A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things Quotes

“Capitalism's geography has a distinctive pyrogeography, one that is part of the fossil record. Indigenous People had thoroughly modified New World landscapes through fire. In eastern North America, they coproduced the 'mosaic quality' of forest, savannah, and meadow that Europeans took for pristine nature. Between Columbus' arrival and around 1650, disease and colonial violence reduced Indigenous populations in the Americas by 95 percent. With fewer humans burning and cutting them down, forests recovered so vigorously that the New World became a planetary carbon sink. Forest growth cooled the planet so much that the Indigenous holocaust contributed to the Little Ice Age's severity....it would be wrong to characterize this episode of genocide and reforestation as anthropogenic. The colonial exterminations of Indigenous Peoples were the work not of all humans, but of conquerors and capitalists. *Capitalogenic* would be more appropriate. And if we are tempted to conflate capitalism with the Industrial Revolution, these transformations ought to serve notice that early capitalism's destruction was so profound that it changed planetary climate four centuries ago.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“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.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“What happens next is unpredictable at one level and entirely predictable at another. Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of "abrupt and irreversible" changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietsche's madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion....The twenty-first century has an analogue: it's easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“The limits of production, consumption, and reproduction are fixed only by the system in which we find ourselves. Such limits are neither outside nor inside but both, knitted together by capitalism’s ecology of power, production, and nature. The individual footprint teaches us to think of consumption as determined by “lifestyle choices”3 rather than socially enforced logics. If you have been gentrified out of your old neighborhood and need to commute an hour to your job, your ecological footprint isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a choice in the same way that English peasants, once kicked off the land, were “free” to find wage work—or starve.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate.9 We argue that what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene.10 Using this name means taking capitalism seriously, understanding it not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“It's possible to see the Green Revolution as a success...The political commitment to making food cheap through state subsidy and violence worked...Perhaps the greatest success was the effective quieting of peasant demands for land reform and urban demands for political change.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“The crisis of fuel isn't necessarily a crisis of scarcity or overproduction. The shift away from fossil fuels isn't the end of the regime of cheap energy. Indeed, the climate crisis has afforded an opportunity for finance to present itself as a mechanism of global salvation: it is through carbon credits, offsets, and permits to pollute the atmosphere that the atmosphere will be saved - or so we are told. This is where commoning can finally be ended - through the full financial externalization of collective responsibility, turning what need to be collective decisions on the fate of the commons into a financial product in a global market.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“Never under capitalism have the majority been asked about the world we'd like to live in. To dream, and to dream seditiously, is something that many humans need to practice, for we have been prevented from doing it for centuries. And the shop floors and community centers and classrooms and kitchen tables where these dreams will be shared are themselves subject to reimagination.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“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 nature's low cost. It's this cheapening that makes possible capitalism's expansive markets.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“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.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work. In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care. The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That's a strategy of Cheap Food....You can't have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy. There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money. Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of animal and human life -- such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color, and immigrants -- have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element -- the rule of Cheap Lives. Yet at every step of this process, humans resist....”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“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. Modern manufacturing relies on layered, simultaneous, and different regimes of work in nature. And with every resistance to it, capitalism has moved the frontiers of work yet again.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet