Synopses & Reviews
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institutionthe nations original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from Americas 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 slaverys endand created a culture that sustains Americas deepest dreams of freedom.
Review
"An ambitious new economic and social history of antebellum America.... The overwhelming power of the stories that Baptist recounts and the plantation-level statistics hes compiled give his book the power of truth and revelation.... The Half Has Never Been Told is a fresh…take on a history we thought we knew too well the history of a people who were victimized by a medieval brand of capitalism but survived...Baptist adds many new, stark and essential elements to that story. His most important achievement is to show us how the dismal science of economics served to make the lot of slaves even grimmer.” The Los Angeles Times
Review
"Baptists work is a valuable addition to the growing literature on slavery and American development.... Baptist has a knack for explaining complex financial matters in lucid prose.
[The Half Has Never Been Told]'s underlying argument is persuasive.” The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Abolitionists were contemptuous of such self-serving nonsense, but they too tended to see slavery as an economically inefficient, and morally reprehensible, hangover from the premodern past.... In The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward E. Baptist takes passionate issue with such assumptions. He asserts that slavery was neither inherently inefficient nor a counterpoint to capitalism. Rather, he says, it was woven inextricably into the transnational fabric of early 19th-century capitalism
Baptist writes with verve and a good eye for the dramatic.” The Wall Street Journal
Synopsis
A sweeping, authoritative history of the expansion of slavery in America, showing how forced migrations radically altered the nation's economic, political, and cultural landscape.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 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.
Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians
Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize
Bloomberg View Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2014
Daily Beast Best Nonfiction Books of 2014
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.