrants, make these cheap things possible.
Of course there’s resistance, from indigenous peoples whose flocks provide the genetic material for breeding to care workers demanding recognition. ‘The social struggles over nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives that attend the Capitalocene’s poultry bones amount to a case for why the most iconic symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget.’
The Medieval Warm Period ran from around 950 to 1250 across the North Atlantic. Populations swelled, towns multiplied. Europeans nearly tripled in number to 70 million. Agricultural surpluses soared. Relative prosperity fuelled expansionism. Beginning in 1095, the Crusades were commercialised military operations targeting the wealth of the eastern Mediterranean. Conquest was made to pay by imposing tribute; the forerunner of colonial capitalism. The greatest conqueror of all, however, was cultivation; by the fourteenth century, agriculture took up a third of all European land use, a sixfold increase in 500 years, much of it at the expense of forests.
Then famine returned with colder, wetter weather. Massive rains struck Europe in May 1315 and did not ease up until August, ending with a cold snap. Europe’s population shrank by twenty percent in five years and the so-called Great Famine continued until 1322. This was the Little Ice Age that lasted until the 19th century. Feudalism crashed, not least because feudal lords wanted cash or grain, and they consumed any surpluses rather than reinvesting in agriculture. Left to their own devices, peasants would probably have shifted to crop mixes, including garden produce. Peasant autonomy would have allowed medieval Europe to feed up to three times as many people. But the transition never happened. In 1347 the Black Death struck an already weakened population. Almost overnight, peasant revolts became large-scale threats to the feudal order.
Repressive legislation to keep labour cheap, through wage controls or outright re-enserfment, was the response, for example England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers. ‘The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionisation harder’, the authors write.
Capitalism was born out of this mayhem. Ruling classes didn’t just seek to restore the surplus but to expand it, and it was the Iberian aristocracy that stumbled on a solution, especially in Portugal and Castile. To make war with the Moslem powers on the peninsula - the Reconquista - they depended on financiers. War and debt remade society and spurred the earliest invasions of the Canary Islands and Madeira. ‘The solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, great frontiers.’
Madeira was a case in point. In the 1460s a new way for producing food took shape. One traveller reported in 1455 there was not a foot of ground on the island not covered in great trees. By the 1550s it was hard to find any wood at all. The reason: sugar production. It had arrived in Ibera by the 14th century and by 1420 it was being grown commercially, funded by German banks and cultivated near Valencia by a mix of slaves and free workers. In the 1460s and 1470s farmers on Madeira gave up wheat and grew sugar exclusively. The sugar frontier spread to other islands in the Atlantic, then on a massive scale to the New World. And like palm and soy monocultures today, it rapidly exhausted soils, cleared forests and encouraged pests. As for the workers, they were indigenous people from the Canary Islands in the case of Madeira, North African salves and in some cases paid plantation labourers from Europe.
When Madeira’s trees were all consumed, sugar production crashed. Capitalism reinvented itself. After sugar came wine, the casks being imported from the ‘cheap’ forests of the New World. Commodities flowed the other way: Madeira was a conduit for the African slave trade, and in a more recent reinvention, today that grim history is exploited and marketed in the form of tourism.
Here then, is the central theme of this highly readable, heavily-sourced book: ‘Capitalism not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers, expanding from one place to the next, transforming socioecological relations, producing more and more kinds of goods and services…For capitalism, what matters is that the figures entered into ledgers - to pay workers, to supply adequate food for workers, to purchase energy and raw materials - are as low as possible. Capitalism only values what it can count and it can count only dollars…this means that the whole system thrivers when powerful states and capitalists can reorganise global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy and raw materials with as little disruption as possible.’
Take the humble chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, product of post WW2 freely-sourced genetic manipulation to produce the most profitable fowl. It reaches maturity in six weeks, can barely walk, has an oversized breast, and is slaughtered en masse, at the rate of sixty billion a year. Cheap Nature. In the United States two cents for every dollar spent on fast-food chicken goes to the poultry workers. Cheap Work. Eighty-six percent of workers are in pain because of repetitive hacking and twisting on the production line. Denial of injury claims is common. The result is a fifteen percent decline in income for ten years after injury, so recovering workers depend on family for support - outside the production circuit but central to maintaining the workforce. Cheap Care. So chickens don’t fart methane like cows, but they are bred in huge barns that need fuel to keep them warm. Low-cost chickens require loads of propane. Cheap Energy. Franchising and public subsidies for private profit mitigate the financial risks of commercial sales, right through to the land on which soy is grown to feed the chickens, in China, Brazil and the United States. Cheap Money. Last, persistent acts of chauvinism against animal and human lives - women, the colonized, the poor, people of colour and immigrants, make these cheap things possible.
Of course there’s resistance, from indigenous peoples whose flocks provide the genetic material for breeding to care workers demanding recognition. ‘The social struggles over nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives that attend the Capitalocene’s poultry bones amount to a case for why the most iconic symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget.’
The Medieval Warm Period ran from around 950 to 1250 across the North Atlantic. Populations swelled, towns multiplied. Europeans nearly tripled in number to 70 million. Agricultural surpluses soared. Relative prosperity fuelled expansionism. Beginning in 1095, the Crusades were commercialised military operations targeting the wealth of the eastern Mediterranean. Conquest was made to pay by imposing tribute; the forerunner of colonial capitalism. The greatest conqueror of all, however, was cultivation; by the fourteenth century, agriculture took up a third of all European land use, a sixfold increase in 500 years, much of it at the expense of forests.
Then famine returned with colder, wetter weather. Massive rains struck Europe in May 1315 and did not ease up until August, ending with a cold snap. Europe’s population shrank by twenty percent in five years and the so-called Great Famine continued until 1322. This was the Little Ice Age that lasted until the 19th century. Feudalism crashed, not least because feudal lords wanted cash or grain, and they consumed any surpluses rather than reinvesting in agriculture. Left to their own devices, peasants would probably have shifted to crop mixes, including garden produce. Peasant autonomy would have allowed medieval Europe to feed up to three times as many people. But the transition never happened. In 1347 the Black Death struck an already weakened population. Almost overnight, peasant revolts became large-scale threats to the feudal order.
Repressive legislation to keep labour cheap, through wage controls or outright re-enserfment, was the response, for example England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers. ‘The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionisation harder’, the authors write.
Capitalism was born out of this mayhem. Ruling classes didn’t just seek to restore the surplus but to expand it, and it was the Iberian aristocracy that stumbled on a solution, especially in Portugal and Castile. To make war with the Moslem powers on the peninsula - the Reconquista - they depended on financiers. War and debt remade society and spurred the earliest invasions of the Canary Islands and Madeira. ‘The solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, great frontiers.’
Madeira was a case in point. In the 1460s a new way for producing food took shape. One traveller reported in 1455 there was not a foot of ground on the island not covered in great trees. By the 1550s it was hard to find any wood at all. The reason: sugar production. It had arrived in Ibera by the 14th century and by 1420 it was being grown commercially, funded by German banks and cultivated near Valencia by a mix of slaves and free workers. In the 1460s and 1470s farmers on Madeira gave up wheat and grew sugar exclusively. The sugar frontier spread to other islands in the Atlantic, then on a massive scale to the New World. And like palm and soy monocultures today, it rapidly exhausted soils, cleared forests and encouraged pests. As for the workers, they were indigenous people from the Canary Islands in the case of Madeira, North African salves and in some cases paid plantation labourers from Europe.
