The Insatiable Empire
On sale
13th April 2027
Price: £25
The history of capitalism is a history of connections we have been taught not to see.
What connects a Russian iron mine to a Caribbean sugar plantation? A New England fishing boat to an enslaved worker in Barbados? And what can those connections tell us about the clothes we wear, the food we eat and the phones in our hands today?
In The Insatiable Empire, historian Franco Paz uncovers the hidden connections that built our modern world. Travelling across continents and centuries, he follows iron, salt, fish and sugar to reveal how seemingly separate lives became bound together in a new global system. Russian iron became the tools and chains of the Atlantic slave trade. Iberian salt preserved the fish that fed enslaved workers on Caribbean plantations. Their sugar transformed lives thousands of miles away.
But this history did not end with abolition. Paz follows its threads into the present, revealing how the pursuit of cheap labour and limitless resources continues to shape our lives.
Expansive, surprising and deeply human, The Insatiable Empire is a revelatory new history of capitalism and the people who made the modern world.
What connects a Russian iron mine to a Caribbean sugar plantation? A New England fishing boat to an enslaved worker in Barbados? And what can those connections tell us about the clothes we wear, the food we eat and the phones in our hands today?
In The Insatiable Empire, historian Franco Paz uncovers the hidden connections that built our modern world. Travelling across continents and centuries, he follows iron, salt, fish and sugar to reveal how seemingly separate lives became bound together in a new global system. Russian iron became the tools and chains of the Atlantic slave trade. Iberian salt preserved the fish that fed enslaved workers on Caribbean plantations. Their sugar transformed lives thousands of miles away.
But this history did not end with abolition. Paz follows its threads into the present, revealing how the pursuit of cheap labour and limitless resources continues to shape our lives.
Expansive, surprising and deeply human, The Insatiable Empire is a revelatory new history of capitalism and the people who made the modern world.
Reviews
A beautifully crafted, globe-spanning story in five commodities that unsettles as much as it enlightens. By unflinchingly focusing on those who labored on early modern sugar plantations, in iron ore mines and on salt flats, Paz shows how the toil of some of the most marginalized produced the wealth and glitter that make the modern world. A dazzling epic tragedy, it makes visible what has often remained hidden and draws our attention to surprising connections across oceans and continents. Provocative and fast-paced, The Insatiable Empire will generate lively debate.