Phenomenal. Maybe a tad over-long and over-wordy, but whatever. The depth of information in the book, especially from an economics and financial standpoint, is deep. Not only that, but Baptist uses it to show the how and why of slavery, its expansion, the escalating violence and sexual aggression toward not only slaves but perceived classes among whites, and much more.

One of my favorite parts of the book is the examination of the Civil War and some of the factors that led to it--specifically whether or not slaves, as property, should be protected by the Federal government. It's such an interesting problem that gets expanded upon in a lot of detail, even down to personal stories and land grabs.

Overall, this is one of the best books on slavery and how our country was founded on the backs of hundreds of thousands of Africans that were stolen from their homeland. This ignores and flat out challenges a lot of the revisionist history I heard growing up, such as the Civil War was unnecessary because slavery would have ended naturally and was already on its way out (not true--it was in fact growing quite substantially).

I recommend that anyone who is serious about understand slavery, capitalism in America, and how the two are inexorably linked. ( )

Not long ago I read Sven Beckert’s massive “Empire of Cotton: A Global History” and possibly it was a mistake to to read that volume ahead of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” by Edward E. Baptist.

I say mistake because the climax of Beckert’s book is the response of the British textile industry to the disruption of the American Civil War. The British were making massive profits on relatively cheap cotton flowing out of America. Demand was enormous. The slave-based supply coming from America was enormous.

So they attempted to recreate the American system elsewhere in the world. They tried in Egypt. They tried in Africa. They pushed into the hinterlands of India and China. Each time they failed. Sometimes it was the climate but more often than not they failed because they didn’t have leverage with the local population that American slavedrivers had in the Deep South.

And Edward Baptist explains why.

Not only did American planters buy and terrorize their slaves with brute force but they used the inexhaustible supply of slaves to continually push into virgin land previously occupied by native Americans, clear the land, plant more and more cotton, finance their ventures with land and slave-secured mortgages, and pushed their slaves to ever higher levels of productivity.

At their peak in the years leading up to the Civil War slaves picked up to a billion pounds of cotton. Slave merchants moved the blacks around the country at first in chain gangs and later on the early railroads.

Baptist’s genius in telling this story is mixing in personal accounts of families broken as slaves were moved from one owner to the next. Enslaving these people, flaying their backs, raping their women, breaking up families. At each step of the way as the slaves were grounded in their new homes their communities were shredded.

American institutions both financial and political were consistently twisted to support the planters’ drive west to the Mississippi and beyond. As capitalism spread so spread the republic. And when the planters ran into financial headwinds they simply absconded on their debts and took their slaves to Texas.

This is what brought the annexation of Texas and might have brought the annexation of Cuba as well had the North not run out of patience finally over Kansas.

The aftermath of the Civil War — had it been played out today — might result in billions of reparations for the economic profits stolen from the slaves. Instead it was Reconstruction and the isolation of blacks in American society. ( )

Everyone should understand how the capitalist system emerged out of slavery as well as its continued pernicious effects. This book is a must-read particularly in today's political discourse that mainly consists of slogans and platitudes. ( )

An interesting read on how slavery and the profit it produced were inextricably woven into almost all aspects of early American society. The author demonstrates that slavery wasn't merely a moral failing isolated to a few southern states, it was backbone of American commerce for decades, its implementation and survival were seen as necessary to making white men obscenely rich and indeed keeping the country financially solvent. The half has never been told is an appropriate title for this work, as most Americans (myself included) aren't fully aware of how ubiquitous and monstrous slavery was, nor how complicit the whole country was in its continuance. ( )

Recommended by Hassan Adeeb

Started this after a trip to Louisiana and touring plantations. A book I'm going to have to purchase in order to have time to finish. I can't read it in big chunks as it is really heavy, but so important! ( )

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's
economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people
Edward E. Baptist (born 1970) is an American academic and writer.
He is a professor of history at Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York,
where he specializes in the history of the 19th-century United States, particularly
the South. Thematically, he has been interested in the history of capitalism and
has also been interested in digital humanities methodologies. He is the author of numerous books.

I ( )

File this under "could have been half as long and thus made its points more effectively," but then, perhaps also file under "has something for everyone." If you were unaware that slavery in America was horrific and brutal, this book will tell you all about that (and if you were aware, you will quickly grow tired of the sub-Dickensian heart-string pulling: I know slavery was horrible, puerile melodrama doesn't help me in any way). If you want solid statistics and argument about the reliance of economic growth on American slavery, this book will give you that (and if you don't, don't worry, another heart-string puller will show up sooner or later). In the end, I just skimmed the narratives, particularly the 'representative' ones that Baptist put together himself. I'm happy to read the stories told by actual ex-slaves; I have no interest in made-for-TV-actual-reproductions-of-possible-events. I advise you do the same, and focus on the argument: property in humans made possible the tremendous economic growth of the USA in the nineteenth century, and that growth also fed into world markets. Our economies would not exist as they do today were it not for the enslavement of millions of men and women. ( )

This is NOT an easy read, but it is fantastic. Each chapter moved ahead chronologically, but also focuses on one aspect of slavery (one chapter on forced migration, one on the auction block, one on life in the cotton fields, etc.) and also highlights individual people and how they were impacted so while learning about larger social, political, and economic forces you never lose track of the lived experiences of the slaves themselves. A masterpiece!! ( )

'twas magisterial, huge. A very thorough stroll over the (now) USA's history of slavery, the cruelty, the effectively universal acceptance 'mongst the white folks.

