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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
challenging
emotional
informative
slow-paced
After having recently made my way through antebellum history while reading through presidential biographies, this history and examination of American capitalism through the lens of slavery was eye-opening and sobering. Although very slow at times, Edward E. Baptist does a laudable job at chronicling the generation of wealth on the back of slavery, while also maintaining a narrative that showed the reader the both the horror and humanity to be found in the experiences faced by individuals. After reading this book, it’s clear that any accounting of our nation’s history, especially economic accountings, must center the exploitation, torture, and plunder that made it possible. Indeed, without such an accounting, only half the story is being told.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
really long and dense, for me. I just didn't have the time it deserves, would like to finish it.
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Supported by the testimonies of many of those who were in bondage, "The Half Has Never Been Told", shows the very close relationship between slavery and the creation of the modern United States.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
“Free Labor Is The Cornerstone Of U.S. Economics”
- Killer Mike, ‘Reagan’
If you want to really understand The United States of America, really understand what makes this country the way it is, you need to read this book. Edward E. Baptist gives a comprehensive and unflinching look at slavery in the US, its economic motives and results, and how a country built its wealth and power on stolen labor and stolen human lives.
There’s so much to be said about this book, but I think at its core it is an unremitting indictment of the United States, and a case for reparations as good as any. Baptist focuses primarily on the economic scope of slavery, and shows how wealth and global political power were amassed through the forced labor of Africans brought against their will to America. It’s impossible to see what slavery did for America’s fortunes and global standing, see that North and South were both responsible for its growth, and not come to the conclusion that reparations are owed. Simply put, slavery is the reason that the United States is the country it is today- all of its economic might, from conception to current day, was built on the backs of slave labor. This is capitalism in its purest form, and it was the kind that the country tolerated and maintained for hundreds of years.
Beyond the sweeping economic ramifications, Baptist also focuses on the truly brutal and unrepentant dehumanization wrought upon slaves by their owners. Family separation was commonplace, methods of torture became more elaborate as the price of cotton rose, and it was all done without remorse, driven by the pursuit of profit. He takes time to demonstrate that even in other countries where slavery was legal, none went to the lengths that the United States did- it was truly in a league of its own in regards to the unyielding cruelty and evil.
However, I think the deepest and most searing focus of this book isn’t the focus on the methods and practices of the South-it’s that Northern states bankrolled this operation, and relied on it for their own wealth. For all the criticism they had for the institution of slavery, Northern creditors and investors were more than happy to monetarily support its expansion into new territory, and process the raw material of cotton to be sold overseas. With extensive data and research, Baptist shows that the entire country, rather than simply the South, was responsible for slavery, and all benefited from it. In contemporary recounts of the Civil War, little seems to be mentioned regarding Northern complicity in slavery, and instead the issue is presented as unique to the South, when in reality the North was financially tied to it. It’s a damning point that Baptist hammers home on many occasions, and truly reveals the stain that slavery left on the entire country.
This book will leave you sad and despairing at how deep the roots of slavery truly go, but hopefully angry enough to want to do something about it. In an era where truths like these are forcibly suppressed by those who wish to write over them, it’s vital to learn them and fight for those who have ceaselessly born their weight.
- Killer Mike, ‘Reagan’
If you want to really understand The United States of America, really understand what makes this country the way it is, you need to read this book. Edward E. Baptist gives a comprehensive and unflinching look at slavery in the US, its economic motives and results, and how a country built its wealth and power on stolen labor and stolen human lives.
There’s so much to be said about this book, but I think at its core it is an unremitting indictment of the United States, and a case for reparations as good as any. Baptist focuses primarily on the economic scope of slavery, and shows how wealth and global political power were amassed through the forced labor of Africans brought against their will to America. It’s impossible to see what slavery did for America’s fortunes and global standing, see that North and South were both responsible for its growth, and not come to the conclusion that reparations are owed. Simply put, slavery is the reason that the United States is the country it is today- all of its economic might, from conception to current day, was built on the backs of slave labor. This is capitalism in its purest form, and it was the kind that the country tolerated and maintained for hundreds of years.
Beyond the sweeping economic ramifications, Baptist also focuses on the truly brutal and unrepentant dehumanization wrought upon slaves by their owners. Family separation was commonplace, methods of torture became more elaborate as the price of cotton rose, and it was all done without remorse, driven by the pursuit of profit. He takes time to demonstrate that even in other countries where slavery was legal, none went to the lengths that the United States did- it was truly in a league of its own in regards to the unyielding cruelty and evil.
