A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

Patel and Moore explore the complex relationship between the modern nation-state and capitalism’s ecology. They argue that the two have shaped each other, particularly through the colonial frontier, interactions between early capitalists and Indigenous peoples, and the development of communication technologies. The authors emphasize that maintaining hegemony and keeping things cheap within capitalism’s ecology requires costly management through the forces of law and order, both domestically and internationally. They link this to the concept of “cheap lives,” suggesting that the most sophisticated and subtle modern institution, the nation-state, still draws on early modern roots and natural science to manage modern life.

Patel and Moore trace the origins of the modern nation-state to ideas of blood purity, the increasing power of the state relative to the Catholic Church, and the emergence of literature sanctioning natural orders of humans. They provide examples of how these concepts were used to propel new kinds of governance and social scientific control, particularly in colonial frontiers such as New Spain. In this context, the authors discuss the sistema de castas, a system that ranked people according to their blood and enforced categories related to women’s bodies, workers, taxes, religion, and property rights. This system was based on a complex mix of grammar, genetics, mathematics, and teleology, with categories suggesting inherent racial characteristics and social positions.

The authors also explore the role of natural science in providing a basis for racial order and legitimizing colonialism’s “civilizing” mission. They cite the work of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who developed the nomenclature for identifying species and offered a typology that classified humans into different categories based on appearance and character. Patel and Moore argue that this scientific project of national order persists in both the Global “North” and “South,” surviving in part due to its inclusion in national discourses by colonial powers such as the British.

Patel and Moore devote significant attention to the development of the English colonial state, particularly in Ireland, where techniques for securing territory and governing ownership rights were developed and later refined in the Americas. They discuss how the English used international law to acquire land through leases from Irish lords or as military plunder and how the clash between English commercial arable farming and Irish pastoral systems led to rebellions and increasingly forceful plantation systems.

The authors also highlight the role of liberal thinkers like John Locke in smoothing the way for the legitimate acquisition and trade of enslaved Indigenous peoples, noting the contradictions in modern political thought that emerged from philosophies conceptualizing work-for-hire at colonial frontiers. They argue that the modern “legal person” was strictly defined and policed and that the “liberal subject” was defined as a white man.

The Haitian Revolution serves as a key example in Patel and Moore’s discussion of how enslaved people’s attempts to claim self-ownership were met with force, finance, and ideology, reminding them of their place in the nature-society divide. The authors note that Haitians were inspired by the rallying cry that all men were considered “free and equal” according to the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, but the French spent two decades trying to subjugate the colony before saddling Haiti with a massive debt in order to repay what France had “lost” through the loss of enslaved people and property (192). Patel and Moore also explore the rise of nationalism through “print capitalism,” which enabled the circulation of ideas about national blood, soil, and destiny. They argue that print capitalism allowed for the profitable translation, transcription, mimeographing, pirating, distortion, and republishing of nationalist ideas and that race, nation, and print capitalism were tightly linked.

The authors argue that the term “natives” was created as a political technology in response to anti-colonial resistance, citing the work of Mahmood Mamdani. They note that this strategy of “define and rule” epitomizes the concept of cheap lives and that its legacy can be seen in various post-colonial states (198), from South Africa to India and from Canada to Peru. Patel and Moore also discuss the rise of alternative nationalisms, a phenomenon they call “global fascism,” as a result of the logic of capitalism's ecology running afoul of nationalism’s language of shared destiny. They suggest that the current concentration of wealth and the crumbling of liberal hegemony have contributed to this phenomenon.

Finally, Patel and Moore present the possibility of non-patriarchal Indigenous nationhood as a potential break from capitalism’s ecology. They cite the work of activists involved in the Idle No More movement in Canada and the writings of Glenn Sean Coulthard, who presents lessons on the dangers of engaging with the state. While acknowledging these challenges, Patel and Moore express hope that such experiments can thrive and that lives might be revalued under these alternative nationalisms. They conclude by emphasizing the need for a post-capitalist vision of governance and reckoning to achieve revolutionary politics.

Patel and Moore argue that the modern world has been fundamentally shaped by capitalism’s “violent alchemy of ideas, conquests, and commerce,” and they contend that a series of binary oppositions lies at the heart of this process: “Society and Nature, colonizer and colonized, man and woman, the West and the rest, white and non-white, capitalist and worker” (202). Far from being mere descriptive categories, they argue, these dualisms have functioned to dominate and cheapen the lives of the vast majority of humans as well as the rest of nature. The powerful have worked to police the boundaries between these constructed oppositions, even as they have been consistently resisted by enslaved people, Indigenous peoples, women, and workers from the very beginnings of capitalism.

Patel and Moore employ the framework of “world-ecology” to understand capitalism as a totalizing system that interweaves power, capital, and nature. In this ecology, each half of capitalism’s binaries is deeply imbricated in the other. The refusal of many Indigenous peoples and workers to be incorporated into capitalism’s logic has been met with strategic responses by governments and a relentless search by investors for new frontiers of profit and extraction. The authors emphasize that the experiences of those exploited by, and resisting, capitalism do not come with any instructions for success.

Patel and Moore critique mainstream environmentalist concepts, such as the calculations of individuals’ “ecological footprint” and the Earth’s “carrying capacity,” which they see as grounded in Cartesian and capitalist thinking. Footprint calculators, for example, frame environmental impact as a matter of individual lifestyle choices, ignoring how consumption is socially determined. Even more problematically, overpopulation discourse based on carrying capacity has consistently blamed environmental destruction on the poor and working class in both the Global “North” and “South.” Patel and Moore argue that this is a dead end that leads only to inevitable despair and racism. Instead, they insist that the limits to production, consumption, and reproduction are determined by capitalism as a system and cannot be understood in isolation.

As an alternative, Patel and Moore propose the framework of “reparation ecology.” They do not reduce reparations to a purely monetary calculation. Rather, reparation ecology entails recognizing how capitalism’s violence and abstractions (such as the society-nature divide) have shaped the world and even people’s basic capacities to think and act. It demands material reparations as well as a fundamental redistribution of resources and labor—for example, the redistribution of domestic work as a key aspect of gender justice. Central to this vision is access to land as a site where humans can connect and renew their relationship with the larger web of life.

Patel and Moore highlight a range of contemporary social movements that are developing systemic responses to capitalism’s depredations, from the international peasant movement La Via Campesina to the Movement for Black Lives to Indigenous resistance at Standing Rock. At the same time, they acknowledge the immense challenges involved in articulating a genuine post-capitalist counterhegemony, including the very real dangers of state repression. There is no easy roadmap, they admit, for a class struggle that simultaneously reinvents humanity’s relationship with the web of life. Nevertheless, they insist that fundamental change is possible.

According to Patel and Moore, this process of reparative, restorative transformation will require a thoroughgoing re-imagining of human-nature relations beyond capitalism’s violence and abstractions. They call for a revolutionary movement to reclaim the commons and embrace meaningful, contributory work outside the punishing imperatives of profit and the “Protestant work ethic.” They envision working and living spaces that provide equitable chances for both idleness and pleasurable labor, citing the idea of “contributive justice” as a framework for building a world beyond mere restorative justice that returns the world to a deeply unjust status quo.

Ultimately, Patel and Moore see this as a collective act of liberation in which the vast majority of humans, long excluded from shaping their shared destiny, finally claim the right to dream and construct a world beyond capitalism’s cheap things and violent ecologies.