The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
by Tim Wu · 4 Nov 2025 · 246pp · 65,143 words
farmer class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depended on town marketplaces (records indicate more than eight hundred in England alone) where they could sell agricultural surplus.[4] In the software industry, thanks to platformization over the 1970s, it became possible for developers to write “to the platform” as opposed to building
Cadillac Desert
by Marc Reisner · 1 Jan 1986 · 898pp · 253,177 words
could easily have refused to supply new water to a region until it could demonstrate that its crop patterns would not make the nation’s agricultural surpluses worse, but its response, under Dominy, was to launch a belligerent campaign to deny that the problem existed. When Dominy appeared not to realize was
Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity
by Robert Albritton · 31 Mar 2009 · 273pp · 93,419 words
easily amount to over 50 percent of a farmer’s income in the case of large industrial farms. It was a policy that encouraged evergreater agricultural surpluses, many of which were dumped in developing countries at below costs of production. Although the food and agriculture sector saw dramatic developments due to petroleum
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of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976 under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Prior to Butz’s reforms the principal policy emphasis in dealing with the perennial agricultural surpluses was on various efforts to reduce supply, such as paying farmers to let some fields lie fallow. However, after Butz’s reforms, farmers received subsidies
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to also think about practices that we need to get rid of. One of these is state subsidies that enable rich countries to sell their agricultural surpluses at below costs of production, thus undermining agriculture in developing countries. Indeed, all “dumping” of agricultural products on international markets at below costs of production
The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin · 31 Dec 2009 · 879pp · 233,093 words
could flow through their bodies and communities. Plant cultivation—aided by irrigation systems—greatly increased the yield per unit of human energy or labor expended. Agricultural surpluses also freed at least some people from toil on the land. Freeing people from labor created the beginnings of a social hierarchy and the differentiation
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periphery of hydraulic civilizations. They were the first societies to employ writing. Their frame of reference was urban. The increase in populations, made possible by agricultural surpluses, extended commerce and trade, and the consolidation of diverse peoples into larger, more complex social units, threatened traditional tribal affiliations. Forced migrations and resettlements, the
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897 liters per hectare by 1700 BC.70 The impact on the cities, whose populations of priests, government bureaucrats, merchants, craftspeople, and soldiers depended on agricultural surpluses to maintain an urban way of life, was devastating. Once powerful Sumerian city-states were wracked by political and economic turmoil, and their elaborate and
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world, the Imperium Romanum occupied and administered much of the hydraulic areas of the Mediterranean and Middle East and relied on the bounty of their agricultural surplus to provide a substantial proportion of the grain to feed Roman citizens as well as its slaves and men under arms.1 Equally important, Roman
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actual self Adams, Robert M. Adler, Alfred adolescent advertising industry Affective Neuroscience (Panksepp) afferent feedback Age of Faith Age of Reason Age of Sentimentalism aggression agricultural surplus agriculture feudal hydraulic societies industrial late Middle Ages Roman Empire Sumeria Ainsworth, Mary Akhenaten Akkadians Alcoholics Anonymous aliens (the other) Allen, Myles Allen, Steve Allen
Water: A Biography
by Giulio Boccaletti · 13 Sep 2021 · 485pp · 133,655 words
and land, determined by each society’s comparative advantage, partly defined by rainfall. If trade was predicated on the ability of some countries to generate agricultural surplus, it stands to reason that such trade could also be vulnerable to long-term changes in water conditions. Less rain in one corner of the
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow · 18 Oct 2021
– according to Diamond and Fukuyama – is inevitable once humans adopt large, complex forms of organization. Even when the new leaders began acting badly – creaming off agricultural surplus to promote their flunkies and relatives, making status permanent and hereditary, collecting trophy skulls and harems of slave-girls, or tearing out rivals’ hearts with
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functions of government – military, administrative and judicial – pass into the hands of full-time specialists. This makes sense if you accept the narrative that an agricultural surplus ‘freed up’ a significant portion of the population from the onerous responsibility of securing adequate amounts of food: a story that suggests the beginning of
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any sort of ongoing village or town life.19 Monumental architecture on the scale of the Hopewell earthworks is generally assumed to imply a significant agricultural surplus, governed by chiefs or a stratum of religious leaders. Yet this isn’t what was going on. Rather we find just the sort of ‘play
The Cigarette: A Political History
by Sarah Milov · 1 Oct 2019
farmers’ productivity skyrocketed, juiced by the liberal application of fertilizers and pesticides.5 But for farmers—and especially for partisans of high government supports for agriculture—surplus commodities did not reflect a problem of overproduction. They represented a problem of underconsumption. Throughout the 1950s, foreign markets were seen as a way to
The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy · 25 Feb 2021 · 565pp · 134,138 words
. But while the other pioneers were importing commodities from the Communist Bloc to the West, Cargill was building connections in the opposite direction, exporting American agricultural surpluses to the world – including to countries behind the Iron Curtain. The trade was encouraged by generous subsidies from the US government, seeking to support farmers
Africa: A Biography of the Continent
by John Reader · 5 Nov 1998 · 1,072pp · 297,437 words
wish to enlarge one's kin group, and the desire to have clients, dependants, servants, and retainers. Indeed, in circumstances where the opportunities for converting agricultural surpluses into material wealth were limited, control over people was an alternative option. This was the niche that came to be occupied by the ‘big men
How Asia Works
by Joe Studwell · 1 Jul 2013 · 868pp · 147,152 words
