A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

“If capitalism is a disease, then it’s one that eats your flesh—and then profits from selling your bones for fertilizer, and then invests that profit to reap the cane harvest, and then sells that harvest to tourists who pay to visit your headstone. But even this description isn’t adequate. The frontier works only through connection, fixing its failures by siphoning life from elsewhere.”

The authors here introduce the theme of Capitalism’s Dependence on Frontiers by arguing that capitalism functions through “connection” and “siphoning life.” This introduces their argument that capitalism is a world ecology that affects nature and society, extending far beyond the realm of mere economics.

“When the processes are larger in scale, it becomes easier to think about ‘social’ and ‘natural’ processes as if they were independent of each other. It is somehow easier to grasp the immediate relationship to soil and work of a farmers’ market than a global financial market. But Wall Street is just as much coproduced through nature as that farmers’ market.”

This passage argues that financial markets are as “coproduced through nature” as farmers’ markets, even if the ties seem less apparent. The authors thus assert that capitalism interweaves “social” and “natural” processes at all scales, undermining The Conceptual Divide Between Nature and Society.

“Cheap things are thus not really things at all—but rather strategies adopted by capitalism to survive and manage crises, gambits made to appear as real and independent entities by the original sin of cheap nature.”

Here, cheap things are called “strategies” and “gambits,” using game metaphors to present them as deliberate capitalist techniques. The religious allusion to “original sin” ironically suggests these strategies’ immorality and trickery in presenting cheap things as “real and independent entities.”

“Money isn’t capital. Capital is journalism’s shorthand for money or, worse, a stock of something that can be transformed into something else […] For Marx and for us, capital happens only in the live transformation of money into commodities and back again […] It is through the live circulation of this money, and in the relations around it, that capitalism happens.”

The authors here present their definition of capital, which they claim aligns with Karl Marx’s (See: Background) conception. In stressing the “live transformation” and “live circulation” of money as the essence of capital, the authors present capital as an active force that impacts every level of day-to-day life in a dynamic way. Their invocation of Marx also positions their work as a continuation of earlier radical critiques of capitalism.

“Neither commodities nor money is capital. This circuit becomes capital when money is sunk into commodity production, in an ever-expanding cycle. Capital is a process in which money flows through nature. The trouble here is that capital supposes infinite expansion within a finite web of life.”

This quote extends the point made in the previous quote: Neither money nor commodities are in themselves capital since capital emerges from their “live” interaction in an “ever-expanding cycle.” The passage also raises a contradiction, phrased almost as a threat—“the trouble here”—of “infinite expansion within a finite web of life.” The authors thereby gesture toward what they regard as capitalism’s self-undermining logic.

“Real abstractions both describe the world and make it. That’s why real abstractions are often invisible, and why we use ideas like world-ecology to challenge our readers into seeing Nature and Society as hidden forms of violence. These are undetonated words. Real abstractions aren’t innocent: they reflect the interests of the powerful and license them to organize the world.”

“Real abstractions” is an oxymoron highlighting how intangible categories act on the physical world. The metaphor of “undetonated words” makes language itself seem explosively dangerous. This underscores the book’s revisionist mission to uncover the forgotten violence behind early modern abstractions of The Conceptual Divide Between Nature and Society.

“Alternative forms of knowledge about nature were seditious. This is why witchcraft and Indigenous knowledge constituted existential threats to capitalism, challenging both its epistemology and its ontology. Inca experiments in agriculture, Mesoamerican advances in soil enrichment, and Chinese medicine were forms of knowledge that had to be confined to the boundaries of folklore, if not extinguished outright.”

This quote presents capitalism as waging war on other knowledges, which pose existential threats to its “epistemology and ontology.” Patel and Moore’s examples of denigrated knowledges—Incan agriculture, Mesoamerican soil enrichment, Chinese medicine, witchcraft—span the globe to show the world-historical scale of destruction.

“Indigenous People continue to resist, and continue to face slaughter—though the language of the Capitalocene tells us that such people aren’t being annihilated. They’re being developed.”

