A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

By: Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

Narrated by: Simon Mattacks

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. 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.

©2017 Raj Patel and Jason Moore (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Read it!

Great writing for the grander ideas that are woven together. It isn't often that I find many thinkers pulling together references from different disciplines for a larger perspective on capitolism's shaping of history. However, I only wish there was more to it's vision for the future than it's exquisite discriptions of the past to the current.

Comprehensive and eye-opening

I have read several books on the ecology and economy of modern times, and this is by far the most comprehensive and the most eye-opening analytical summary of the matter.

Brilliant!

Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Marx, Roland Barthes and so many other philosophers, activists, and revolutionaries are reading this from beyond the grave and applauding! Just fantastic!

Need to listen!

Great analysis as well as a vision for a better world. Offers answers and solutions.

A remarkable exposé & synthesis of the Ponzi scheme that capitalism is and always has been.

This book is an astounding and well organized synthesis of history - environmental & social (political, economic & cultural) - that exposes the unifying threads of unsustainable exploitation that has today brought us to a precipice. Nothing is really cheap; unacknowledged costs are often high. Where in the past, as resources are depleted, capitalists have increased the level of coercive force applied, or moved on to rape more virgin lands, the authors note that with climate change, the usurpation of the commons now extends to the very atmosphere upon which all life depends. And in the conclusion they offer some very initial ideas of alternative structures. A lot to ponder, a dramatic call to face our current reality honestly, as well as to develop alternatives immediately. Critical reading!