MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity, necessary reading

MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity
MATTHEW COSTA
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$31.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five, because of the learning curve involved

The Publisher Says: Rent, or unearned income, is a pervasive concept in contemporary economics. Economists of all stripes see today’s global economy as riddled with harmful rents, but most deny these are intrinsic to capitalism, and insist they can be eliminated with the right policies. It begs the question, why is rent theory so critical of the present but so optimistic about the future?

In Mother of Capital, Matthew Costa delves into the intellectual and social history of rent to solve this puzzle. Centring rent as the engine of capitalism’s historical emergence in medieval Europe, he offers a groundbreaking, systematic history of rent and rent theory. The book also traces the history of resistance to rent from below, and unearths a neglected body of critical rent theory.

Weaving complex strands of social and intellectual history into a vivid, lively, and original explanation of how the society we live in came to be, Costa makes a bold intervention into contemporary debates about the origins and future of capitalism, the nature of social change, and of history itself.

Matthew Costa is an Australian political economist. He has been a sessional lecturer and honorary associate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is currently a Director at New South Wales Treasury, and was previously an economic policy advisor in Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you're willing to put in the work, this is a good way to understand how capitalism got organized around the concept of extraction. Author Costa is an academic. It shows. You'll need your dictionary handy. The concepts he's explaining in these sophisticated words are, once you've familiarized yourself with the vocabulary, strikingly simple to assimilate. The end result of the read is to make available to the reader a different, probably new, angle of viewing and interpreting the modern world.

Ideological principles that go unchallenged in spite of their deleterious effects on humanity appear in stark relief when this angle of viewing is assumed. It is an angle I encourage you to investigate for yourself...don't trust me, or anyone else, to give you from On High the One True Vision of the world. Acquire a bit of knowledge from a lot of sources. This source is one whose angle of view you won't find in the huge mass of economic-discussion sources in the mainstream. Once you get your head around the light this book sheds on the system we all live within, you will understand why.

It's worth making the effort. It *is* an effort. I encourage you to fight the innerer Schweinehund, get off your mental pillow, and learn something new as painlessly as is possible. The value of the perspective this book offers you on the world as it is can't be overstated.

SIDDHARTH KARA'S PAGE: THE ZORG: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery; & COBALT RED: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

COBALT RED: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
SIDDHARTH KARA
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award.

An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation―and the moral implications that affect us all.

Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt.

Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.

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My Review: Remember King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa? More than a quarter-century later, that story of exploitation and abuse of human beings from the vilest era of European colonialism had no effect on the world. Handwringing and smug self-assurance that we would never, it can't happen again, are herewith disproved. We did; it did.

And not many of "us" care, or act like we care, or say or do anything to indicate to our corporate masters that we disapprove. After reading this book, maybe a few will take some time to hunt up contact details for their pad/laptop/cellphone manufacturer and let them know...

...

...well, it's pretty much useless to finish that sentence. Siddharth Kara writes his fingers to the bone, he goes hot miserable places, and he comes and tells us the impassioned truth about how our "clean" energy devices depend on the slave labor of millions...so does every plateful of food you eat...and we go full Joker mode...

...and move on.

After reading Author Kara's interviewee who interrupts him to finish the sentence, "...you work in horrible conditions..." with

"No, we work in our graves."

And you and I sit here and stare at our cobalt-powered screens.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE ZORG: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
SIDDHARTH KARA
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

FINALIST for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction! Winner announced 31 March 2026.

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

The Publisher Says: From Pulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red: A notorious slave ship incident that led to the abolition of slavery in the UK and sparked the US abolitionist movement

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning “care”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.

After reaching Africa, the Zorg was captured by a privateer and came under British command. With a new captain and crew, the ship was crammed with 442 slaves and departed in 1781 for Jamaica. But a series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course and running out of water. So a proposition was put forth: Save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves—by throwing dozens of people, starting with women and children, overboard.

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history—sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States.

Siddharth Kara utilizes primary-source research, gripping storytelling, and painstaking investigation to uncover the Zorg’s journey, the lives and fates of the slaves on board, and the mysterious identity of the abolitionist who finally revealed the truth of what happened on the ship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Whistleblowers are reviled by the greedy capitalists because they interfere with the satiation of the actually evil levels of greed that propel acts like these in the book.

There is a reason y'all's religions, one and all, condemn greed. Not that it ever has the tiniest effect on most "religious" people's behavior, nor the behavior of those who claim they work for the common good, nor really any other human being I've ever known. Yes, before some annoying twidgee says it, I include myself.

Like Cobalt Red (q.v.), Author Kara knows exactly what will give you nightmares, and deploys that thing in search of your conscience. It's history, not current events, I hear you echoing my bleat of self-justification. Back to Cobalt Red you should go.

The relief from guilt is the sheer outrageousness of the court case fought over this murderous event. It's something that I definitely see making a huge splash in the press of the day. It would be a Frontline documentary today. In any event, it is historical record, so there is no escaping the ugly truth:
We have known the facts of slavery for generations and done the bare minimum to end it, more to ameliorate our feelings of greed and guilt than because we see the enslaved as real people.

Sleep tight.

THREADS OF EMPIRE: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets, fascinating light on history

THREADS OF EMPIRE: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets
DOROTHY ARMSTRONG
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$33.00 hardcover, $16.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Carpet specialist Dorothy Armstrong tells the stories surrounding twelve of the world’s most fascinating carpets.

Dorothy Armstrong’s Threads of Empire is a spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets. Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world’s 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibers from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots.

In Threads of Empire, Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world’s most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world’s powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers’ lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop. In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: My only complaint is this DRC had none of the images the finished book has; I waited to write this review until I saw a finished book, so I could judge for myself how well the author's careful descriptions of these art objects evoked my perception of them.

Very well indeed, as it happens.

Best aspect of the read was the charming-to-me blend of personal anecdote and intensive research. They're blended in a way that evokes the sensation of having a personal chat with that world-renowned subject matter expert who's our personal bestie that we all have. (Or wish we did anyway.)

Flying on her magic carpet of knowledge across huge spans of time and space, Author Armstrong shows us how human creativity and skill are "rewarded" by exploitation and subjugation all too often. The existence of imperialism is not new. It is always, however, driven by greed. The subject of greed shifts over time but it never leaves us.

As the chapters are devoted to specific carpets from different cultures and eras, coveted by imperialists, a chronological organization would not work very well. It's sort of loosely there if you squint just right. I recommend reading the book as presented, however, not trying to do something more "orderly" with its vast erudition on a subject I'd bet not many of us know much about. It might help to space the chapters out, more like stories in a collection. I did that more or less by accident.

It should surprise no one that the majority of the anonymous creators of these artworks were women, and all were from disadvantaged, relatively powerless groups. A recurring theme, this, in Western colonial attitudes.

Feminists, art-history buffs, anti-imperialist readers, and the serious trivia hounds are encouraged to pick one up. Casual lovers of pretty books, well, if carpets are you thing yes; we're not looking at a coffee-table book, though.

Well worth springing for the paper book. I think the ebook must have some of the illustrative images but how they come across will be heavily device dependent. Stick to the half-millennium-old printing technology.