When Madeira’s trees were all consumed, sugar production crashed. Capitalism reinvented itself. After sugar came wine, the casks being imported from the ‘cheap’ forests of the New World. Commodities flowed the other way: Madeira was a conduit for the African slave trade, and in a more recent reinvention, today that grim history is exploited and marketed in the form of tourism.
Here then, is the central theme of this highly readable, heavily-sourced book: ‘Capitalism not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers, expanding from one place to the next, transforming socioecological relations, producing more and more kinds of goods and services…For capitalism, what matters is that the figures entered into ledgers - to pay workers, to supply adequate food for workers, to purchase energy and raw materials - are as low as possible. Capitalism only values what it can count and it can count only dollars…this means that the whole system thrivers when powerful states and capitalists can reorganise global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy and raw materials with as little disruption as possible.’
May 9, 2021
Storytel'de dinledim. Dünya tarihine farklı bir açıdan yaklaşmış. Bazı bilgiler benim için yeni ve bir o kadar da çarpıcıydı. Çevirisinde, dinlerken yer yer zorlandım. Basılı olarak ingilizcesini edinip, okuyacağım
February 13, 2020
A mixed bag. On the plus side, the idea that Western civilization at the beginning of the Renaissance created an artificial division between Nature and Society is intriguing. It seems to explain a lot, from abuse of the environment to oppression of people considered "natural" including women, enslaved Africans and indigenous people everywhere. The authors make a good case for class conflict using Marxist theory, that the active and aggressive capitalist class always found new ways to turn people and nature into money, with damaging effects on everyone but the money men.
On the minus side, halfway through it feels like the authors are trying to fit everything into their Marxist framework. Stories of people are thin and it becomes clear that people don't matter much to the authors compared to the impersonal forces that determine history.
The one person the authors bring up again and again is Christopher Columbus. But he's less a historical figure than an archetype of the European colonizer and proto-capitalist exploiter of nature and non-European humanity. The authors don't provide enough detail to generate much emotion about Columbus at all.
In a book like this, of course Columbus is no hero. But he's really no villain either. Unlike many critics of the ocean explorer, Patel and Moore don't give enough detail to successfully paint Columbus as a monster of greed and inhumanity, torturing and dispossessing island peoples wherever he found them. Instead, here Columbus is just a stand-in for pretty much everybody from Western cultures, which, in the end, come out as just tools of the impersonal forces of capitalist expansion.
The solution to destroying the environment and oppressing people turns out to be not just to dump western civ. But to dump all civ, that is, any country that has ever put a plow to a field, throwing in with the earth-destroying European and North American powers both China and India.
Only marginal nations--Iceland!--and indigenous cultures come out unscathed. They should be an example for us all to reform our evil capitalist ways, claim the authors. Once we get rid of our nation-states, somehow undo the damage wrought by the culture of the plow, and commit to upending all hierachies, then can we prevent ecological doom.
Even if this were realistic (and the authors offer few details on how such a big task is to be accomplished) I'm not convinced that it's what we need or even that it would work at all.
If you already think that Western Civilization is the problem, then you may enjoy learning that Eastern Civilization isn't much better. Otherwise, if you think that history is a mixed bag of good and ill, that impersonal forces sometimes give way to the power of individual conscience and ambition, and that our future can build on the good things in our past as we attempt to overcome the bad ones, then you may find this book as frustrating as I did.
This book's great potential to examine the crucial question of why cheapness has so often trumped goodness is overwhelmed by a lack of heart and adherence to a rigid ideology.
On the minus side, halfway through it feels like the authors are trying to fit everything into their Marxist framework. Stories of people are thin and it becomes clear that people don't matter much to the authors compared to the impersonal forces that determine history.
The one person the authors bring up again and again is Christopher Columbus. But he's less a historical figure than an archetype of the European colonizer and proto-capitalist exploiter of nature and non-European humanity. The authors don't provide enough detail to generate much emotion about Columbus at all.
In a book like this, of course Columbus is no hero. But he's really no villain either. Unlike many critics of the ocean explorer, Patel and Moore don't give enough detail to successfully paint Columbus as a monster of greed and inhumanity, torturing and dispossessing island peoples wherever he found them. Instead, here Columbus is just a stand-in for pretty much everybody from Western cultures, which, in the end, come out as just tools of the impersonal forces of capitalist expansion.
The solution to destroying the environment and oppressing people turns out to be not just to dump western civ. But to dump all civ, that is, any country that has ever put a plow to a field, throwing in with the earth-destroying European and North American powers both China and India.
Only marginal nations--Iceland!--and indigenous cultures come out unscathed. They should be an example for us all to reform our evil capitalist ways, claim the authors. Once we get rid of our nation-states, somehow undo the damage wrought by the culture of the plow, and commit to upending all hierachies, then can we prevent ecological doom.
Even if this were realistic (and the authors offer few details on how such a big task is to be accomplished) I'm not convinced that it's what we need or even that it would work at all.
If you already think that Western Civilization is the problem, then you may enjoy learning that Eastern Civilization isn't much better. Otherwise, if you think that history is a mixed bag of good and ill, that impersonal forces sometimes give way to the power of individual conscience and ambition, and that our future can build on the good things in our past as we attempt to overcome the bad ones, then you may find this book as frustrating as I did.
This book's great potential to examine the crucial question of why cheapness has so often trumped goodness is overwhelmed by a lack of heart and adherence to a rigid ideology.
January 18, 2022
Author criticizes capitalism giving no better solution in return other then Marx
socialism (mentioned here and there with sentiment). Other words, same meaning like reparation = redistribution. Tested already - no, thank you sir. What is menacing is that I found this book by recommendation of polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki. This might indicate in which direction Poland is heading right now… terrifying
socialism (mentioned here and there with sentiment). Other words, same meaning like reparation = redistribution. Tested already - no, thank you sir. What is menacing is that I found this book by recommendation of polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki. This might indicate in which direction Poland is heading right now… terrifying
January 17, 2018
"It's easier for most people to imagine the end of our planet than to imagine the end of capitalism. We need an intellectual state shift to accompany our new epoch." This book is a thought-provoking history of how Capitalism ate our planet and our lives and the resistance that happened in each stage and area. The authors argue we should call this age the Capitalocene specifically not the more generic Anthropocene. I was particularly struck by the chapters on how capitalism requires cheap labor, cheap care and cheap lives and how this has been true since the beginning. The book is short on solutions for the future but does point to helpful emergent movements.
July 11, 2019
Uygarlıklar; doğadan küçük bir yardımdan fazlasını alarak ortaya çıkar, yardımın çekilmesi ile son bulur.
Şayet kapitalizm bir hastalıksa etinizi yiyen cinstendir. Kemiklerinizi de gübre niyetine satacaktır.
UCUZ DOĞA
Descartes yasaları; insan aklının, doğanın üzerinde olduğunu ve Avrupa uygarlığının, doğanın efendisi ve sahibi olduğunu söylüyordu.
Doğa; artık bir şey olmaktan ziyade, yaşamın ahlaki ve ekonomik olarak ucuzlatılmasını sağlayan bir strateji haline gelmişti.
