Take a photo of a barcode or cover
207 reviews for:
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Edward E. Baptist
4.48 AVERAGE
207 reviews for:
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Edward E. Baptist
4.48 AVERAGE
I was intrigued by the claim on the cover -- that slavery was fundamental to the foundation & growth of American capitalism. Some of my disappointment with this book has to do with feeling misled: there is surprisingly little (really not much more than a few paragraphs) in the entire book making the argument promised on the cover. If the book had been called something like The Slave Experience in the Deep South from 1800-1850 I probably would have given it four stars. What we actually have is a book with three very different styles and themes.
One is the lived experience of slaves during the expansion of slavery and cotton plantations as the fledgling republic expanded; this was 4-star material and primarily focuses on the years 1810-1840 or so.
The next is fairly standard "history". Baptist drops all of the influences from slave narratives and gives a fairly straightforward history of America in the years bookending the slave narratives. This was fine & interesting but nothing especially amazing and some of it (like Bleeding Kansas or the run up to the Civil War) is going to be at least vaguely familiar to many. 3-star stuff.
Then there is the very thin thread of "slavery was the foundation of American capitalism" which is not especially convincing (and that's without even looking at the subsequent strong criticisms) and takes up surprisingly little of the book. 2-stars for this.
One thing that struck me as I read the book were the parallels between American's pursuit of wealth at the expense of black slaves in the 1800s and modern pursuit of wealth at the expense of the environment. It wasn't hatred of black lives that drove slavery, it was love of money.
I was also struck by the parallels between 19th century slave holders demands that they be allowed to do anything with their property and modern anti-state, pro-business, ultra-libertarian thinking in America and I wonder how much the latter is a direct descendant of the former?
Baptist is at his best when he tells the story of the early years of the expansion. Of how slave families in Virginia were ripped apart and the most able hands were shipped to the new territories. Of how a backwater like New Orleans nearly overtook New York as the financial center of the US. Of how the entire system was run by the threat of torture.
Not to mention omnipresent rape of teenagers and women.
And the "system" extended far beyond slave plantations. Everyone wanted to invest. Even the British, who had outlawed slavery, were more than happy to invest in slave plantations.
But on his key thesis, that slavery was the foundation of American capitalism, Baptist is surprisingly brief and weak. The claim is straightforward: cotton was the most important commodity of the world at the time; through ratcheting torture slavers actually increased productivity of slaves dramatically; that led to an American monopoly over global cotton; those monopoly profits generated a lot of cash that financed the Industrial Revolution.
Yet Baptist only rarely puts numbers to any of these things and does almost nothing to disprove alternative explanations. It doesn't help that one of the key claims, that productivity increased dramatically due to ratcheting methods of torture has been strongly rebutted by the very academics Baptist cites for his claim. (They say the productivity growth they demonstrate was due to improved variations of cotton seeds not to changes in quality or quantity of torture.) Baptist is curiously number-free at key points. One that jumped out as me is a claim of slave owner wealth:
That's the kind of thing where providing some numbers would add a lot of color! How much richer were they? What's the claim even based on, anyway? Baptist is silent. Likewise, how big were these "monopoly profits" that cotton was generating? This happens repeatedly and weakens his argument.
Read this for Baptist's tremendous evocation of the "slave gold rush" and the ensuing financial shenanigans but don't expect to be convinced by his arguments that slavery was foundational to American capitalism.
Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor. [...] The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.
One is the lived experience of slaves during the expansion of slavery and cotton plantations as the fledgling republic expanded; this was 4-star material and primarily focuses on the years 1810-1840 or so.
The next is fairly standard "history". Baptist drops all of the influences from slave narratives and gives a fairly straightforward history of America in the years bookending the slave narratives. This was fine & interesting but nothing especially amazing and some of it (like Bleeding Kansas or the run up to the Civil War) is going to be at least vaguely familiar to many. 3-star stuff.
Then there is the very thin thread of "slavery was the foundation of American capitalism" which is not especially convincing (and that's without even looking at the subsequent strong criticisms) and takes up surprisingly little of the book. 2-stars for this.