Here, the authors counter the capitalist narrative of development and progress by highlighting the violent suppression of Indigenous and colonized cultures that such economic “development” has often entailed. In stressing how emerging and established capitalist economies depend on finding new lands and peoples to commodify, the authors invoke Capitalism’s Dependence on Frontiers.

“At the origins of capitalism’s ecology is a cycle that goes beyond that of money into commodities and back again. A peculiar and very modern magic lies here. States wanted the loot of war but needed money to pay their soldiers. Without wars they couldn’t acquire the riches that they needed in part to pay for the previous war. War, money, war.”

In this quote, the repetition of the war-money-war cycle highlights the self-perpetuating feedback loop between capital accumulation and state violence. The authors’ phrasing of a “peculiar and very modern magic” suggests the mysterious nature of this process, while the idea of it being “very modern” challenges the idea that there is something natural or inherently logical about the capitalist system.

“Unless it forms part of circuits of exchange, silver is just shiny dirt. It’s the fusion of commodity production and exchange that turns it into capital.”

Patel and Moore’s analogy of silver as “shiny dirt” deflates its apparent value to emphasize how its worth is constructed. Only “fusion” through capitalist circuits transforms it into capital. The passage aims to denaturalize the capitalist constructions underlying seemingly inherent values.

“[A]lthough Europe features in it, capitalism’s story isn’t a Eurocentric one. The rise of capitalism integrated life and power from Potosí to Manila, from Goa to Amsterdam.”

This quote rejects Eurocentric interpretations to insist that capitalism was a world-historical integration “from Potosí to Manila,” thereby invoking Capitalism’s Dependence on Frontiers. The global place names demonstrate capitalism’s planetary scale from its early modern origins, decentering Europe. This reinforces the book’s post-Eurocentric approach.

“Today, those frontiers are smaller than ever before, and the volume of capital looking for new investment is greater than ever before. This unprecedented situation explains something of the extraordinary coupling of radical wealth inequality and profound financial instability that now shapes our world. War and violence drip from every pore of this coupling, but this time there’s no meaningful promise of creative destruction—only destruction.”

Here, the ominous tone presents a world of shrinking frontiers of accumulation amidst unprecedented concentrations of mobile capital. The authors assert that capitalism is an unsustainable system, arguing that the only way to avoid such “destruction” is to reject The Conceptual Divide Between Nature and Society in constructing a post-capitalist society.

“Putting most humans into the category of Nature rather than Society enabled an audacious act of frontier bookkeeping. The salaries of soldiers, administrators, and sailors were charged in and paid through a cash nexus. But the volume of work produced through the cash nexus depended on much greater flows of work outside that nexus […] The appropriation—really, a kind of ongoing theft—of the unpaid work of ‘women, nature and colonies’ is the fundamental condition of the exploitation of labor power in the commodity system. You can’t have one without the other.”

Patel and Moore stress The Conceptual Divide Between Nature and Society, revealing how the “appropriation” of unpaid work extracted from people grouped into the “nature” category made possible the productivity of waged labor for those considered part of “society.” They offer a stark claim—“You can’t have one without the other”—emphasizing that the often-invisible labor of unpaid care work is crucial to the forms of work that capitalism deems valuable and productive.

“As we saw in chapter 1, 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.”

The authors use the process of enclosure to illustrate capitalism’s world-ecological restructuring of land, labor, and life. The scare quotes around “freed” highlight the irony that the peasants’ “freedom” from the commons left them “free to starve,” highlighting the dark underbelly of market “freedom” and stressing How Capitalism Affects the Web of Life.

“Every global factory needs a global farm: industrial, service, and technological enterprises rely on the extraction of work and cheap nature, barely accounted for, to thrive. The apps on your iPhone, designed in Cupertino, California, are coded by self-exploiting independent software engineers, depend on chips that are assembled in draconian workplaces in China, and run on minerals extracted in bloody conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

The “global factory” and “global farm” underscore capitalism as a planetary system, highlighting Capitalism’s Dependence on Frontiers. The parallelism of “industrial, service, and technological enterprises” shows the system’s scope. The authors use emotive terms like “draconian” and “bloody” paired with specific places and commodities—iPhones, Congo minerals, Chinese factories—to illustrate the “extraction” on which capitalism relies.