İstila ve metalaştırma ile yaşama yöntemlerini biçimlendiren kartezyen devrimi ile;
-“Hem o hem bu” nun yerini “ya o, ya o” aldı.
-“Tözlerle şeyler hakkında” düşünme, “tözler arasındaki ilişkiyi” düşünmekten daha ayrıcalıklı kılındı.
-“Toplumsal fayda” olarak görülen bilim üzerinden, “doğaya tahakküm” kuruldu.
-“Sömürgeci planlama ve tahakküm projesi” uygulanabilir kılındı.
-“Proleterleştirme ve mülkiyetin yaygınlaştırılması” ile insan köleleştirildi.
UCUZ PARA
Bankerler iktidara, iktidarlar da bankerlere daima muhtaçtır.
Savaş devletin ödünç alma kapasitesine bağlı olduğundan bir devletin kredi notu, savaş alanındaki kazanma kabiliyetini belirler.
Modern savaş; altın ve kanı sermayeye çevirmenin bir yöntemidir. Sonuç önemsizdir. Savaş, sermaye sahipleri için her zaman karlıdır.
Banka ödemeleri daima, işçilerin sömürülmesi ve doğanın geri kalanının gasp edilmesiyle yapılır.
UCUZ EMEK
Her artı değer üretme eylemi, insan ve insan dışı yaşamın parasal bağlantılarla kurulan ilişkisi ötesinde, doğayı da içeren daha büyük bir el koyma eylemine bağlıdır.
İnsanın makine aracılığı ile köleleşmesini kınayan Lenin, sonraları “Taylor sistemini getirmek üzere kesinlikle konuşmalıyız, bu olmaksızın üretkenliği arttırmak imkansız olacak ve onsuz sosyalizme öncülük edemeyeceğiz” diyordu.
Stalin’e göre ise, doğa zaten, kendi çıkarları için kullanılacak bir nesne ve boyun eğdirilecek bir düşmandı.
İngiliz sömürgeciliğinde, ucuz emek; toprağın çevrilmesi ve Kelt Halkları’nın fethedilmesi aracılığı ile güvence altına alınmıştır.
İngilizlere göre, İrlanda’lıların yabaniliği toprağı verimsiz kullanmalarını, toprağın verimsiz kullanılmasıysa yabaniliklerini doğuruyordu.
UCUZ BAKIM
İşçi sömürüsü, insan dışı doğanın gasp edilmesi ve ödenmemiş bakım emeğiyle bağlantılıdır.
Tüm ücretli çalışma sistemini mümkün kılan, karşılıksız bakım emeğidir. Ücreti ödenmeyen işler, bilhassa bakım emeği olmadan ücretli çalışma, kapitalizme gerçekten çok pahalıya malolurdu.
UCUZ GIDA
Fabrikasyon piliç üretimi; döllenmiş bir yumurtayı ve 4kg’lık yem torbasını 5 hafta içinde 2kg’lık tavuğa dönüştüren et üretim sürecidir.
Kapitlizmin ucuz gıda rejimleri açlık rejimleridir.
Aç halk vaatlerle kandırılabilir ancak, onları kazanmak eylemlerle mümkün olacaktır.
UCUZ ENERJİ
Kapitalizmin enerji devrimi; kömürle değil ağaçla ve özelleştirme anlamına gelen ormanların etrafının çevrilmesi ile başlar.
Kapitalizmde, ülke kalkınmasının arka planı ne kadar çok, büyük ölçekli sanayiden kaynaklanırsa, doğanın yıkım süreci de o kadar hızlı olacaktır.
UCUZ YAŞAM
Kapitalizm ucuz yaşamı yönetmek için, en incelikli ve gelişmiş modern kurum ulus-devleti de çok iyi kullanmakta. Ancak ucuz yaşamın sınırlarına da gelmiş bulunuyoruz. Bu savı liberal ulus devletin ardılı için heves duyarak değil, endişeyle ileri sürüyoruz. Sonrakinin beterin beteri olabileceğini bilecek kadar zeki tarih öğrencileriyiz.
Şayet kapitalizm bir hastalıksa etinizi yiyen cinstendir. Kemiklerinizi de gübre niyetine satacaktır.
UCUZ DOĞA
Descartes yasaları; insan aklının, doğanın üzerinde olduğunu ve Avrupa uygarlığının, doğanın efendisi ve sahibi olduğunu söylüyordu.
Doğa; artık bir şey olmaktan ziyade, yaşamın ahlaki ve ekonomik olarak ucuzlatılmasını sağlayan bir strateji haline gelmişti.
İstila ve metalaştırma ile yaşama yöntemlerini biçimlendiren kartezyen devrimi ile;
-“Hem o hem bu” nun yerini “ya o, ya o” aldı.
-“Tözlerle şeyler hakkında” düşünme, “tözler arasındaki ilişkiyi” düşünmekten daha ayrıcalıklı kılındı.
-“Toplumsal fayda” olarak görülen bilim üzerinden, “doğaya tahakküm” kuruldu.
-“Sömürgeci planlama ve tahakküm projesi” uygulanabilir kılındı.
-“Proleterleştirme ve mülkiyetin yaygınlaştırılması” ile insan köleleştirildi.
UCUZ PARA
Bankerler iktidara, iktidarlar da bankerlere daima muhtaçtır.
Savaş devletin ödünç alma kapasitesine bağlı olduğundan bir devletin kredi notu, savaş alanındaki kazanma kabiliyetini belirler.
Modern savaş; altın ve kanı sermayeye çevirmenin bir yöntemidir. Sonuç önemsizdir. Savaş, sermaye sahipleri için her zaman karlıdır.
Banka ödemeleri daima, işçilerin sömürülmesi ve doğanın geri kalanının gasp edilmesiyle yapılır.
UCUZ EMEK
Her artı değer üretme eylemi, insan ve insan dışı yaşamın parasal bağlantılarla kurulan ilişkisi ötesinde, doğayı da içeren daha büyük bir el koyma eylemine bağlıdır.
İnsanın makine aracılığı ile köleleşmesini kınayan Lenin, sonraları “Taylor sistemini getirmek üzere kesinlikle konuşmalıyız, bu olmaksızın üretkenliği arttırmak imkansız olacak ve onsuz sosyalizme öncülük edemeyeceğiz” diyordu.
Stalin’e göre ise, doğa zaten, kendi çıkarları için kullanılacak bir nesne ve boyun eğdirilecek bir düşmandı.
İngiliz sömürgeciliğinde, ucuz emek; toprağın çevrilmesi ve Kelt Halkları’nın fethedilmesi aracılığı ile güvence altına alınmıştır.
İngilizlere göre, İrlanda’lıların yabaniliği toprağı verimsiz kullanmalarını, toprağın verimsiz kullanılmasıysa yabaniliklerini doğuruyordu.
UCUZ BAKIM
İşçi sömürüsü, insan dışı doğanın gasp edilmesi ve ödenmemiş bakım emeğiyle bağlantılıdır.
Tüm ücretli çalışma sistemini mümkün kılan, karşılıksız bakım emeğidir. Ücreti ödenmeyen işler, bilhassa bakım emeği olmadan ücretli çalışma, kapitalizme gerçekten çok pahalıya malolurdu.
