A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things is extraordinary because it unapologetically links Western capitalism to the ills of the global food system, and shows how the epistemological questions regarding the choices to divide and separate nature from society, natives from colonialists, and men from women are complicit in remaking the world in the image of capitalist values. This is noteworthy for a book intended for a non-academic audience. In contrast to most consumerist critiques of the food system written in the developed world, this book incisively connects global natural destruction and the decimation of indigenous populations to the very logic of capital accumulation by arguing that extractive relationships based upon class, race, and gender are structurally connected to the global First and Third-World division, and thus define the very nature of the Capitalocene (instead of the broader formulation of the Anthropocene). There is no escape from the capitalistic exploitation of nature and culture. There is no room for good capitalism in this book. This is a bracing and necessary argument that is often never made, especially in the United States, where a variety of ameliorative propaganda about values-based capitalism is routinely peddled, even by members of the good-food movement. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things provides a rare synthesis that theoretically connects the disparate work of critics in culture, economics, politics, and philosophy; in the end, it is an incisive political-ecological critique that accounts for both political-economy and cultural politics. This is successful grand theorization at the highest level.
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