A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapter 6-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 2 Summary: “Cheap Money”

Patel and Moore explore the historical relationship between finance, state power, and the exploitation of nature in the development of capitalism. They argue that the creation of “cheap money”—a secure form of currency that can be relied upon to facilitate commerce and meet the needs of the ruling class—has been essential to the expansion of capitalism and imperialism since the 15th century.

The authors begin by discussing how Columbus’s voyages were financed by Genoese bankers, who had become the primary creditors to the Spanish crown. This relationship exemplifies the early ties between finance and state power in the era of European exploration and colonization. They then trace the origins of modern money to the silver mines of Central Europe in the 15th century, which provided the material basis for the growth of trade and the rise of the Fugger banking family.

Patel and Moore then turn to the role of Genoese banking in financing Spanish imperialism. They argue that the Genoese were able to achieve mastery over cheap money by financing Spain’s colonial exploits and reaping the rewards in the form of access to American silver. This relationship between the Genoese bankers and the Spanish state established an enduring pattern in which credit was used to organize global nature, world power, and planetary work. The authors highlight how this dynamic laid the foundation for the emergence of a global capitalist ecology.

The authors then discuss how the increasing costs of warfare in the 16th century led to a shift from military power to financial power as states became increasingly dependent on borrowing to finance their armies. They argue that this shift was accompanied by the rise of modern colonialism, as European states sought to appropriate the unpaid work of human and natural elements in order to generate a regular stream of wealth. The authors emphasize that this process of appropriation was essential to the functioning of the emerging capitalist world ecology.

Patel and Moore use the example of silver mining in Potosí (in present-day Bolivia) to illustrate how the exploitation of Indigenous labor and the destruction of local environments were essential to the production of cheap money and the expansion of global trade. Patel and Moore detail how the exploitation of Indigenous labor through the mita system and the destruction of local environments through deforestation and mercury pollution were integral to the expansion of global trade. They argue that the flow of silver from the Americas to Europe and Asia created a new planetary ecology that integrated life and power across vast distances, with profound implications for both human societies and natural systems.

The authors then turn to the interdependent relationship between bankers and governments, arguing that while governments rely on bankers to fund wars, bankers also depend on governments to secure property rights, subdue populations, and defend the underlying system of cheap nature. Patel and Moore suggest that this symbiotic relationship has led to recurring cycles of accumulation, in which profits are generated through the exploitation of new frontiers, followed by periods of financialization and crisis. They note that these cycles have been accompanied by shifts in the balance of power between capitalists and bankers, with finance capital tending to dominate in periods of material expansion.

Situating contemporary financial capitalism within this historical context, Patel and Moore argue that the increasing sophistication of financial engineering is an extension of centuries-old patterns of accumulation based on the appropriation of nature and the exploitation of labor. They suggest that the current era of financialization is characterized by a lack of new frontiers for profitable investment, leading to unprecedented levels of inequality and instability. The authors warn that this situation is producing a coupling of radical wealth inequality and profound financial instability, with the ever-present threat of war and violence.

Patel and Moore conclude by emphasizing the ongoing relevance of these historical dynamics in contemporary cases such as the Greek debt crisis. They argue that the austerity measures imposed on Greece by its creditors represent a continuation of the centuries-old pattern of appropriating nature and exploiting labor in the service of debt repayment. The authors end by stressing the need to understand the deep historical roots of the world’s current ecological and economic crises to effectively address them.

Chapter 3 Summary: “Cheap Work”

Patel and Moore argue that the creation of “cheap work” was essential to the development of capitalism. They trace the historical roots of enslavement and forced labor, showing how the colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade provided a vast pool of exploitable labor. The authors emphasize how the categorization of Indigenous peoples and Africans as part of nature rather than society enabled their subjugation and exploitation. They discuss how legal and religious justifications, such as papal bulls and the Spanish Requerimiento, were used to legitimize the enslavement and dispossession of non-European peoples. Patel and Moore also highlight the importance of the Valladolid debate—a moral debate to discuss the rights of Indigenous peoples—in establishing the idea that Indigenous peoples could be “civilized” through labor, further entrenching the division between European humans and “natural savages.”

Patel and Moore discuss how the rise of capitalism transformed the nature of work itself. They argue that the introduction of the mechanical clock and abstract, linear time was crucial in disciplining workers and increasing productivity. Work became detached from natural rhythms and seasonal cycles. The authors provide examples of how this new temporal regime was imposed in colonial settings, such as the installation of public clocks in Spanish colonial cities and the use of shearing times to mark years for Aboriginal Australians. They also highlight instances of resistance, such as Aboriginal Australians refusing to work on Sundays and the racialization of this resistance as “laziness.”

The chapter examines the close links between the development of industrial labor and the transformation of agriculture. Patel and Moore argue that enslavement and the displacement of peasants were essential to providing cheap raw materials like cotton for British factories. They trace how American industrial agriculture in the 19th century, based on the innovations of the plantation system, fed the growth of cities and factories in Europe while displacing peasants globally.

The authors provide specific examples, such as the 20-fold increase in the number of enslaved people in new frontier states like Alabama and Mississippi from 1790 to 1860 and the 40-fold increase in American grain exports to Britain in the three decades after 1846. They also discuss how the industrialization of agriculture, with the introduction of farm machinery, displaced peasants in Southern and Eastern Europe, leading to mass migration to the United States.

Patel and Moore identify strategies that capitalists have used to keep labor costs low and prevent worker organization. These include displacing workers with new technologies, pitting workers in different regions against each other, developing alternative raw materials, and directly suppressing unions. The authors provide examples from the history of the cotton industry, such as the displacement of handloom weavers by industrial machinery and the use of new trade routes to access cheaper sources of cotton. They also discuss how worker militancy emerged in factories and slave plantations as a resistance to capitalism’s ecology, citing examples such as the 1824 strike led by women in a Rhode Island cotton mill and the 1835 Muslim uprising of enslaved people in Bahia, Brazil.