UCUZ GIDA
Fabrikasyon piliç üretimi; döllenmiş bir yumurtayı ve 4kg’lık yem torbasını 5 hafta içinde 2kg’lık tavuğa dönüştüren et üretim sürecidir.
Kapitlizmin ucuz gıda rejimleri açlık rejimleridir.
Aç halk vaatlerle kandırılabilir ancak, onları kazanmak eylemlerle mümkün olacaktır.
UCUZ ENERJİ
Kapitalizmin enerji devrimi; kömürle değil ağaçla ve özelleştirme anlamına gelen ormanların etrafının çevrilmesi ile başlar.
Kapitalizmde, ülke kalkınmasının arka planı ne kadar çok, büyük ölçekli sanayiden kaynaklanırsa, doğanın yıkım süreci de o kadar hızlı olacaktır.
UCUZ YAŞAM
Kapitalizm ucuz yaşamı yönetmek için, en incelikli ve gelişmiş modern kurum ulus-devleti de çok iyi kullanmakta. Ancak ucuz yaşamın sınırlarına da gelmiş bulunuyoruz. Bu savı liberal ulus devletin ardılı için heves duyarak değil, endişeyle ileri sürüyoruz. Sonrakinin beterin beteri olabileceğini bilecek kadar zeki tarih öğrencileriyiz.
October 1, 2020
I'm halfway through this book and I can't say that I'll finish it. Honestly feels grifty as hell. Why in God's name Verso published this is beyond me.
Patel and Moore tried to rebrand a New Materialist framework of capitalism using Marxist concepts through Moore's own "world-ecology" but falls short of doing anything coherent with it. I don't need to read the whole book to see that most of it is one long essay filled to the brim with historical anecdotes (and footnotes... lots of footnotes; they literally comprise one third of the book) to show that the authors did their homework--but nothing more. What the hell is oikeios? The term adds very little to current critiques of capitalism. With regard to the book's concept of "cheapness": it also doesn't add much. Capitalists commodifies everything and wants to maximize surplus value. And? We know this already.
Reading this while re-reading Neil Smith's Uneven Development also didn't help their argument on the separation of Nature from Society. While Smith's "production of nature" argues that Nature becomes external to Society through gradual acts of labor in a (pre)capitalist system and producing new natures amenable to capital accumulation, Patel and Moore's treatment of nature seems to place 15th century colonialism as the ultimate birthplace of this externalization. Citing historical documents that places indigenous people as part of nature in order to dehumanize them, the book claims to know the exact time period in which capitalism was born. This is while ignoring a plethora of debates on capitalism's origins.
Other reviews already pointed out the eurocentric analysis of the book, covering mostly Europe and its colonization of the Americas, and the preoccupation with Columbus. The mystification of indigenous people is also a troubling aspect. In a passage describing a Chichimec Indian woman's dream of a deer riding a horse, symbolizing the Chichimec in a position of power, this what the authors had to say: "The dreamer of this dream was guilty of calling not just for a political insurrection but a cosmic one. . . . The dreamer of this radically different ecology had to be killed, swiftly. To allow her to live would sanction an alternative to capitalism's world-ecology." Or maybe she was simply accused of witchcraft. Surely in 1599 colonizers didn't have the power of hindsight to recognize capitalism as a cohesive system let alone an "alternative to capitalism's world-ecology"?
There were some good historical knowledge, I must admit. The detail in which the authors elaborate their points is worthy of praise. In the end, however, the impression that I got from reading half of this book is that I'm being sold "world-ecology" as a catch-all term to understanding the world (it's not a theory, they said so!). To be brutally honest, that sounds like a grift--a New Age rhetoric of holism and interconnectedness with a sprinkle of Marxist analysis.
Patel and Moore tried to rebrand a New Materialist framework of capitalism using Marxist concepts through Moore's own "world-ecology" but falls short of doing anything coherent with it. I don't need to read the whole book to see that most of it is one long essay filled to the brim with historical anecdotes (and footnotes... lots of footnotes; they literally comprise one third of the book) to show that the authors did their homework--but nothing more. What the hell is oikeios? The term adds very little to current critiques of capitalism. With regard to the book's concept of "cheapness": it also doesn't add much. Capitalists commodifies everything and wants to maximize surplus value. And? We know this already.
Reading this while re-reading Neil Smith's Uneven Development also didn't help their argument on the separation of Nature from Society. While Smith's "production of nature" argues that Nature becomes external to Society through gradual acts of labor in a (pre)capitalist system and producing new natures amenable to capital accumulation, Patel and Moore's treatment of nature seems to place 15th century colonialism as the ultimate birthplace of this externalization. Citing historical documents that places indigenous people as part of nature in order to dehumanize them, the book claims to know the exact time period in which capitalism was born. This is while ignoring a plethora of debates on capitalism's origins.
Other reviews already pointed out the eurocentric analysis of the book, covering mostly Europe and its colonization of the Americas, and the preoccupation with Columbus. The mystification of indigenous people is also a troubling aspect. In a passage describing a Chichimec Indian woman's dream of a deer riding a horse, symbolizing the Chichimec in a position of power, this what the authors had to say: "The dreamer of this dream was guilty of calling not just for a political insurrection but a cosmic one. . . . The dreamer of this radically different ecology had to be killed, swiftly. To allow her to live would sanction an alternative to capitalism's world-ecology." Or maybe she was simply accused of witchcraft. Surely in 1599 colonizers didn't have the power of hindsight to recognize capitalism as a cohesive system let alone an "alternative to capitalism's world-ecology"?
There were some good historical knowledge, I must admit. The detail in which the authors elaborate their points is worthy of praise. In the end, however, the impression that I got from reading half of this book is that I'm being sold "world-ecology" as a catch-all term to understanding the world (it's not a theory, they said so!). To be brutally honest, that sounds like a grift--a New Age rhetoric of holism and interconnectedness with a sprinkle of Marxist analysis.
September 4, 2018
I honestly picked up this book thinking it was another book detailing the history of the world by looking at a microcosm of selected material objects. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised with its unique critique of human history and economics focused around the seven cheap things being inputs that make a destructive capitalism possible. This is a full on beat down of the excesses of capitalism going right back to what the authors believe are its Enlightenment foundations.
I am not as sour on capitalism as the authors, but they make an honest accounting of its historical and present shortcomings. Their beat down of Columbus is especially refreshing though. Interestingly, the authors mention the Standing Rock protests several times, insinuating that it was very much part of the struggle against capitalism's devaluation of the seven things. It is interesting how that event continues to reverberate in the minds of so many and in different ways.
I am not as sour on capitalism as the authors, but they make an honest accounting of its historical and present shortcomings. Their beat down of Columbus is especially refreshing though. Interestingly, the authors mention the Standing Rock protests several times, insinuating that it was very much part of the struggle against capitalism's devaluation of the seven things. It is interesting how that event continues to reverberate in the minds of so many and in different ways.
August 4, 2019
Çok güzel noktalara değinmişler. Çok önemli ifadeler vardı. Tarihteki çok önemli bağlantıları, neden sonuçları göstermiş.