No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions.
One thing that struck me as I read the book were the parallels between American's pursuit of wealth at the expense of black slaves in the 1800s and modern pursuit of wealth at the expense of the environment. It wasn't hatred of black lives that drove slavery, it was love of money.
I was also struck by the parallels between 19th century slave holders demands that they be allowed to do anything with their property and modern anti-state, pro-business, ultra-libertarian thinking in America and I wonder how much the latter is a direct descendant of the former?
In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire.
Baptist is at his best when he tells the story of the early years of the expansion. Of how slave families in Virginia were ripped apart and the most able hands were shipped to the new territories. Of how a backwater like New Orleans nearly overtook New York as the financial center of the US. Of how the entire system was run by the threat of torture.
Those who had seen and experienced torture in both the southeastern and southwestern regions universally insisted that it was worse on the southwestern plantations.
Not to mention omnipresent rape of teenagers and women.
The manager of a wealthy man’s Jamaican plantation, Thistlewood recorded the names of 109 enslaved women with whom he coupled over thirteen years. He focused on teenage girls, not grown women.
And the "system" extended far beyond slave plantations. Everyone wanted to invest. Even the British, who had outlawed slavery, were more than happy to invest in slave plantations.
The accounts of northern merchants and bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery’s expansion. [...] With the creation of innovative financial tools, more and more of the Western world was able to invest directly in slavery’s expansion.
But on his key thesis, that slavery was the foundation of American capitalism, Baptist is surprisingly brief and weak. The claim is straightforward: cotton was the most important commodity of the world at the time; through ratcheting torture slavers actually increased productivity of slaves dramatically; that led to an American monopoly over global cotton; those monopoly profits generated a lot of cash that financed the Industrial Revolution.
Yet Baptist only rarely puts numbers to any of these things and does almost nothing to disprove alternative explanations. It doesn't help that one of the key claims, that productivity increased dramatically due to ratcheting methods of torture has been strongly rebutted by the very academics Baptist cites for his claim. (They say the productivity growth they demonstrate was due to improved variations of cotton seeds not to changes in quality or quantity of torture.) Baptist is curiously number-free at key points. One that jumped out as me is a claim of slave owner wealth:
They became the richest class of white people in the United States, and perhaps the world.
That's the kind of thing where providing some numbers would add a lot of color! How much richer were they? What's the claim even based on, anyway? Baptist is silent. Likewise, how big were these "monopoly profits" that cotton was generating? This happens repeatedly and weakens his argument.
Read this for Baptist's tremendous evocation of the "slave gold rush" and the ensuing financial shenanigans but don't expect to be convinced by his arguments that slavery was foundational to American capitalism.
He clearly suffered from the “Alabama Fever,” as people called it—the fervent belief that every white person who could get frontier land and put enslaved people to work making cotton would inevitably become rich.
This is a very hard book to rate, for a variety of reasons.
First, I have to agree with some middling reviewers’ that Baptist’s prose is often purplish enough to make he think he’s a disgruntled would-be Harlequin novelist. I’ve not read other books by him, but this one really could have stood for some major editing. I have read his response to some of his critiques at the Guardian, and I’m guessing that if any major editing was suggested for this book, he got a huge burr up his saddle about this. This is worth a down-star by itself.
Second, he ignores some stats that might partially undercut his claim about the economic superiority, and efficiency, of King Cotton. Namely, it’s quite likely that slaves DID illegally come into the United States after the official ban on international importation in 1808. These could have come directly from Africa, or indirectly from Cuba, or indirectly from British Caribbean islands, when emancipation first became broached in London but before the Commons officially approved it. And they could have either come directly to the US, or indirectly to 1821-1844 Texas. W.E.B. DuBois estimated the number as being as high as 200,000.
Third, I’m not sure how accurate all US statistics, whether on cotton production, number of enslaved residents of the US, or other things from 1800-1860 really can be. So,
From two and three, it’s thus arguably not proven that the slave economy was, at maximum, as much more efficient than was the free economy of the time.