“At the origins of capitalism, strategies used to corral Indigenous Peoples into the pen of Nature were also used to create and manage a category of humans who would perform unpaid care work: women.”

Here, the “pen of Nature” metaphor suggests oppressive containment of those relegated to the zone of nature, suggesting that they were treated similar to animals and invoking The Conceptual Divide Between Nature and Society. Patel and Moore’s analogy between Indigenous peoples and unpaid women’s work shows how the nature-society binary intersects with racial and gender hierarchies. They position this binary as foundational by saying that it lies “at the origins of capitalism.”

“Comprehend the destruction of the commons under enclosure, understand the new relations between human production and reproduction, and as a bonus you can solve the mystery of the misogynist plough. It’s just that you have to go back not two hundred years but many more to discover how ploughing first became a tradition, fed by the bones of the social systems it destroyed.”

The authors use ironic hyperbole to call the plough’s origins a “mystery,” wryly personifying the plow as “misogynist.” The authors employ a visceral “bones” metaphor to convey the violence of this history, underscoring the long, slow violence of capitalism remaking relations of production.

“The frontier of cheap care has deepened and expanded, with vast international networks of care service providers remitting funds across borders to help sustain households elsewhere. The global household has always done the work that makes possible the global factory and the global farm.”

The authors extend the book’s frontier motif to social reproduction with the “frontier of cheap care.” They argue that women’s undervalued care work is essential for the continuation of capitalist production, once more emphasizing what they regard as capitalism’s influence in the realm of social and gender relations.

“Grain prices held stable in western European cities as a result—but for capitalism, ever hungry for economic growth, stability is never enough.”

The authors personify capitalism as “ever hungry” to present its drive as insatiable, invoking Capitalism’s Dependence on Frontiers and reflecting their wider argument that capitalism is an inherently unsustainable system. The authors thus present boom-and-bust cycles and economic instability as inevitable byproducts of capitalist economics.

“To those with a romantic view of where their food comes from, meat appears to be a raw ingredient rather than a processed one. Yet the industrial labor techniques of simplification, compartmentalization, and specialization first developed in sugar production have found their way into meat production too […] Raw meat in the supermarket is, in other words, cooked up by a sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism’s ecology.”

The authors use the example of raw supermarket meat to make the normally hidden processing visible. They employ irony to highlight the alienation between production and consumption, wishing to highlight How Capitalism Affects the Web of Life. The authors provide examples of industrial techniques applied to meat processing—“simplification, compartmentalization, specialization”—to reveal the constructed, industrial character behind the apparently “raw” commodity.

“With little control over their lives, workers felt the company town akin to refeudalization rather than benign capitalism. When the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company squeezed their wages, coal miners organized.”

The authors suggest that workers felt company towns were akin to “refeudalization rather than benign capitalism,” criticizing the idea of the company towns as progress. The authors frame the workers’ resistance as a direct response to the Rockefellers’ greed.

“To avoid default, indebted countries, predominantly in the Global South, turned to the only lenders who’d consider them: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, institutions that could administer austerity programs, small governments, and free markets through their own shock doctrines. Petrodollars thus made possible the sorry history of neoliberal governance.”

Here, the authors describe the process whereby less wealthy countries are compelled to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for loans, which the authors present as predatory and highly conditional, as the loans come with “neoliberal governance.” The authors present these modern loans as a part of Capitalism’s Dependence on Frontiers, with organizations like the IMF using financial power to expand the capitalist and neoliberal system into more regions of the globe.

“Humans who resembled the authors sat at one limit of the hierarchy. At the other end were ‘monsters’ […] Like savage, to which it is kin, the term monster ought to trigger alarm for its association with beings that cross the boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. Monstrosity licensed the idea of pure blood—you couldn’t have a pure bloodline without the threat of ‘loathsome copulation’ to sully it.”

The authors set off the archaic, eugenic language of “monsters” and “loathsome copulation” with scare quotes to highlight the racism of Enlightenment hierarchies. The authors use this language to demonstrate The Conceptual Divide Between Nature and Society in Enlightenment thought, in which non-white, non-male people were often dehumanized.