The Half Has Never Been Told
Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
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 E. Baptist reveals in the prizewinning 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.
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.
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Short Review: I am rounding up a little for content. This is well written and important. I think there are a few places where a tighter connection could have been made. The biggest hole for me was why the North that had been consistent in its economic support for slavery shifted toward a greater support for abolition. (My impression is that the north was mildly abolitionist and had the South not seceded and started the Civil War that slavery would have lasted much longer in the US.)
But that one hole in the book did not over shine the overall helpfulness. There was a lot of focus on what slavery was really like, primarily by focusing on slave accounts. The economics really is the important part that I have not understood previously. The early US economy, especially that in the south was far more modern than I previously believed. Banks were much more wide spread. Slave expansion was a largely financed event. Slaves were a form of liquid capital that was in many ways the root of US economy.
This is part of slavery that I think is not understood.
My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/half-has-never-been-told/
