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    A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
    A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
    A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
    Audiobook6 hours

    A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

    Written by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore

    Narrated by Simon Mattacks

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    About this audiobook

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

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateOct 17, 2017
    ISBN9781543660524
    Author

    Raj Patel

    Raj Patel was educated at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University. He is currently a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, California, a visiting researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked for the World Bank, interned at the WTO, consulted for the UN and been involved in international campaigns against his former employers. Visit Raj Patel at www.rajpatel.org.

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    Reviews for A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

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    • 5/5
      Anyone who is studying history, political science, or economics or system thinking should read/listen to this book. The authors did significant research connecting history, moral code, religion, economics, and natural events into a connected picture of how past decisions got to the social structure we have today.

      Some may not agree with all of it, and there are high-level recommendations to consider in the last chapter. The authors form questions and paint the picture. However, this is a history book of an interdisciplinary perspective. It is a starting point, it may be missing the few opposite examples, but I recommend reading this book 1st and then Thinking in Systems: A PrimerLink by Donella Meadows

      It will help you to move out from the gloomy view of our civilization and into productive thinking of how to improve, innovate, and increase potential through better policy, governance and individual choices.
    • 3/5
      Its unusual that a 200 page book spends 40 pages on the Introduction, and after that introduction, usefully focused on the island of Madeira as a case study though it is, you feel as though you have the general idea, And the conclusions are hard to argue with; yes capitalism has succeeded through cheapening most elements of life - although I might dispute the conclusions around the cheapening of care. Yes, care and work in the home is undervalued but its hard to quantify that value when noone outside a particular home cares whether that work is done or notBut in general its very easy to agree with the authors' well argued case. But its less clear what, if anything can be done about it. For me the leap between the Marxist analysis of the problem and the World-Ecology basis of the solution was too great; for me the problem, or the history, was absorbing but the solution was unclear and unconvinving