The Insatiable Empire: A History of Consumption and Its Consequences

From "our next great American historian" (Geraldine Brooks), an astonishingly ambitious account of how our desires became the engine that built the modern world

To want is human. To want without end is modern. Our desires have never been easier to satisfy or harder to escape, shaped by a system that cultivates and multiplies them. In reinforcing our hunger for more, capitalism’s power lies somewhere more primal than markets: it turns human desire into demand for ever more labor and resources. What does it mean to live, work, and hope in such a system?  

The Insatiable Empire tells the story of our modern world through five brutal extractions—iron, salt, sugar, fish, and the self. From the enclosures of English fields to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, from Russian iron foundries to the cobalt mines and factory floors of today, Paz traces the global economic machinery that transforms our world and the people who live in it into fuel for a system that must expand or perish. Drawing on history, political economy, and philosophy, Paz shows how the chains of slavery became tidy contracts and hunger replaced the whip; how the conveniences of modern life carry within them the lives that made them possible; and how coercion endures by assuming the forms of choice and progress.

Refusing nostalgia, redemption, or absolution, The Insatiable Empire confronts the reader with an unsettling truth: the modern world was built not beside suffering but through it, and even one of our most desperate desires—to be innocent—has become another product to sell. This humanistic history of capitalism asks us to face the forces that have made the modern world—and our own place inside them.