A Cheaply Made World

 Rylee Johnson 

1/26/2021

Response Paper 2

A Cheaply Made World 

“A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things” by Raj Patel and Jason Moore offers a great insight into the history and ongoing capitalism, nature, and climate change. Patel and Moore offer a variety of historical events and offer insight using keywords. Patel and Moore enlighten us about capitalism, nature, and climate change through claims, history, and keywords. 

Both of the authors came together to create an idea or argument about capitalism, nature, and climate change. The main argument is that the modern world has been made cheaply through nature, money, work, cars, food, energy, and lives. This argument was backed up by historical and recent events, and the chapter of the book kept me on the edge of my seat. The other specific claim that was made was that throughout time capitalism is one of the main contributors of climate change. Although we see this in recent events and recent history, this has dated back since before the 19th century. 

Patel and Moore gave us examples of these claims through historical events. The first example they gave was before 19th century Europe, the peasants were able to have their own land and start growing their own food. The problem was that the soil fertility declined because of the constant use. This created a food shortage and killed millions. Another example that was brought to my attention was the overproduction of sugar in Madeira and the price that the climate paid for this event of capitalism. This event created modern slavery, destroyed land, and left nothing for the people of Maderia to live off of. These are just a few examples of cheaply made things created by capitalism. 

Some of the keywords are linked to what we are discussing in class and chapter two. The first and the most obvious is capitalism and that was a keyword in both class and in Patel and Moores's book. This ties to both because our modern world was created on capitalism, one thing that stuck out to me when the authors were explaining capitalism they said that capitalism only values what they can count on and they can only count on money. Another keyword in our textbook that links to our weekly reading is subsistence economies, the rural places such as Europe in the 19th century created their own food not for sale but for consumption. Lastly, the working landscape from our textbook ties to Europe and Madeira once again that the landscape is created and maintained by the people through agriculture. 

In conclusion, “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things” by Raj Patel and Jason Moore offers a great argument and insight into capitalism and climate change. They offer us a great argument in the sense that our world needs to change for the better or we will be overcome by the trash in the year 2050. They offered us examples through historical events such as 19th century Europe and Madeira. They also used keywords such as capitalism, subsistence economies, and working landscape.