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The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Hardcover – September 9, 2014

by Edward E. Baptist (Author)

403 customer reviews

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Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy.

As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence.

Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery's end—and created a culture that sustains America's deepest dreams of freedom.

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Editorial Reviews

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Peniel Joseph, Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, and author of Stokely: A Life
"The Half Has Never Been Told is a true marvel. Groundbreaking, thoroughly researched, expansive, and provocative it will force scholars of slavery and its aftermath to reconsider long held assumptions about the 'peculiar institution's' relationship to American capitalism and contemporary issues of race and democracy. Engagingly written and bursting with fresh, powerful, and provocative insights, this book deserves to be widely read, discussed, and debated."

About the Author

Edward E. Baptist is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. Author of the award-winning Creating an Old South, he grew up in Durham, North Carolina. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Product details

Hardcover: 528 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (September 9, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 046500296X
ISBN-13: 978-0465002962
Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 403 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #137 in Books > History > Americas > United States > Civil War > Abolition
- #228 in Books > History > Americas > Caribbean & West Indies
- #323 in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Banks & Banking

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Should be required reading for graduate school for study in either Economics; American History; MBA; Afr. American History

November 14, 2016

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

The content of the first 20-30 pages gave the impression that the book had been mistitled. However, by page 120 I had become convinced that the author had provided an vital resources in in understanding how the dots connected between slavery~cotton~manifest destiny~capitalism~the brutal nature of this peculiar institution. I read heavily on the subject of slavery and found this to be the best treatment to date that I have found to address the connection between slavery and America's rise to become a 20th century superpower. This book was so good that I purchased and listened it on CD after having read the print copy. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

68 people found this helpful

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Eric Anthony Koszyk

And he makes a good argument that slavery would not have died if it ...

August 10, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Edward Baptist makes several strong arguments, some of which turn conventional wisdom on its head. Some of his arguments are difficult to read and go against our preferred versions of U.S.history.

He details how American slavery was one of the most productive economic institutions in world history and how the expansion of slavery made the U.S. into a modern industrial empire. He details how slavery, by use of torture and terrorism, increased productivity and made the cotton industry the biggest, most sustained, expansion of the economy in human history.

He makes the point that it wasn't just a Southern industry; indeed it benefitted the entire world -- from Northern banks, ship builders and industries that supported slavery (farm implements, whips, ropes, chains, etc) to the textile mills of Western Europe, especially Britain.

And he makes a good argument that slavery would not have died if it hadn't been for the Civil War. Indeed, from the founding of the nation, slavery had grown for 70 years at a rate unprecedented in human history. There's no evidence to suggest that such a profitable and productive industry would have ever died out on its own accord. He shows that the cotton industry was never as productive again, after it lost it's use of the whip.

Finally, he points out that the South brought about their own destruction. It was they that always pushed for more and more expansion of slavery (even contemplating taking over Cuba and all of Mexico!), which pushed Northerners into fearing for their own loss of political power. The Southern push for ever-growing slavery culminated in the creation of the new Republican Party, formed to not end slavery but to end it's expansion. The South then went to war in order to create its own government based on slavery. Thankfully, they were destroyed.

It's a very well written book that not only makes his arguments with well researched historical documents. He also adds powerful voice to the millions of men, women and children who suffered under the bondage of slavery.

150 people found this helpful

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The "Peculiar Institution" At the Center of Our History

January 14, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This is a "must read" book for anyone who is interested in American history, which means anyone who is seriously interested in American politics. Baptist argues that slavery was at the center of the early expansion of the American economy, using both careful research and moving narratives of individual slaves.

Most writing about American history tends to focus on slavery, the "Peculiar Institution" of the ante-bellum South, as a regional issue whose political effects became critical, but whose national economic effects were limited. Baptist turns that view on its head, arguing that the economic effects of slavery dominated the national economy in the fifty years before the civil war. He documents this view with rigorous research, focussing on the fact that the amount of cotton produced by each slave rose sharply over the period, reaching levels that free labor could not match. Cotton became America's most important export, and, indirectly, the basis of much of the rest of the economy -- the South was a major market for the North, increasingly so as the South grew richer and richer. This led to the development of a financial system emerged that depended on the continued geographic expansion of slavery, which spilled over into the political sphere and came to dominate Southern priorities.

Baptist's book is carefully researched, solid economic history. But it is also a searing examination of how slavery worked in the cotton fields of the deep South. The rising productivity of slave labor was no accident; it was the result of torture, and the fear of more torture. It is painful to read much of what he writes about how slaves were treated -- punished, humiliated, separated from family -- and he doesn't mince words. For example, he refers to "slave labor camps" instead of "plantations", part of a shift in view that makes what happened stark and real.

34 people found this helpful

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Michelle Lamb Discher

he echoes the call of black intellectuals like me for a re-examination of the language associated with ...

February 10, 2016

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Baptist's work is significant if only because he carefully and dispassionately details the intricacies of the economic slave trade vis a vis the industries (including cotton) it made possible, the ubiquity of physical and sexual abuse and exploitation, the systematic and deliberate destruction of family, language and community. Moreover, he echoes the call of black intellectuals like me for a re-examination of the language associated with the trade. It's a dense, but vivid tome, and I learned a lot.

41 people found this helpful

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