The authors argue that even nominally anti-capitalist systems like the Soviet Union reproduced exploitative relations between work and nature. Patel and Moore suggest that the threat of worker power under radical banners caused capitalists to change their strategies, leading to the rise of corporatism and the outsourcing of production to regions with weaker labor protections. They discuss how the Soviet Union embraced industrial agriculture and Taylorism—a factory management system devised by American management consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor—despite initial critiques. They also describe how Mao’s war on agricultural pests—fleas, flies, rats, and sparrows—led to ecological disruption and famine in China. The authors then provide examples of how capitalists responded to worker militancy, such as Japanese automakers’ use of subcontracting to diffuse labor unrest and the shift of production to China.

In summary, Patel and Moore argue that capitalism has depended on creating a tripartite division of labor: waged labor, unpaid reproductive labor, and the appropriation of nature. They call for a revolutionary politics of sustainability that recognizes and mobilizes the contradictions between these forms of work. The chapter highlights how the exploitation of workers is fundamentally bound up with the appropriation of nature and the devaluation of care work. The authors emphasize that capitalism has always relied on a variety of labor systems, from enslavement to the modern “sharing economy,” and that management constantly seeks to reinvent and reimagine the relationship between work and nature to maintain profitability and control over labor.

Chapters 2-3 Analysis

In Chapters 2 and 3, Patel and Moore examine The Conceptual Divide Between Nature and Society, further showing how the rise of capitalism has depended on a fundamental conceptual divide between nature and society. This divide is evident in the way that Indigenous peoples in the Americas were relegated to the realm of nature, with their labor and lands subject to appropriation by European colonizers. As the authors note, “The Valladolid controversy succeeded not just in drawing the line between European humans and ‘natural’ savages elsewhere, but in establishing the legitimacy of that line for the purposes of labor” (93). This conceptual separation also underpins the division between paid and unpaid work, with the unpaid work of women, nature, and colonies treated as a “free gift” to capital. By tracing the historical origins of this nature-society binary, Patel and Moore show how it has served to legitimize and naturalize the exploitation of both human and extra-human natures in the service of capitalist accumulation.

Throughout these chapters, Patel and Moore also explore the theme of How Capitalism Affects the Web of Life, emphasizing that capitalism’s “cheap things” are not truly cheap, but rather depend on the appropriation of vast quantities of unpaid work from the web of life. They write, “Every act of producing surplus value depends on a greater act of appropriating human and extra-human life beyond the cash nexus” (95). The examples they provide, from the Potosí silver mines to the cotton plantations of the American South, illustrate how the drive for cheap money and cheap work has devastated ecosystems and human communities alike.

Patel and Moore argue that by reducing nature to a mere input to production, capitalism disrupts the delicate balance of ecological relationships and generates new forms of precarity and vulnerability. At the same time, the authors stress that the web of life is not a passive victim of capitalist exploitation, but rather an active force that constantly resists and reshapes the conditions of accumulation. From Indigenous revolts to rebellions of enslaved people to contemporary labor struggles, the history of capitalism is also a history of the web of life pushing back against its own commodification.

Throughout Chapters 2 and 3, Patel and Moore draw on a wide range of historical sources and scholarly references to support their arguments. They engage with the work of key thinkers such as Karl Marx (See: Background), Fernand Braudel, and Sidney Mintz, using their insights to illuminate the dynamics of capitalism’s ecology. For instance, they write, “As Fernand Braudel put it, ‘finance capital only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state’” (68); this serves to explain one of the dimensions of cheap money. By invoking Braudel’s authority, the authors situate their own analysis within a tradition of historical scholarship on capitalism and empire. At the same time, Patel and Moore also draw on primary sources, such as Christopher Columbus’s letters and the 1513 Requerimiento, to provide direct evidence of the colonial logic that underpinned the rise of cheap money and cheap work. The integration of these diverse sources establishes the authors’ expertise and lends credibility to their sweeping historical claims.

Patel and Moore continue to anchor their analysis of cheap money and cheap work in a world-ecological framework that emphasizes the interrelationship between capitalist accumulation and the appropriation of nature. They argue that capitalism’s “cheap things” are premised on a fundamental separation between society and nature, which allows for the exploitation of both human and extra-human natures. This analytical lens is evident throughout the chapters, as when they write,

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—yet within reach of capitalist power (93).

By highlighting the way that capitalism relies on the appropriation of unpaid work, Patel and Moore challenge conventional understandings of economic value, pointing toward the need for a more holistic understanding of the relationship between nature and society.

One of the key rhetorical strategies employed by the authors in these chapters is the use of historical examples to illustrate their theoretical claims. For instance, they describe in detail the brutal labor regime of the Potosí silver mines, writing,

So voracious was the combination of small smelters and mercury amalgamation extraction that by 1590 wood had to be brought in from nearly three hundred miles (five hundred kilometers) away. By the early sixteenth century there was little sign that the mountain of Potosí had ever been home to any trees—or indeed a vibrant Indigenous civilization (84).

This use of evocative language brings the human and ecological toll of cheap money into sharp relief.

Patel and Moore also make frequent use of rhetorical questions to challenge their readers’ assumptions and prompt critical reflection. For example, they ask, “Why is such boundary enforcing necessary to capitalism?” before going on to explain how the separation of paid and unpaid work is essential to the functioning of the capitalist system (95). By engaging the reader in this way, the authors invite them to participate in their intellectual journey and question the assumptions of capitalist modernity.