. From a global development perspective, reduced protection in already-developed countries also gives other poor countries in turn the opportunity, in turn, to export their agricultural surplus in the period when their labour is cheapest; it keeps the developmental drawbridge down. Unfortunately, in north-east Asia, governments in Japan, Korea and, to
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are shaped and re-shaped by political power. Without the dispossession of landlords in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China there would have been no increased agricultural surplus to prime industrialisation. Without the focus on manufacturing for export, there would have been no way to engage tens of millions of former farmers in
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch
by Lewis Dartnell · 15 Apr 2014 · 398pp · 100,679 words
City: Urbanism and Its End
by Douglas W. Rae · 15 Jan 2003 · 537pp · 200,923 words
Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane · 28 Feb 2017 · 346pp · 90,371 words
Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman · 30 Jun 2018
Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves
by Nicola Twilley · 24 Jun 2024 · 428pp · 125,388 words
An Edible History of Humanity
by Tom Standage · 30 Jun 2009 · 282pp · 82,107 words
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley · 17 May 2010 · 462pp · 150,129 words
The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food
by Lizzie Collingham · 1 Jan 2011 · 927pp · 236,812 words
Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization
by Paul Kindstedt · 31 Mar 2012 · 297pp · 89,176 words
Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
by Iain Gately · 30 Jun 2008 · 686pp · 201,972 words
Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman · 2 Sep 2020 · 909pp · 130,170 words
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000
by Paul Kennedy · 15 Jan 1989 · 1,477pp · 311,310 words
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore · 16 Oct 2017 · 335pp · 89,924 words
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson · 15 May 2023 · 619pp · 177,548 words
The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History
by Greg Woolf · 14 May 2020
The Locavore's Dilemma
by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu · 29 May 2012 · 329pp · 85,471 words
Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
by Richard Heinberg and James Howard (frw) Kunstler · 1 Sep 2007 · 235pp · 65,885 words
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel · 17 Jan 2017 · 775pp · 208,604 words
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama · 29 Sep 2014 · 828pp · 232,188 words
The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff · 30 May 2012
Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil · 23 Sep 2019
Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin · 21 Jun 2023 · 248pp · 73,689 words
When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom
by Martin Jacques · 12 Nov 2009 · 859pp · 204,092 words
Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: Energy Options for a Low-Carbon Future
by Chris Goodall · 1 Jan 2010 · 297pp · 95,518 words
China: A History
by John Keay · 5 Oct 2009
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began
by Valerie Hansen · 13 Apr 2020
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand · 15 Mar 2009 · 422pp · 113,525 words
In Defense of Global Capitalism
by Johan Norberg · 1 Jan 2001 · 233pp · 75,712 words
A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn · 2 Jan 1977 · 913pp · 299,770 words
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent · 22 May 2017 · 789pp · 207,744 words
After the Cataclysm
by Noam Chomsky · 17 Dec 2014
The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
by Giovanni Arrighi · 15 Mar 2010 · 7,371pp · 186,208 words
Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World
by Andrew Lambert · 1 Oct 2018 · 618pp · 160,006 words
Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong · 6 Apr 2020 · 593pp · 183,240 words
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
by David W. Anthony · 26 Jul 2010 · 658pp · 195,182 words
The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris · 1 Jan 2012 · 456pp · 123,534 words
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein · 11 Jul 2011 · 448pp · 142,946 words
A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories)
by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf · 27 Sep 2006
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist · 24 Oct 2016
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor · 1 Feb 2018 · 370pp · 111,129 words
Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
by John Darwin · 12 Feb 2013
A History of the World in 6 Glasses
by Tom Standage · 1 Jan 2005 · 231pp · 72,656 words
Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg · 14 Sep 2020 · 505pp · 138,917 words
Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney · 5 Mar 2013 · 476pp · 125,219 words
Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein · 18 May 2020 · 339pp · 95,270 words
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
by Andrés Reséndez · 11 Apr 2016 · 532pp · 162,509 words
A Pipeline Runs Through It: The Story of Oil From Ancient Times to the First World War
by Keith Fisher · 3 Aug 2022
The Rough Guide to Sri Lanka
by Rough Guides · 21 Sep 2018
The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class
by Kees Van der Pijl · 2 Jun 2014 · 572pp · 134,335 words
The City: A Global History
by Joel Kotkin · 1 Jan 2005
Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler · 1 Jun 1984 · 286pp · 94,017 words
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
by George Friedman · 30 Jul 2008 · 278pp · 88,711 words
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein · 1 Jan 2008 · 1,351pp · 404,177 words
Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives
by Stefan Al · 11 Apr 2022 · 300pp · 81,293 words
The Wars of Afghanistan
by Peter Tomsen · 30 May 2011 · 1,118pp · 309,029 words
The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham
by Joe Carlen · 14 Apr 2012 · 398pp · 111,333 words
On Thermonuclear War
by Herman Kahn · 16 Jul 2007 · 1,117pp · 270,127 words
The Rough Guide to Jamaica
by Thomas, Polly,Henzell, Laura.,Coates, Rob.,Vaitilingam, Adam.
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
by Max Boot · 9 Jan 2018 · 972pp · 259,764 words
Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization
by Tim Queeney · 11 Aug 2025 · 264pp · 88,907 words
Venice: A New History
by Thomas F. Madden · 24 Oct 2012 · 466pp · 146,982 words
The Stolen Year
by Anya Kamenetz · 23 Aug 2022 · 347pp · 103,518 words
City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith · 19 Jun 2012
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor and David Horsey · 1 Jan 2001 · 378pp · 102,966 words
The Myth of the Blitz
by Angus Calder · 28 Jun 2012 · 434pp · 127,608 words
They Have a Word for It A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases-Sarabande Books (2000)
by Howard Rheingold · 10 Mar 2020