Ancak cümle yapıları çok karmaşık ve anlaşılmazı zordu. Belki çok uzun vadede okuduğumdan belki yanlış yerlerde yanlış zamanlarda yanlış şekillerde okuduğumdan dolayı bilmiyorum ama kitapta bütünlük, akıcılık, bağlayıcılık, sürükleyicik göremedim. Yordu. İçinde çok önemli fikirler ve öğretiler vardı. Bu sebeple tutundum ve bitirdim ancak keyifle okumadım. Belki çevirisinden dolayı cümleler bu kadar anlaşılmaz ve kopuktu bilmiyorum.
Bütünlüğü ve sürükleyiciliği bulamadım.
Ancak cümle yapıları çok karmaşık ve anlaşılmazı zordu. Belki çok uzun vadede okuduğumdan belki yanlış yerlerde yanlış zamanlarda yanlış şekillerde okuduğumdan dolayı bilmiyorum ama kitapta bütünlük, akıcılık, bağlayıcılık, sürükleyicik göremedim. Yordu. İçinde çok önemli fikirler ve öğretiler vardı. Bu sebeple tutundum ve bitirdim ancak keyifle okumadım. Belki çevirisinden dolayı cümleler bu kadar anlaşılmaz ve kopuktu bilmiyorum.
Bütünlüğü ve sürükleyiciliği bulamadım.
May 15, 2021
Ok I’m back! This book is revolutionary periodt. It’s so well written. Every single sentence, every example, explains the argument they make perfectly. It’s funny in places, heartbreaking in places, infuriating in places, and of course, informative everywhere. If you’re looking for a good book on how capitalism works as a process, as a method of human categorization, and as a way of embedding racism and sexism within itself, this is the ONE!
Read
September 20, 2023A really really thoughtful & enjoyable read! Connects the threads of a lot that I have read before in a useful way, a great primer for thinking about world-ecology & ecological history. Learned a lot particularly about the history of food production & how it links to other capitalistic developments - super interesting to think abt after having been surrounded by cheap food production this summer
Definitely recommend to all my friends who are interested in political ecology! Rly readable & interesting
Definitely recommend to all my friends who are interested in political ecology! Rly readable & interesting
January 12, 2021
Having pushed through the mediocre Sapiens, the nauseatingly myopic and self-important Why Nations Fail and the cunningly disguised Enlightenment Now in the recent past, I’m a bit burned out on sweeping megahistories. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things turned my simmering prejudicial resentment on its head.
The tone of Patel and Moore’s effort at megahistory was better than Pinker, Harari and Acemoglu from the first word of the title: the acknowledgement that they had composed not the history of the world, but a narrative of the past is pleasantly modest in its pretensions. This is an observation about more than just the authors’ humility. Whereas other purveyors of megahistories seek to give the impression that their narrative is complete, authoritative, all-encompassing and all-explaining, Patel and Moore are clear that their entry in the genre aims to encompass and explain only one thing. That the thing they’re explaining is the entire global system of order-to-enable-exploitation is a complication that they take in their stride.
As a consequence of Patel and Moore’s impressive ability to focus in on what’s relevant and blaze past what isn’t, this may be the first book in some years that I not only don’t call too long but which probably could and even should have been longer. There are times where Patel and Moore—no doubt leery of scaring off non-academic readers with a massive page count, or of bogging down their punchy argument in a mire of detail and explanation—sweep ahead of the reader and leave us trailing behind, coated in jargon and reasoning that takes a read-through or two to get straight. At just over two hundred pages this is an astonishingly short book; another hundred pages to clarify, provide examples and ground their sometimes-challenging ontology would only have made it better. This is balanced by the fact that Seven Cheap Things is prodigiously researched and referenced, making up what it lacks in clarity with the promise of deeper understanding at a slight remove.
The argument itself, which is precisely where other megahistories tend to collapse under hubris and historical intertia, is powerful and well-constructed. It is vogue in some circles (as it has been for decades) to rile against “capitalism” or—god help us—the system, an easy bugbear to kick that’s nevertheless difficult to satisfactorily define. Here, Patel and Moore have constructed what amounts to a definition of global capitalism (importantly, they have not produced an indictment; this book juxtaposes rigorous evidence and leaves the interpretation to the reader), which is new and important principally because it exposes the connections and circuits out of which the modern world is woven. Where other writers have done much for the conversations around nutrition, agriculture, energy, labour, landscapes, indigenous peoples, colonialism, biodiversity, time, technology, violence, populism, media and every other subject bemoaned by thinking people the world over, Patel and Moore have tied those strands of thought into a coherent lens. Few other texts could have drawn the connection between the emergence of cheap, destructive industrial food production and the 1980s end of revolutionary culture in the West so compellingly.
The work of producing and communicating new ways of seeing and understanding the world is often undervalued. In the shadow of smug, myopic, specious works from the likes of Pinker, Patel and Moore have put together a timely, important contribution to the global conversation, bringing together the traditions of Jared Diamond and Wendell Berry in a frank, clear-eyed, solutions-oriented crystallisation of twenty-first century post-industrial capitalism.
The tone of Patel and Moore’s effort at megahistory was better than Pinker, Harari and Acemoglu from the first word of the title: the acknowledgement that they had composed not the history of the world, but a narrative of the past is pleasantly modest in its pretensions. This is an observation about more than just the authors’ humility. Whereas other purveyors of megahistories seek to give the impression that their narrative is complete, authoritative, all-encompassing and all-explaining, Patel and Moore are clear that their entry in the genre aims to encompass and explain only one thing. That the thing they’re explaining is the entire global system of order-to-enable-exploitation is a complication that they take in their stride.
As a consequence of Patel and Moore’s impressive ability to focus in on what’s relevant and blaze past what isn’t, this may be the first book in some years that I not only don’t call too long but which probably could and even should have been longer. There are times where Patel and Moore—no doubt leery of scaring off non-academic readers with a massive page count, or of bogging down their punchy argument in a mire of detail and explanation—sweep ahead of the reader and leave us trailing behind, coated in jargon and reasoning that takes a read-through or two to get straight. At just over two hundred pages this is an astonishingly short book; another hundred pages to clarify, provide examples and ground their sometimes-challenging ontology would only have made it better. This is balanced by the fact that Seven Cheap Things is prodigiously researched and referenced, making up what it lacks in clarity with the promise of deeper understanding at a slight remove.
The argument itself, which is precisely where other megahistories tend to collapse under hubris and historical intertia, is powerful and well-constructed. It is vogue in some circles (as it has been for decades) to rile against “capitalism” or—god help us—the system, an easy bugbear to kick that’s nevertheless difficult to satisfactorily define. Here, Patel and Moore have constructed what amounts to a definition of global capitalism (importantly, they have not produced an indictment; this book juxtaposes rigorous evidence and leaves the interpretation to the reader), which is new and important principally because it exposes the connections and circuits out of which the modern world is woven. Where other writers have done much for the conversations around nutrition, agriculture, energy, labour, landscapes, indigenous peoples, colonialism, biodiversity, time, technology, violence, populism, media and every other subject bemoaned by thinking people the world over, Patel and Moore have tied those strands of thought into a coherent lens. Few other texts could have drawn the connection between the emergence of cheap, destructive industrial food production and the 1980s end of revolutionary culture in the West so compellingly.
The work of producing and communicating new ways of seeing and understanding the world is often undervalued. In the shadow of smug, myopic, specious works from the likes of Pinker, Patel and Moore have put together a timely, important contribution to the global conversation, bringing together the traditions of Jared Diamond and Wendell Berry in a frank, clear-eyed, solutions-oriented crystallisation of twenty-first century post-industrial capitalism.