For anyone else: 5 stars. For me, well, I more wanted to be interested that actually was, so it didn't grab me that much, so 4 ( )

This is an amazing book. It provides a very detailed and thorough account of the integral role slavery played in the development of the United States between its founding and the Civil War. The author does a terrific job of interweaving personal stories of former slaves gathered during the early 1900s to make the story more visceral and human. It will open your eyes to the fact that slavery is still a large part of our economic and social foundation today.

( )

This book fills an important void for me in my attempt to fully understand black history in America, at least as fully as someone who is not black is capable of doing so. In this particular case, this author presents very detailed economic factors that drove America's use of slavery. Given my college minor in economics, I find it interesting it has taken me so long to get to this book. In any event, I must add it to my pantheon of essential recommended volumes: (1) Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped From the Beginning, for its study of racist thought, (2) this book, for its economic analysis at every level, (3) Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name, for its study of the transition from slavery to Jim Crow, (4) Danielle L. McGuire's At the Dark End of the Street, for its important study of gender differences between races and their lasting societal effects, and (5) Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, for taking us from all that was in the past to where America is today. There are numerous other worthy works that offer important insights, but these are the ones that I feel dive the deepest and tackle the broadest strokes. So, why might anyone else read this book besides an economics student? First, it has a rather unique narrative style. Spaced throughout the book, the author takes the reader very intimately into my lives directly impacted by their enslavement in America. Many stories dug out of his research are every bit as personal and emotional as any scenes in the movie, "12 Years a Slave". Then, inevitably, the author draws the reader back up and out of those ground-level descriptions and relates for the reader the type of explanations that would be happening more broadly in the country. For instance, he relates a fairly complex economic situation in the 1830s that could easily have been matched with Michael Lewis' explanation of the Great Recession in his very insightful, The Big Short. (Not to be confused with the movie marketed as a comedy. At least I didn't find anything funny about the book or the Great Recession.) As the author relates, the mortgaging and repackaging of mortgages of the enslaved, accelerated and spread so far beyond prudent financial limits, that the system collapsed on itself, very much like house mortgages did in America not so long ago. The author doesn't always handle the transitions from intimate and personal to investigative journalism of the past very smoothly, especially in the beginning, but after enough groundwork is laid, the narrative in the book really starts to flow well. There are a number of interesting details revealed, such as the earlier version of the 1960s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, but, in this case, which happened because powerful slave owners wanted to expand slavery by invading and taking over Cuba. Or, similarly, how, after the U.S. defeated Mexico in the 1840s, many slave owners wanted to take over all of Mexico for the same reason as they wanted Cuba, to have more land to expand slavery. However, the purest of the pro-slavery politicians could not tolerate seeing the power of a pure Caucasian-led nation tainted by the "nameless and mongrel breeds" that would become American citizens if Mexico was added to the U.S.A. (No, Trump isn't that old, so he didn't coin that phrase back then.) In the end, the dependency of the South on an ever expandable mortgaging of slaves reached its zenith in 1859. And just how devastating was it to the cotton industry to no longer be able to beat slaves into maximum efficiency in picking cotton? In the late 1850s, the better slaves picked well over 200 pounds of cotton per day. Some eighty years later, even with the help of significant research on finding plant varieties with more easily picked cotton bolls, the typical individual picker output -- free of the overseers whip -- could only muster about 100-120 pounds per day. An extra 100 pounds of cotton per picker per day must have made that whip a bargain purchase for most slave owners. ( )

wonderful book, ( )

brain-changing ( )

Powerful, but looong. The descriptions of lives stolen was particularly riveting; making me feel white guilt. But Baptist had a tendency to present a person enslaved, and make them stand and be examined while he went on and on driving his point. That in itself, felt like a further indignity. ( )

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. ( )

Outstanding. Eye-opening. Fundamental. Read this book!

