A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017)

- PICKED BY ANKE-
December 2021

In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet scholars Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore explain the central role of capitalism and colonialism in what is often referred to as the “Anthropocene”. Targeting a broad audience, they argue that in order to keep turning profits, capitalists are endlessly making things cheaper at the expense of the human and more-than-human well-being.

For example, by violent conquest of people and nature (only to serve as “natural resources”), or by relegating work like care to unpaid labor mostly performed by women. Patel and Moore discuss how nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives have been made cheap and how this has resulted in the catastrophic human impact upon the planet: from fossil fuels to massive chicken bone deposits.