A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

“Repressive legislation to keep labor cheap, through wage controls or outright reenserfment, came in reaction to the Black Death. Among the earliest was England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, enacted in the teeth of the plague’s first onslaught (1349–51). The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionization harder.”

The authors compare medieval wage controls to hypothetically responding to Ebola by restricting unions, emphasizing the reaction of traditional powers against the increased power of workers through the labor shortages caused by the Black Death. The analogy presents capitalism as emerging as a new means of oppressing the laborers as medieval feudalism (See: Background) began to crumble.

“If capitalism is a disease, then it’s one that eats your flesh—and then profits from selling your bones for fertilizer, and then invests that profit to reap the cane harvest, and then sells that harvest to tourists who pay to visit your headstone. But even this description isn’t adequate. The frontier works only through connection, fixing its failures by siphoning life from elsewhere.”

The authors here introduce the theme of Capitalism’s Dependence on Frontiers by arguing that capitalism functions through “connection” and “siphoning life.” This introduces their argument that capitalism is a world ecology that affects nature and society, extending far beyond the realm of mere economics.

“When the processes are larger in scale, it becomes easier to think about ‘social’ and ‘natural’ processes as if they were independent of each other. It is somehow easier to grasp the immediate relationship to soil and work of a farmers’ market than a global financial market. But Wall Street is just as much coproduced through nature as that farmers’ market.”

This passage argues that financial markets are as “coproduced through nature” as farmers’ markets, even if the ties seem less apparent. The authors thus assert that capitalism interweaves “social” and “natural” processes at all scales, undermining The Conceptual Divide Between Nature and Society.