Commentary Value in the web of life, or, Why world history matters to geography Jason W Moore Binghamton University, USA Abstract Critical geography as a field has yet to reckon with a fundamental geographical blind spot: the historical- geographical patterns of capitalism as a whole. There has been a steady—and studied—reluctance to grapple with capitalism as a historical-geographical place. A geography of value relations must proceed from the unities-in-diversity of capitalism’s combined and uneven spatiality. If value relations are central to grasping the geographies of power, capital, and nature, those geographies are irreducibly world- historical. That does not mean imposed ‘from above’ in any straightforward sense. It means, as Marx and Engels perceptively observe, that value relations entwine everyday life with and within a mosaic of power and capital that operates at the scale of capitalism. Such an understanding situates value relations as unifying thread without positing linear causality or scalar primacy. Dialectical thinking about world history, after all, moves through variation—not in spite of it. Keywords world-ecology, Marx, Cheap Nature, environmental history, capitalocene Kay and Kenney-Lazar (2017) have done a heroic job summarizing a rich discussion of a complex problem: value, nature, and how capitalism works. Of course, I entirely agree: Marx’s theory of value is indispensable to interpreting and narrating the his- tory of capitalism. But I have to confess something. I had a difficult experience reading this paper. Not because it is poorly written (it isn’t) but because the synthesis so necessary for further discussion never materia- lizes. I don’t think that’s a failing of the authors, who have taken on a demanding—and often thank- less—task of summarizing diverse arguments. I do think the absence of synthesis says something important about Anglo-American geography. There are surely many nuanced ways of putting this ‘something important’, but let me try a rough-and- ready diagnosis: Human geography has actively dis- couraged world-historical thinking. If value relations are central to grasping the geo- graphies of power, capital, and nature, those geogra- phies are irreducibly world-historical. That does not mean imposed ‘from above’ in any straightforward sense. It means, as Marx and Engels perceptively observe, that value relations entwine everyday life with and within a mosaic of power and capital that Corresponding author: Jason W Moore, Department of Sociology, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902, USA. Email: jwmoore@binghamton.edu Dialogues in Human Geography 2017, Vol. 7(3) 326–330 ª The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/2043820617736605 journals.sagepub.com/home/dhg