January 16, 2019
I had hoped the breezy title indicated something easily digested- a sort of left wing version of all the guff they put up on shelves in Waterstones these days with titles like "From Apes to Apps: 10 innovations that changed history". It's mushier than the author's other academic work, but not really a populist work to challenge the ignominious "Sapiens", or whatever Steven Pinker writes.
The Seven Cheaps are the binding concepts: Nature, Work, Money, Energy, Care, Food and Lives (though that last one is a trick, something in between a master concept and an attempt at talking about the nation-state without breaking the overall theme). Moore and Patel argue these were reconstructed in the "long 16th century", and became "devalued" in a very broad sense to "afford" a surplus, in another broad sense. These float atop recurring dualisms (nature and society, male and female, coloniser and savage, white and not-white, worker and capitalist), which are all visited by recurring historical moments (among a half-dozen others): the Portuguese landing on Madeira, the voyages of Columbus, the enclosures of England, the end of feudalism in the Netherlands, and the slave trade in Brazil. These moments are chosen by their representing the character of the "seven cheaps", and their related dualisms, and so go on to inform the character of western capitalism today. I don't think this Atlantic focus is a limit, as the world today is indeed defined by these imperial thefts and murders, but "the history of the world" promised is primarily centred on the Atlantic empires circa 1500-1700. The roles played by Asia and the middle east in the development of the "seven cheaps" are diminished, though I am grateful for a limitation in scope for such an expansive book. Indeed I think it could have used more focus.
The "seven" themselves are far too loose to hold the history together, blending together and separating mainly at the will of the authors. Each aspect of each historical moment can be split between these seven endlessly: each cheap is made possible by every other cheap, at every stage. Accordingly, the focus of the book darts around distractingly, now in England, now in Genoa, now on the slave trade, now on the enclosures, which demands far more focus from the reader than one might expect from an attempt at a simplified account of capitalist history. The chapter on how food prices have been reduced feels like the seed this work grew from, since it's fascinating and very novel, but other chapters raised more questions than answers. Are Moore and Patel concerned with the devaluation of these things, or their commodification? if they are devalued, who or what is gaining from it? And what is to be done? The final chapter seemed as lost as I was, and ended with an ambiguous and somewhat mawkish call for reparations, reimagination, recreation, recognition and redistribution- of what? to who? The seven cheaps aren't useful abstraction, but vague, bathetic holism.
The Seven Cheaps are the binding concepts: Nature, Work, Money, Energy, Care, Food and Lives (though that last one is a trick, something in between a master concept and an attempt at talking about the nation-state without breaking the overall theme). Moore and Patel argue these were reconstructed in the "long 16th century", and became "devalued" in a very broad sense to "afford" a surplus, in another broad sense. These float atop recurring dualisms (nature and society, male and female, coloniser and savage, white and not-white, worker and capitalist), which are all visited by recurring historical moments (among a half-dozen others): the Portuguese landing on Madeira, the voyages of Columbus, the enclosures of England, the end of feudalism in the Netherlands, and the slave trade in Brazil. These moments are chosen by their representing the character of the "seven cheaps", and their related dualisms, and so go on to inform the character of western capitalism today. I don't think this Atlantic focus is a limit, as the world today is indeed defined by these imperial thefts and murders, but "the history of the world" promised is primarily centred on the Atlantic empires circa 1500-1700. The roles played by Asia and the middle east in the development of the "seven cheaps" are diminished, though I am grateful for a limitation in scope for such an expansive book. Indeed I think it could have used more focus.
The "seven" themselves are far too loose to hold the history together, blending together and separating mainly at the will of the authors. Each aspect of each historical moment can be split between these seven endlessly: each cheap is made possible by every other cheap, at every stage. Accordingly, the focus of the book darts around distractingly, now in England, now in Genoa, now on the slave trade, now on the enclosures, which demands far more focus from the reader than one might expect from an attempt at a simplified account of capitalist history. The chapter on how food prices have been reduced feels like the seed this work grew from, since it's fascinating and very novel, but other chapters raised more questions than answers. Are Moore and Patel concerned with the devaluation of these things, or their commodification? if they are devalued, who or what is gaining from it? And what is to be done? The final chapter seemed as lost as I was, and ended with an ambiguous and somewhat mawkish call for reparations, reimagination, recreation, recognition and redistribution- of what? to who? The seven cheaps aren't useful abstraction, but vague, bathetic holism.
January 24, 2023
This well-researched and genuine book is also dense, unrelenting, and a little preachy. The authors (including Jason Moore, who isn't listed on this site as a co-author) are looking at seven social/physical categories: work, energy, food, care, nature, money, and lives. For each category, they run down the ways in which capitalism has exploited, misused, and debased our situation. They provide small amounts of analysis along the way, but in general they provide a grab-bag of apparently accurate and depressing facts. They do stress, and sometimes describe, the partial success of various historical rebellions and uprisings, some of which are surprisingly under-examined, such as the long and powerful German peasant revolt in the 1400s. Nonetheless, I was left with lots of evidence for things I already generally believed, and not much insight or new ways of thinking.
January 27, 2020
kitap başlıktaki ucuz şeylerin nasıl kapitalizmin aracılarından biri haline geldiklerini ve şu anda küresel ekoloji içindeki yerlerini tarihsel süreçleriyle birlikte anlatıyor. kitabın benim açımdan en güzel tarafı yaşadığımız küresel çevre felaketini adlandırırken kullanılan antropojenik (insan kökenli) kavramının yerine kapitalojenik (kapitalizm kökenli) kavramını koyması. nihayetinde o kadar da insan merkezli bir çağda değiliz, en azından merkezdekiler tüm insanlar değil. nitekim kitap kapitalistlerin en önemli dayanağının, doğa ve insan ayrımında spektrumun doğa tarafında kalan insanlar olduğunu oldukça açık bir biçimde anlatıyor. hem doğanın hem de doğaya ait insanların nasıl sömürüldüğünün ve kullanıldığının tarihi. hem ekolojik hem de ekonomik tarih olarak okunabilir.
February 28, 2022
didn't read this front to back but i have now taught i think most of the chapters at one point or another over the past few years. i'm continually surprised / impressed by how much students respond to the "long" historical view of things here. might just assign it as a whole next time around.
May 29, 2021
I knew of Raj Patel from his books "Stuff and Starved" and "The Value of Nothing" and from his extensive journalism, so I was expecting something that was thoroughly readable and also well researched (I got that - so many references and footnotes! but yes also readable). What I did not expect was that it would predominantly focus on the historical impacts of capitalism, especially colonial and neoliberal capitalism. I should have focused more on the 'A History' part of the title and a little less on the part in the blurb that describes how "...Patel and ...Moore...analyze today's planetary emergencies."
How capitalism intersects with the prison industrial system, racism, nationalism (and its impact on the environment, on health, and on society) is analysed through current states and with a view to future permutations but the majority of each section: Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy, Lives: is devoted to historical background. An example of this is the 'cheap work' chapter which is very well done in its historical global scope through colonisation to twentieth century USA, China, 1990's South Korea, examining both agricultural and factory settings while later in the book gendered dynamics are examined in the chapter on 'cheap care'.
