Frontiers

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

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

by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel

How has capitalism devastated the planet—and what can we do about it? 

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: 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 the Earth.  

In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analysing 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. 

In the Introduction to their book Patel and Moore have a section headed FRONTIERS AND CHEAPNESS. Here are some of the salient points they make. 

Often in visualizations of the spread of capitalism, the image that offers itself is an asteroid impact or the spread of a disease, which starts at ground or patient zero and metastasizes across the planet. Capitalist frontiers require a more sophisticated science fiction. 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 pofit 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. a frontier is a site where crises encourage new strategies for profit. Frontiers are frontiers because they are the encounter zones between capital and all kinds of nature - humans included. They are always, then, about reducing the costs of doing business. 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 that circulate through an expanding series of exchanges. But more important, frontiers are sites where power is exercised - and not just economic power. Through frontiers, states and empires use violence, culture, and knowledge to mobilize natures at low cost. It's this cheapening that makes frontiers so central to modern history and that makes possible capitalism's expansive markets.