However, I think the deepest and most searing focus of this book isn’t the focus on the methods and practices of the South-it’s that Northern states bankrolled this operation, and relied on it for their own wealth. For all the criticism they had for the institution of slavery, Northern creditors and investors were more than happy to monetarily support its expansion into new territory, and process the raw material of cotton to be sold overseas. With extensive data and research, Baptist shows that the entire country, rather than simply the South, was responsible for slavery, and all benefited from it. In contemporary recounts of the Civil War, little seems to be mentioned regarding Northern complicity in slavery, and instead the issue is presented as unique to the South, when in reality the North was financially tied to it. It’s a damning point that Baptist hammers home on many occasions, and truly reveals the stain that slavery left on the entire country.
This book will leave you sad and despairing at how deep the roots of slavery truly go, but hopefully angry enough to want to do something about it. In an era where truths like these are forcibly suppressed by those who wish to write over them, it’s vital to learn them and fight for those who have ceaselessly born their weight.
Baptist presents two pieces of propaganda about slavery in the US in The Half Has Never Been Told, one Northern and one Southern. Northern propaganda held that a free laborer is a more efficient laborer. Southern propaganda acknowledged that free labor is more efficient, but out of kindness and love for their slaves, Southern enslavers practiced slavery because it was a way to “civilize” people of African descent.
As Americans, I think we want to believe these lies. We want to believe a free-market leads to the best possible outcome. We want to believe that slavery wasn’t that bad for a variety of cultural reasons: we want to celebrate the Confederacy and we want to celebrate the US becoming one of the great economies of the world. This celebration is easier if we pretend slavery was benign or wasn’t that important. So these ideas persist to this day in various forms. Baptist’s book takes them apart.
First, free labor was not more efficient in pure economic terms. Southerners were able to produce more cotton per person before emancipation than free laborers were able to produce after the Civil War. It wasn’t until the mechanization of cotton farming in the 1930s that cotton production caught up with antebellum efficiency levels.
Second, slavery was efficient because it was ruthlessly capitalistic. Slave owners engineered a system of minimal government regulation so they were free to borrow, lend, torture, rape, and traffic their fellow people. These actions allowed slave owners to maximize the return on their human capital. Slave owners were the richest people in the US prior to the Civil War. And the financial innovations that slavery produced allowed not just Northerns, but financial institutions across Europe to invest, speculate and profit off this efficiency.
I think the structure of the book interfered with the author’s goals. On one hand it’s a narrative history, and simultaneously he tries to sprinkle this narrative with stories of individuals. I value why he did this, but the fact remains the implementation undermined the clarity of the work. He also groups the sections of the book according to parts of the human body. This allegory while valuable, that the economy of the US was literally built on the bodies of slaves, it seems arbitrary in execution.
The book makes clear that free-markets are amoral. There is nothing inherently good about them. They are *free* and so reflect the morals of the people exercising the freedom. It’s also important to note that if violence was justified by the colonists against England in 1776, or by the Allies against the Axis during WWII, violence was justified on the part of slaves against the US government that allowed it. That there has not been such a violent uprising deserves respect.
If you want a brutally honest, yet not exploitative, overview of the history of US slavery, this book is a great resource.
Quotes:
"What slavers used was a system of measurement and negative incentives. Actually, one should avoid such euphemisms. Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck. The continuous process of innovation thus generated was the ultimate cause of the massive increase in the production of high-quality, cheap cotton: an absolutely necessary increase if the Western world was to burst out of the 10,000-year Malthusian cycle of agriculture. This system confounds our expectation, because, like abolitionists, we want to believe that the free labor system is not only more moral than systems of coercion, but more efficient. Faith in that a priori is very useful. It means we never have to resolve the existential contradictions between productivity and freedom...Yet those who actually endured those days knew the secret that...drove cotton-picking to continually higher levels of efficiency."
