How is the history of European colonialism connected to contemporary inequalities?

Melisa Yilmaz-137611

For Patel and Moore, the starting point of the answer to this question is a critique of

capitalism. They begin their argument by naming the modern era we live in not as the

Anthropocene as it is commonly called these days, but as the Capitalocene, which derives

from the word capitalism. After summarizing some important events such as the plague, wars,

the discovery of sugar cane that took place before this era, they refer to the history of

European colonialism.

According to them, capitalism essentially has to exist through borders. It transforms

socioeconomic relations through boundaries. Borders, according to the authors, are places

where power is exercised. Through borders, states use their culture, knowledge and power to

profit from nature at the lowest cost, which also means violence. When the history of

colonization in Europe is considered from this perspective, people in colonized places are

dehumanized, as the authors put it. These people were part of nature for the colonizers, and

just like nature, they were cheapened, instrumentalized, excluded. This fact defines slaves and

wage workers as simply the cheapest labor for writers. Thus, the transformation of slavery

into modern slavery and wage labor into forced labor is a clear transition for the authors.

Likewise, the exclusion of women as a subgroup and the positioning of women's domestic

labor as unpaid labor are associated with the same dehumanization mechanism and the

phenomenon of maximum efficiency with minimum cost.

In short, what has been going on since the history of European colonization, according to the

authors, is the cheapening of some people's lives, and therefore their labor, by the capitalist

order, and this situation continues to manifest itself in the inequalities of the age we live in.
What the authors suggest is to resist, to remember against the capitalist order that aims to

make this cheapening and exclusion reality of people forget.

Focused reading:
Patel, R., & Moore, J. W. (2017). A history of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to

capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. Univ of California Press.