Drawing from actual data of the 18th and 19th centuries, and not just the commentary of apologists, Professor Baptist, shows that American economic growth was powered by enslaved people. He shows that entrepreneurial spirit and technical innovation played roles in the economic expansion, but the availability and effects of those factors were delayed by the Slave system. The forced toil of enslaved people built America.
Today, the South is an educational back water ruled by feudal lords. The rulers try to erase and disguise the source of their power. Most Southerners today have forgotten that the Southern plutocracy of the early 1800s were the wealthiest people in the world. (Dixie would easily have won the Civil War--the plutocrats could have bought a land army five times larger than the North, and with better weapons--but the lords hated taxes, even when raised for themselves.)
Professor Baptist follows the money. Plantation companies used Slaves as collateral to get credit to buy more slaves and plantations. The American South had a global near-monopoly on raw cotton. American clipper ships and British bottoms were supplying Europe, China and India with textiles. No other country could produce the labor-intensive land-exhausting cultivation of cotton at competitive prices to the plantation production based on the enslavement of men, women and children. Baptist fully documents the comprehensive institutional totality of Slavery.
By drawing from eye-witness accounts and diaries, Professor Baptist is able to construct a story from the daily violence of plantation labor to which explains the West’s economic takeoff in the 19th century. He also documents the techniques used to force ever-increasing "productivity" from the labor force--torture, fear, forced breeding. Even children were forced into harems and working stations. ( )

A wonderful and important work. The author demonstrates that slavery was more efficient at producing cotton than any other method, due to the torture that white overseers inflicted on their laborers. He also shows that this country depended on cotton and slavery for its growth, even going back to the 18th century. The combination of personal stories with sound economics is unusual but highly relevant. He writes about the music that these people developed, and many other things. ( )

This was an amazing read for me. The author combines economic history and personal narratives from enslaved people to present material in a way that yielded so many interesting perspectives on early US History. The author takes on some of the myths of slavery and its passing. It was not withering away. It was evil and a blight is so many ways. It powered US growth for a number of decades and many lifetimes. It generated quite a few innovations in capital markets. It was the use of torture to generate high productivity in the core resource, cotton, at the start of the industrial revolution.

If you have an interest in US history, I highly recommend this book. ( )

Although I am a white man who was born in the North and whose family history is all pretty much north of the Mason Dixon line, I have never had too much trouble with the idea that I am and my world is an indirect beneficiary of African American slavery. Aside from the simple fact that my nations capitol city was literally built by slaves, and many of her early leaders profited from slavery and the slave trade, I was aware that it was Northern money that financed much of the system and Northern (and worldwide) demand for slave labor cotton that kept it profitable. So when Baptist's book sparked a negative review in The Economist that was quickly withdrawn for its stupidity, I assumed it must be a Marxist-Leninist take down of capitalism itself to drive free market fetishists to such frenzy. Spoiler Alert: it's not.
True, Baptist demonstrates how slavery was not an aberration, but rather an extreme expression of capitalism, but but this is not a new theory. True, Baptist demonstrates (through data gathered from primary source documents) that slavery was not economically inefficient and was not doomed to die out even without the intervention of the Civil War, but this, too, although Baptist supports his argument through better data, is not a new assertion, having been around for decades (a nice summary of the literature is here: https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/was-slavery-on-the-way-out/). So I can only assume that because Baptist's book came out in the fall of 2014, a time when there was renewed focus on racial tensions in the U.S., it became an innocent flash point for political point making.
Once you get past the hype and consider the book as itself, it reveals it as a flawed, but useful book. Baptist's data collection tracks not only the external financing of the slave system, but also the internal fluctuations and migrations of the trade, an important factor in weighing the human cost and understanding how the system perpetuated itself. Baptist also ties these economic facts to the lives of slaves and slave owners, illuminating the destruction visited on the former and the depravity of the latter. Unfortunately, this is also where the book's biggest flaw arises.
Baptist ties his data to the lives of slavery's victims and perpetrators throughout his narrative. To do this, he uses slave narratives, publications, and private letters of enslavers. He also attempts to reconstruct the lives of slaves and slavers through re-creating scenes based upon the documents he has uncovered. And here, I fear, he stretches the thing a tad too far, recreating thoughts and sensations that are, essentially, unknowable. It is a shame, too, because there is no evidence more incriminating than the letters written by enslavers themselves that Baptist quotes, and no testament to the horrors of slavery better than the words and writings of the slaves themselves, captured in contemporary narratives like Northup's "Twelve Years A Slave," or the autobiography of Charles Ball, apparently, which I had not heard of before but based on Baptist's book should also be made into a movie. Baptist also uses interviews from the WPA slave narrative project to good effect. But all of this is weakened by his insistence trying to recreate scenes of slavery when those sources are not forthcoming. I sympathize with Baptist's intent here, but these recreations weaken the force of his facts, and undermine his work. I wish Baptist had been content to let his facts and his subjects speak for themselves as far as they could, and not try to speak for them where they could not. It is as if Baptist could not bring himself to say that the half has never been told, and in fact never will be told, because the victims have been silenced by the lash and by time itself. Unfortunately, that is the difference between history and romance. ( )