“The total number of bales produced in the United State didn't surpass 1859's peak until 1875, despite a significant increase in the number of people making cotton in the South after emancipation. Cotton productivity dropped significantly. Many enslaved cotton pickers in the late 1850s had peaked at well over 200 pounds per day. In the 1930s, after a half-century of massive scientific experimentation all to make the cotton boll more pickable, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved often picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day.” p. 410
“It has been said that the Civil War was ‘unnecessary’ because slavery was already destined to end, probably within a few decades after the 1860 election. Yet this is mere dogma. The evidence points in the opposite direction. Slavery yielded ever more efficient production, in contrast to the free labor that tried (and failed) to compete with it, and the free labor that succeeded it.If slave labor in cotton had ever hit a wall of ultimate possibility, enslavers could have found new commodities. Southern enslavers had adapted slavery before, with incredibly profitable results.” p. 414
As Americans, I think we want to believe these lies. We want to believe a free-market leads to the best possible outcome. We want to believe that slavery wasn’t that bad for a variety of cultural reasons: we want to celebrate the Confederacy and we want to celebrate the US becoming one of the great economies of the world. This celebration is easier if we pretend slavery was benign or wasn’t that important. So these ideas persist to this day in various forms. Baptist’s book takes them apart.
First, free labor was not more efficient in pure economic terms. Southerners were able to produce more cotton per person before emancipation than free laborers were able to produce after the Civil War. It wasn’t until the mechanization of cotton farming in the 1930s that cotton production caught up with antebellum efficiency levels.
Second, slavery was efficient because it was ruthlessly capitalistic. Slave owners engineered a system of minimal government regulation so they were free to borrow, lend, torture, rape, and traffic their fellow people. These actions allowed slave owners to maximize the return on their human capital. Slave owners were the richest people in the US prior to the Civil War. And the financial innovations that slavery produced allowed not just Northerns, but financial institutions across Europe to invest, speculate and profit off this efficiency.
I think the structure of the book interfered with the author’s goals. On one hand it’s a narrative history, and simultaneously he tries to sprinkle this narrative with stories of individuals. I value why he did this, but the fact remains the implementation undermined the clarity of the work. He also groups the sections of the book according to parts of the human body. This allegory while valuable, that the economy of the US was literally built on the bodies of slaves, it seems arbitrary in execution.
The book makes clear that free-markets are amoral. There is nothing inherently good about them. They are *free* and so reflect the morals of the people exercising the freedom. It’s also important to note that if violence was justified by the colonists against England in 1776, or by the Allies against the Axis during WWII, violence was justified on the part of slaves against the US government that allowed it. That there has not been such a violent uprising deserves respect.
If you want a brutally honest, yet not exploitative, overview of the history of US slavery, this book is a great resource.
Quotes:
"What slavers used was a system of measurement and negative incentives. Actually, one should avoid such euphemisms. Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck. The continuous process of innovation thus generated was the ultimate cause of the massive increase in the production of high-quality, cheap cotton: an absolutely necessary increase if the Western world was to burst out of the 10,000-year Malthusian cycle of agriculture. This system confounds our expectation, because, like abolitionists, we want to believe that the free labor system is not only more moral than systems of coercion, but more efficient. Faith in that a priori is very useful. It means we never have to resolve the existential contradictions between productivity and freedom...Yet those who actually endured those days knew the secret that...drove cotton-picking to continually higher levels of efficiency."
“The total number of bales produced in the United State didn't surpass 1859's peak until 1875, despite a significant increase in the number of people making cotton in the South after emancipation. Cotton productivity dropped significantly. Many enslaved cotton pickers in the late 1850s had peaked at well over 200 pounds per day. In the 1930s, after a half-century of massive scientific experimentation all to make the cotton boll more pickable, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved often picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day.” p. 410
“It has been said that the Civil War was ‘unnecessary’ because slavery was already destined to end, probably within a few decades after the 1860 election. Yet this is mere dogma. The evidence points in the opposite direction. Slavery yielded ever more efficient production, in contrast to the free labor that tried (and failed) to compete with it, and the free labor that succeeded it.If slave labor in cotton had ever hit a wall of ultimate possibility, enslavers could have found new commodities. Southern enslavers had adapted slavery before, with incredibly profitable results.” p. 414
I’m so embarrassed for how little I know about the US’s history. This should be required reading in every high school.
I had to take off a half point for his odd formatting. I see what he was going for, but the shocking text was enough - didn’t need a kitschy (f’ed up) theme.
I had to take off a half point for his odd formatting. I see what he was going for, but the shocking text was enough - didn’t need a kitschy (f’ed up) theme.