That said, I think Baptist’s contention is still relatively sound. I too think that the slave economy, on plantation type agriculture, was at least somewhat more efficient; why else did the “Reconstruction” North keep trying to force freed slaves into oppressive labor contracts?
Baptist rightly demolishes one other argument — that US climate of the Southwest would have “naturally” restricted slavery. Pointing to the semi-peonage of immigrant farm labor in California, and the fact that Arizona is now the nation’s top cotton state undercuts this. True, it took technology to provide the water for that. But, technology hasn’t created cheap mechanical pickers for fruit and vegetable crops; if slavery could be re-introduced there, it probably would be.
And, yes, I absolutely believe that; if slavery were legal, we'd see it in places like California's Central Valley.
Finally, I think I know one reason for part of the vitriol about this book. Baptist is native to the South. Based on some of the reaction I’ve seen to the book Tomlinson Hill, a lot of white Southerners hate white Southerners who write books like this.
And, despite its editorial bloat losing it a star right there, and the rest of his case not quite as solid as I might like, I’ll still give it four stars. But, if Baptist writes another book with this over-the-top style, I’ll ding it two stars.
First, I have to agree with some middling reviewers’ that Baptist’s prose is often purplish enough to make he think he’s a disgruntled would-be Harlequin novelist. I’ve not read other books by him, but this one really could have stood for some major editing. I have read his response to some of his critiques at the Guardian, and I’m guessing that if any major editing was suggested for this book, he got a huge burr up his saddle about this. This is worth a down-star by itself.
Second, he ignores some stats that might partially undercut his claim about the economic superiority, and efficiency, of King Cotton. Namely, it’s quite likely that slaves DID illegally come into the United States after the official ban on international importation in 1808. These could have come directly from Africa, or indirectly from Cuba, or indirectly from British Caribbean islands, when emancipation first became broached in London but before the Commons officially approved it. And they could have either come directly to the US, or indirectly to 1821-1844 Texas. W.E.B. DuBois estimated the number as being as high as 200,000.
Third, I’m not sure how accurate all US statistics, whether on cotton production, number of enslaved residents of the US, or other things from 1800-1860 really can be. So,
From two and three, it’s thus arguably not proven that the slave economy was, at maximum, as much more efficient than was the free economy of the time.
That said, I think Baptist’s contention is still relatively sound. I too think that the slave economy, on plantation type agriculture, was at least somewhat more efficient; why else did the “Reconstruction” North keep trying to force freed slaves into oppressive labor contracts?
Baptist rightly demolishes one other argument — that US climate of the Southwest would have “naturally” restricted slavery. Pointing to the semi-peonage of immigrant farm labor in California, and the fact that Arizona is now the nation’s top cotton state undercuts this. True, it took technology to provide the water for that. But, technology hasn’t created cheap mechanical pickers for fruit and vegetable crops; if slavery could be re-introduced there, it probably would be.
And, yes, I absolutely believe that; if slavery were legal, we'd see it in places like California's Central Valley.
Finally, I think I know one reason for part of the vitriol about this book. Baptist is native to the South. Based on some of the reaction I’ve seen to the book Tomlinson Hill, a lot of white Southerners hate white Southerners who write books like this.
And, despite its editorial bloat losing it a star right there, and the rest of his case not quite as solid as I might like, I’ll still give it four stars. But, if Baptist writes another book with this over-the-top style, I’ll ding it two stars.
This book was pretty hard to read. It lays out all the ways in which slavery was the foundation of the modern Western economy, mostly because of the US kidnapping and torturing generations of workers into growing cotton for them. I didn't know a lot of the details, like how slaves were mortgaged and packaged up like an 1800s version of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, or all the different ways that enslavers kept their slaves working (besides just whipping them).
informative
slow-paced
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
Beautiful prose and descriptive storytelling make this very long read a painful but enlightening experience.
By far the most important book I’ve read recently. Absolutely essential reading. Incredible history told by someone who is not mincing words.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism
You can read my review here: http://bmrn.captchaintherye.com/review-the-half-has-never-been-told-slavery-and-the-making-of-american-capitalism-by-edward-baptist/