Here is a book that will inspire readers to investigate what information is available at archive.org regarding the various slave narratives and fictional representations of the antebellum south (from before the civil war) and practices of the slave overseers with regard to the "pushing" method of getting maximum productivity out of the slaves that worked in the slave camps for the planters in the slavery times. This is an unbelievably good read!! ( )

The book very skillfully mixes a wrenching portrayal of individual human suffering, gleaned from oral histories of former slaves, with a solid economic history of the U.S. economy during the slave era. It's a powerful combination. Baptist's strongly supported thesis is that the economic growth of the 18th and 19th centuries was fueled neither by entrepreneurial drive, nor by technical innovation, but instead by the toil of enslaved people. Having read the book, this feels very obvious to me now, but as I was reading it I could feel my own resistance to Baptist's thesis, because I have been taught well over many years to believe otherwise--that the plantation economy of South as well as slavery itself were backward economic institutions that were destined to be overwhelmed by the capital-intense North. But who bought all that cotton, who turned it into textiles, who profited from cheap cotton? Who benefitted most from cotton being produced by free labor? Not just the South. By laying out very carefully the flow of money, credit, land development and slave labor, from the late 18th to mid-19th century, Baptist leaves the reader with a very strong understanding of how all white Americans, not just those in the South, benefitted from the subjection of African Americans into slavery.

Baptist, a Cornell history professor, breaks out of academic-speak altogether and presents the material in unique ways. I felt his narrative creativity served to jolt me out of any received wisdom about slavery so I could think in new ways. In one section Baptist writes for example from the point of view of a dying man, a leader of a slave revolt at the moment of his execution. Less flamboyantly but even more effectively for me, Baptist consistently replaces the word "slaves" with "enslaved people." That may sound like a small difference, but it reframed the fact of slavery in a new, more factual way.The word "slave" has been used up, in a way, to the point where it is very hard to divorce the word from the centuries-old idea of a "happy slave" being cared for by paternalistic "masters." "Enslaved people" gets back to the heart of the atrocity, back to the bare fact of a person held against their will and entirely at the mercy of another human being.

It's a book that causes heartache, as it should. It's very hard to look straight at this topic and see it for all its horror. It also left me with the feeling that very little has changed, when I think about how much of U.S. economic growth still depends on the labor of the powerless, whether it be farm workers here in the U.S., or the near-slave labor making everything from shirts to semiconductors overseas. This greater criticism of capitalism is not in any way a part of Baptist's thesis, which is wide-ranging enough as it is...but even so, the book led me to certain kinds of conclusions about how the rapid accumulation of wealth in any capitalist economy seems to depend on the subjugation of others. ( )

After I read it, I understand why the Economist gave it such a defensive, racist review. This book, more than any I can remember reading, confronts non-black Americans, and to a certain extent citizens of other countries like Britain, with exactly how much of white American wealth and industrialization, which also made many others wealthy or comfortable, depended on the systematic torture of African and African-American people. The book does so both with the horrendous facts, but also with its language, which does not allow readers to gloss over the past. There are no plantations in this book, only slave labor camps. There are no masters, only enslavers—enslavement was an active thing, a thing that kept happening, that was maintained regularly and voluntarily, including by lots and lots of people who never enslaved others themselves—and Baptist often speaks of enslaved people rather than slaves, reminding us both of their humanity and the ongoing nature of their mistreatment.

There is rape and there is fucking; Baptist, like other historians, links the violent white male culture of the South with the domination they were pleased to exercise over enslaved people and the necessity they felt of showing other whites that they were “free” and not enslaved. This freedom was freedom to steal (land, people), rape, kill, whip, and otherwise torture blacks as well as freedom to assault and even kill any white man who “insulted” them. The greed of capitalist expansion was funded by ever more efficient extraction of cotton production through the torture of enslaved people, using quantification and individualization of quotas combined with the reduction of slaves to interchangeable “hands.” This greed was connected to the other risk-taking behavior of enslavers as well as to their greed for the bodies of enslaved women, whom they were free to rape. Sexual access to those women also asserted power over white women, functioning as proof that these white men were governed only by themselves: that they did the whipping.

Baptist argues that it’s a reassuring lie to say that slavery was economically inefficient, as we are often taught today. With the mechanisms enslavers developed to break down social bonds between enslaved people; to torture them so terrifyingly that they’d work desperately to avoid the torture; and to create an efficient market for slaves, including credit and securitization, slavery was a wealth-generating machine the likes of which had never been seen before. Slaves learned to innovate and become ever more productive in order to gain some small, temporary protection from the torture. Slavery made some white men very, very wealthy, both in the North and the South, and the institutions we have today are still benefiting from the wealth extracted from enslaved people and allocated to white people. ( )