So these parts were absolutely informative, interesting, and infuriating in a political activist sense but I was left wanting more space given in the book for dealing with 'now'. This may have required a slightly bigger book - I would have been ok with this at only 212pages of body text :)
Fortunately the author has a website, where his work is more centred on current items, and one example is the entry on poultry farming. This is one of the pieces, from the book, that does cover more up to date information and on the website the author expands even further and includes a link to one of the original investigative stories behind there own - I have included a sample and link to full article below and at the very bottom is a link to a free pdf introduction of the book supplied by the author:
https://rajpatel.org/2018/05/21/chick...
https://content.ucpress.edu/chapters/...
How capitalism intersects with the prison industrial system, racism, nationalism (and its impact on the environment, on health, and on society) is analysed through current states and with a view to future permutations but the majority of each section: Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy, Lives: is devoted to historical background. An example of this is the 'cheap work' chapter which is very well done in its historical global scope through colonisation to twentieth century USA, China, 1990's South Korea, examining both agricultural and factory settings while later in the book gendered dynamics are examined in the chapter on 'cheap care'.
So these parts were absolutely informative, interesting, and infuriating in a political activist sense but I was left wanting more space given in the book for dealing with 'now'. This may have required a slightly bigger book - I would have been ok with this at only 212pages of body text :)
Fortunately the author has a website, where his work is more centred on current items, and one example is the entry on poultry farming. This is one of the pieces, from the book, that does cover more up to date information and on the website the author expands even further and includes a link to one of the original investigative stories behind there own - I have included a sample and link to full article below and at the very bottom is a link to a free pdf introduction of the book supplied by the author:
https://rajpatel.org/2018/05/21/chick...
CAAIR was set up by chicken executives so that survivors of the opioid epidemic might pray by day and work on the understaffed night-shift at slaughterhouses. Do read the full story, as researched by the Center for Investigative Reporting.
https://revealnews.org/article/they-t...
......
For millennia, most humans survived through more or less intimate relations with land and sea. Even those who didn’t were closely connected to the tasks and objects of labour. Human survival depended on holistic, not fragmented, knowledge: fishers, nomads, farmers, healers, cooks and many others experienced and practised their work in a way directly connected to the web of life. Farmers, for instance, had to know soils, weather patterns, seeds – in short, everything from planting to harvest. That didn’t mean work was pleasant – slaves were often treated brutally. Nor did it mean that the relations of work were equitable: guild masters exploited journeymen, lords exploited serfs, men exploited women, the old exploited the young. But work was premised on a holistic sense of production and a connection to wider worlds of life and community.
In the 16th century, that began to shift. The enterprising Dutch or English farmer – and the Madeiran, then Brazilian, sugar planter – was increasingly connected to growing international markets for processed goods, and correspondingly more interested in the relationship between work time and the harvest. International markets pushed local transformations. Land in England was consolidated though enclosure, which concurrently “freed” a growing share of the rural population from the commons that they had tended, supported and survived on. These newly displaced peasants were free to find other work, and free to starve or face imprisonment if they failed.
This history is alive and well in the modern chicken nugget. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the US, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to poultry workers. It’s hard to find staff when, according to one study in Alabama, 86% of employees who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. To fill the gaps in the labour force, some chicken operators use prison labour, paid at 25 cents an hour. In Oklahoma, chicken company executives returned to a colonial fusion of work and faith, setting up an addiction treatment centre in 2007, Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery. With judges steering addicts to treatment instead of jail, the recovery programme had a ready supply of workers. At CAAIR, prayer was supplemented with unpaid work on chicken productionlines as part of a recovery therapy. If you worked and prayed hard enough for the duration of your treatment, you’d be allowed to re-enter society.
CAAIR’s recruits were predominantly young and white, but the majority of poultry workers are people of colour. Latinx immigrants are a vital force in US agriculture, and the delivery of their cheap work was made possible by class restructuring on two fronts. One, in the US, was a strong movement in the 1980s by newly aggressive meat-packing firms to destroy union power and replace unionised workers with low-wage immigrant labour. The other was the destabilisation of Mexico’s agrarian order after 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which resulted in flows of cheap immigrant labour – unemployed workers displaced by capitalism’s ecology from one side of the US border to the other.
A line on a map between two states is a powerful abstraction, one that has been used recently by the far right to recruit and spread fear, and for much longer by capitalists in search of ever cheaper and more profitable workers. Under capitalism, national territories, locally owned land and new migrating workers are produced simultaneously. ....
https://content.ucpress.edu/chapters/...
December 25, 2023
Vahşi kapitalizmi -kapitalizm ekolojisi diyo kitap-dunyanin neden bu kadar boktan bir hale geldiğini, insanın doğayı nasıl tükettiğini, yerli halkların nasıl yok edildiğini, yedi başlık altında anlatıyor kitap. Bunu yaparken de sevgili karindaşimdan yıllarca dinlediğim sol jargonu kullanmadan yapıyor bunu .Mesela kitapta sadece 1-2 kere Marx geçiyor, Lenin, Engels, proleterya, işçi sınıfı ,emperyalizm gibi kelimelerin esamesi bıle okunmuyor -ki bu iyi bisey-
Çeviri bazi bölümlerde çok zorladı, bilhassa sonlarda.
Ozellikle ucuz bakım bölümü beni çok etkiledi. Evde çalışan anneler, ablalar, kadınlar ve onların temizlik, yemek, bulaşık, çocuk bakımı vb ev işlerini herhangi bir karsilik-odeme- almaksızın fedakarca yapıyor oluşları, buna bir standart getirilemiyor olması, boşa giden ömürler gerçekten çok acıydı. Muazzam bir emek sömürüsünü cennet anaların ayağının altında vb benzeri kutsiyet addeden süslü cümlelerle perdeliyor erkek egemen toplumlar.
Ben mi neyim? Evet erkeğim ben de, ev işlerini asgari duzeyde paylaşımcı bir perspektifte ele alan, reviewimi yazip çamaşır katlıycam misal:)
Çeviri bazi bölümlerde çok zorladı, bilhassa sonlarda.
Ozellikle ucuz bakım bölümü beni çok etkiledi. Evde çalışan anneler, ablalar, kadınlar ve onların temizlik, yemek, bulaşık, çocuk bakımı vb ev işlerini herhangi bir karsilik-odeme- almaksızın fedakarca yapıyor oluşları, buna bir standart getirilemiyor olması, boşa giden ömürler gerçekten çok acıydı. Muazzam bir emek sömürüsünü cennet anaların ayağının altında vb benzeri kutsiyet addeden süslü cümlelerle perdeliyor erkek egemen toplumlar.
Ben mi neyim? Evet erkeğim ben de, ev işlerini asgari duzeyde paylaşımcı bir perspektifte ele alan, reviewimi yazip çamaşır katlıycam misal:)
November 10, 2020
كتاب عظيم!
قراءة واحدة لا تكفيه، بل يحتاج لدراسة...
الكتاب قراءة جديدة في تاريخ نشوء الرأسمالية، من خلال تفكيك العناصر التي ساهمت في بنائها منذ خمسة قرون. هذه العناصر التي امتدت عبر التاريخ ومازالت تعمل بشكل علائقي واعتمادية للحفاظ على "نظام" الرأسمالية...
