The history of the world in 7 cheap things

About the author

Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist, and academic. He is a research professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior research associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes …

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Jason W. Moore teaches world history and world-ecology at Binghamton University and is coordinator of the World-Ecology Research Network. He is the author of several books, including Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of …

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‘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

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things Summary

Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things” by Raj Patel. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics.

SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. This one-page guide includes a plot summary and brief analysis of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things by Raj Patel.In their political polemic A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017), leftwing writers Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore argue that in its endless drive to make things cheaper to produce and consume, the capitalist system has exacted an enormous cost on the natural world and human life. The cheap “things” of the title are nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. In practice, Patel and Moore argue, these seven categories are mutually interdependent, with the cheapness of each making possible the cheapness of the others.

Introducing the topic of cheap food, Patel and Moore make the case that the true symbol of modernity is neither the automobile nor the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget. These morsels of cheap food are a product of the cheapness of the other six “things.”

McNuggets are made from a bird bred to the point that it can barely walk. Sixty billion are killed every year. This is cheap nature. The chickens are slaughtered, processed, and distributed by workers who collectively receive only 2 cents from every dollar spent on fast-food chicken, so cheap work also plays a role in creating the McNugget. The physical pressures of poultry work frequently result in injuries, meaning that workers depend on the care of family members either to stay in work or to recover for work. This care contributes to the production of the McNugget, but it is entirely unpaid, so it’s very cheap care. The large-scale rearing of chickens is extremely energy intensive, depending on the availability of cheap fossil fuels to, for example, heat enormous barns—introducing cheap energy to the process. The whole industry from top to bottom is subsidized by national governments: cheap money for the corporations involved.

Finally, the McNugget costs lives: not just chickens’ lives and sometimes workers’ lives, but the lives and livelihoods of indigenous people cleared from land “needed” to grow chicken feed. These are cheap lives.

The McNugget, then, illustrates how the seven cheap “things” make one another possible. It also illustrates another of the authors’ central theses. They point out that long after humans have disappeared from the Earth, future inhabitants of our planet may examine the fossil record of our era and be astonished by the number of chicken bones it contains. In other words, the mass production of chicken carcasses is a feature of what the authors call the “Capitalocene” era: the period in which the activities of capitalism are leaving a permanent trace in the geological record. The authors propose this term as a replacement for the more popular “Anthropocene,” arguing that the latter is inaccurate because humans existed for a hundred thousand years without leaving any long-term traces. It is capitalism, they argue, which is scorching the earth, not mankind per se.

At the same time as tracing the links between the seven cheap “things,” the authors fill out the history of cheapness—that is, the history of the Capitalocene. They argue that the Capitalocene era began with European colonial expansion in the 16th century. In this era emerged a feature which the authors see as central to capitalism: growth through bloody expansion at a frontier or frontiers. “Capitalism not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers.”

Each chapter introduces its subject—one of the cheap “things”—by tracing its origins in the era of colonial expansion. All but one, in fact, are traced directly to Christopher Columbus, who comes to stand as a symbol for capitalism itself.

The chapter on cheap money begins with the atrocious conditions in the silver mines of Spain’s 16th-century colonies, where indigenous peoples were worked to death. Indigenous people (and European peasants) were the first “cheap lives,” the unpaid labor of these workers’ womenfolk the first “cheap care.” From this origin, the authors trace the development of cheap money through industrialization to financialization.

Patel and Moore introduce the topic of cheap nature through the early Spanish colony of Madeira. In 1455, the island was covered in old-growth forest. By the 1550s it was treeless. Instead, the soil was being exhausted by sugar plantations, a system that was rapidly exported to the New World. This is cheap nature. Patel and Moore argue that the same willingness to exploit and exhaust natural resources continues to characterize capitalist expansion to this day.

The sugar colonies of the New World depended entirely on the cheap labor—and lives—of African slaves. The idea of cheap work had been in circulation in Europe since the Middle Ages, when the ruling classes responded to the Black Death by preventing peasants from asking for higher wages. It is still, the authors argue, in circulation today, from the sweatshops of the developing world to the ever-decreasing real wages of service-sector workers in the US.

In the colonial era, cheap work and cheap food were themselves also cheap energy: they provided the muscle power needed to expand profits. Since the late 19th century, cheap energy has come from the fossil fuel industry. Patel and Moore examine the impact of this industry not only on nature, but on food, work, and the other cheap “things.”

From the colonial era to the present, cheap care has primarily taken the form of the care work performed domestically by women. The capitalist system, the authors argue, insists on dividing “work” from “care” in order to justify its failure to remunerate the latter. In fact, to examine work without examining care is not only unjustifiable but nearly impossible, “like writing an ecology of fish without mentioning the water.”

Women’s lives have historically been cheap under capitalism, as have the lives of indigenous people, people of color, and the poor. Patel and Moore argue that capitalism creates these distinctions in order to enforce the frontiers it needs for its survival. Those beyond the frontier can be exploited to make things cheaper for those inside.

Patel and Moore end their polemic with a vision for the future. In broad strokes, they advocate the redistribution of not only economic but natural and cultural resources. They also argue for a “reparation ecology,” which establishes the true value of the natural resources which have been cheaply exploited during centuries of capitalism. This program is less a practical call to arms than an invitation to dream, as the authors put it, “seditiously.”