هذه الطريقة من التفكير والتي ولّدت هذا التحليل العميق تجعلني أشير من جديد لأهمية التفكير النظمي Systems Thinking، والذي ذكرته في مراجعاتي لأكثر من كتاب. هذه الطريقة توسّع وتعمّق النظر للقضايا ليس من حيث عناصرها المكونة لها فحسب، ولكن العناصر والبيئة التي توجد فيها والعلاقات وآليات العمل والتفاعل والاستمرار والتكيّف وغير ذلك...
الكتاب لا يكتفي بذلك ذلك فقط، ولكن يضع الفكرة الجوهرية في قلب هذا النظام، وهي فكرة "ترخيص" هذه العناصر، وأقول بحسب ما ألتقطته لهذا المفهموم "الحطّ" من قيمة هذه العناصر السبعة... بدون فكرة الحط/الترخيص لن تقوم الرأسمالية...
فالإنسان من الأساس موجود في العالم داخل شبكة من العلاقات:
علاقته مع الآخر، الطبيعة، وسائل الانتاج وغير ذلك... والنظرة الناظمة لهذه العلاقات في الرأسمالية هي الترخيص. وفي تفصيل لها هي تحويل كل عنصر من هذه العناصر إلى أداة خادِمة من أجل المصلحة/الربح، من خلال النظر إلى الربحية الكامنة بداخلها وليس هناك أي نظرة أخرى.
الكتاب اعتمد على الشخصية الأساسية/الأولى التي حملت هذه الأفكار: كريستوفر كولومبس، فعند وصوله العالم الجديد لم يرى فيه عجائب الطبيعة وتنوعها، واختلاف انسانها عنه وغير طلك من التصورات الطبيعية/الفطرية. بل كانت مقاربته في كيف يستغل موارد الأرض ويستغل انسانها لجني الربح.
العناصر السبعة هي:
الطبيعة-المال-العمل-الرعاية-الطعام-الطاقة والحياة
كتاب مهم وجوهري من مفكر وناشط عظيم Raj Patel والأكاديمي Jason W. Moore لفهم العالم الذي نعيش فيه
أنصح به وبشدة
قراءة واحدة لا تكفيه، بل يحتاج لدراسة...
الكتاب قراءة جديدة في تاريخ نشوء الرأسمالية، من خلال تفكيك العناصر التي ساهمت في بنائها منذ خمسة قرون. هذه العناصر التي امتدت عبر التاريخ ومازالت تعمل بشكل علائقي واعتمادية للحفاظ على "نظام" الرأسمالية...
هذه الطريقة من التفكير والتي ولّدت هذا التحليل العميق تجعلني أشير من جديد لأهمية التفكير النظمي Systems Thinking، والذي ذكرته في مراجعاتي لأكثر من كتاب. هذه الطريقة توسّع وتعمّق النظر للقضايا ليس من حيث عناصرها المكونة لها فحسب، ولكن العناصر والبيئة التي توجد فيها والعلاقات وآليات العمل والتفاعل والاستمرار والتكيّف وغير ذلك...
الكتاب لا يكتفي بذلك ذلك فقط، ولكن يضع الفكرة الجوهرية في قلب هذا النظام، وهي فكرة "ترخيص" هذه العناصر، وأقول بحسب ما ألتقطته لهذا المفهموم "الحطّ" من قيمة هذه العناصر السبعة... بدون فكرة الحط/الترخيص لن تقوم الرأسمالية...
فالإنسان من الأساس موجود في العالم داخل شبكة من العلاقات:
علاقته مع الآخر، الطبيعة، وسائل الانتاج وغير ذلك... والنظرة الناظمة لهذه العلاقات في الرأسمالية هي الترخيص. وفي تفصيل لها هي تحويل كل عنصر من هذه العناصر إلى أداة خادِمة من أجل المصلحة/الربح، من خلال النظر إلى الربحية الكامنة بداخلها وليس هناك أي نظرة أخرى.
الكتاب اعتمد على الشخصية الأساسية/الأولى التي حملت هذه الأفكار: كريستوفر كولومبس، فعند وصوله العالم الجديد لم يرى فيه عجائب الطبيعة وتنوعها، واختلاف انسانها عنه وغير طلك من التصورات الطبيعية/الفطرية. بل كانت مقاربته في كيف يستغل موارد الأرض ويستغل انسانها لجني الربح.
العناصر السبعة هي:
الطبيعة-المال-العمل-الرعاية-الطعام-الطاقة والحياة
كتاب مهم وجوهري من مفكر وناشط عظيم Raj Patel والأكاديمي Jason W. Moore لفهم العالم الذي نعيش فيه
أنصح به وبشدة
June 8, 2020
The title of the book can be somehow misleading, as, lets say 97% of the story is about Europe and America in 1400s to 1700s, which is totally not the “history of world” as claimed.
There are seven cheap things; nature, money, food, work, care, energy and live. And I might have expected too much about care chapter because I thought this would explain cheap care in terms of bad health care policies affecting people more than half of this world and encouraging inequality in today’s society. On the other hand, it focuses on the gender equality and women’s rights. (Which I find pretty interesting tho.)
So my opinion is this book might not be a perfect book for those in the beginning step (like me) who want to explore the capitalism in the overall and contemporary aspect.
There are seven cheap things; nature, money, food, work, care, energy and live. And I might have expected too much about care chapter because I thought this would explain cheap care in terms of bad health care policies affecting people more than half of this world and encouraging inequality in today’s society. On the other hand, it focuses on the gender equality and women’s rights. (Which I find pretty interesting tho.)
So my opinion is this book might not be a perfect book for those in the beginning step (like me) who want to explore the capitalism in the overall and contemporary aspect.
January 30, 2023
Kapitalizmi tüm çıplaklığı ve çarpıklığıyla ortaya koyan harika bir kitap. Okurken ucuzun ve ucuzlatmanın ne olduğunu, düzenin nasıl sermaye sahipleri dışında herkesin minimumuna sahip olarak yaşamaya devam etmek üzere güdüldüğü, bugün fütursuzca kullandığımız doğal kaynakların aslında doğal varlıklar olduğu, bunları sömürmenin aklanması işin oynanan oyunları akıcı bir anlatı ve kademeli bir örgüyle anlatıyor. Kitabın en güzel kısmı da, argümanlarını referanslar ile güçlendirmesi. Öyle ki her bölümün 100+ kaynağı var ki bu da kitabın yaklaşık 40 sayfalık kaynakçasını oluşturuyor. Herkesin okuması, üzerine oturumlarca tartıimamız gereken bi’ kitap.
March 4, 2020
Dit boek laat zien hoe in de tijd gezien de zeven belangrijkste elementen eigenlijk de toekomst van onze planeet bepalen. Als we een gemiddeld mens zouden laten leven zoals we nu leven zeker in de Westerse wereld heeft eigenlijk elk mens gemiddeld 4 planeten nodig om de kwaliteit van dit leven in stand te houden. Hieruit wordt duidelijk hoezeer wij de planeet overvragen. Soms wordt er ingewikkelde taal gebruikt die het lezen soms bemoeilijkt en volgens mij vermijdbaar is. Boek geeft wel erg interessante inzichten waar je niet een twee drie bij stilstaat. Kortom de moeite waard.
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