A stunning indictment of African-American slavery, contextualizing the history of the “peculiar institution” within emerging 19th-century American capitalism…Baptist’s great contribution is in providing general readers with insights into slavery’s horrors and how it transformed the South into the dominant force in the global market and cotton into the most important raw material in the world economy.”—News & Observer
“Baptist’s exhaustively researched, elegantly written and provocatively argued book details the connection between the growth of the institution of human bondage and economic innovations from 1783-1861.”—Providence Journal
“An ambitious and thorough account of how American capitalism was not an innate gift, but rather a system of gradual development, aiming to penetrate all aspects of the American public life. In particular, this fine book anatomizes the relationship between slavery and the creation of American capitalism…Thanks to its comprehensive, chronological approach and its lucid prose, the book is a rich addition to the literature on the economics of slavery and American development. The Half Has Never Been Told is required reading. It is challenging, illuminating, refreshing, and creative…Baptist adds many new, essential elements to the story of capitalism in America. Arguably, his most important contribution is to show how the ‘dismal science’ of economics can be an engine of development and yet a reminder of great and terrible costs that it imposes in the overall story. Now the long unspoken half of the story has been told—and we can only hope that it is heard.”
—H-Law
“Baptist’s prose is simultaneously evocative, gripping…Baptist supports his argument with an array of data…that are informative without being obtrusive or intimidating…This is the book you want to give your friends and relatives who have seen 12 Years a Slave and want to learn more. Like the film, this book will likely horrify them. It is not an easy book to read, but it is a book that needs to be read. It is likely to find its place among rare works of scholarship on slavery that successfully reaches a mass audience and reshapes how a generation of readers thinks about one of America’s most defining institutions.”
—Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians
“A piece of scholarship that will both redefine the study of the ‘peculiar institution’ and shed fresh light on the relationship between slavery and modernity…A fresh, insightful view of slavery as a dynamic and modern social formation. The Half Has Never Been Told will undoubtedly shape debates in the field for many years to come.”
—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
“[Baptist] presents a detailed case, showing how the American economy benefitted from profits gained by forced labor and financial instruments that enabled investors to profit from slavery.”—Seattle Times
“Edward Baptist has written one of the richest and most provocative accounts of American slavery I have ever read. He so powerfully captures the pain and tragedy of plantation slavery… The author brilliantly draws out the close relationship between plantation slavery in the newly opening territories and states of what was then called the Southwest (Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas) and the American capitalist explosion of the antebellum years... ‘Slavery permitted unchecked dominance and promised unlimited fulfillment of unrestrained desire,’ Baptist writes, and ‘one cannot understand it without studying both careful calculation and passionate craving.’ This book addresses both with an effectiveness achieved by few other authors.”—Christian Century
“A compelling case for recognising slavery as fundamental to the rise of the United States.”—Guardian Australia
“Baptist’s book fluidly interweaves economic analysis of the slave trade and the production that came from it—principally cotton—with heartbreaking stories of the lives and suffering of the people who were enslaved… The book enlightens the mind and pierces the heart. It should summon our collective will to finally redress the lingering injustices created by this most American institution.”—Labor Notes
“Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is an achievement of the first order… With Baptist’s meticulous research and comprehensive, chronological approach, the other half of the story has now been told, and told very well. The reader is readily engaged in this scholarly treatment of over 400 pages, thanks to Baptist’s narrative style and his skillful interweaving of personal stories from slave and enslaver memoirs and letters with complex political and economic context… Baptist’s depiction of the breakup of families, slave coffles in chains, and relentless field toil is heartbreakingly affective and never allows us to forget that it is ultimately impossible to make property of people… This book on ‘slavery’s second life in the United States’ is highly recommended to those who want to understand the evolution of our African-American heritage and its centrality to the nation’s political and economic history, not to mention the shameful blow to America’s stated ideals.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
“Edward E. Baptist’s brilliant book, The Half Has Never Been Told, soars because of the author’s decision to root his analysis in the human dimension. The book transcends anything that has previously been written about slavery...In short, Baptist has humanized the lives of American slaves, liberated them from one of the most inhumane systems mankind ever devised. The entire country needs to do the same.”—CounterPunch
“The Half Has Never Been Told amounts to a powerful counternarrative of early American ‘progress.’ It should be valuable, both in and out of classrooms, as a template for remapping readers’ understanding of the young country’s economic development.”
—The Junto
“A…myth-busting work that pursues how the world profited from American slavery…this is a complicated story involving staggering scholarship that adds greatly to our understanding of the history of the United States.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Baptist renders history and economics with the power of prose that seeks to tell a fuller story than has been told of American slavery…An insightful look at U.S. slavery and its controversial role in the much-celebrated story of American capitalism.”—Booklist
“Baptist has written a book that truly deepens and broadens our understanding of slavery… Professional historians and lay readers will pore over this book for years to come. Essential for all readers interested in American history and the history of slavery.”—Library Journal
“An unapologetic, damning, and grisly account of slavery’s foundational place in the emergence of America as a global superpower, balancing the macro lens of statistics and national trends with intimate slave narratives. Delivered in a voice that fluidly incorporates both academic objectivity and coarse language… Baptist’s chronicle exposes the taint of blood in virtually all of the wealth that Americans have inherited from their forebears, making it a rewarding read for anyone interested in U.S.A.’s dark history.”—Publishers Weekly
★ 2014-06-17
A dense, myth-busting work that pursues how the world profited from American slavery.The story of slavery in America is not static, as Baptist (History/Cornell Univ.;Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War, 2001) points out in this exhaustive tome. It entailed wide-scale forced migrations from the lower East Coast to the South and West of the economically burgeoning United States. Following tobacco production along the Chesapeake Bay, slavery was embraced in the newly opened territories of Kentucky and Mississippi, where slaves were force-marched in coffles, separated from families, bought and sold to new owners, and then used to clear fields and plant indigo and the new cash crop, cotton. Although some advanced attempts to ban slavery—e.g., in the Northwest Ordinance—the newly hammered-out Constitution codified it by the Three-Fifths Compromise. In the name of unity, the delegates agreed with South Carolina’s John Rutledge that “religion and humanity [have] nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations.” Using the metaphor of a trussed-up giant body à la Gulliver, Baptist divides his chapters by body parts, through which he viscerally delineates the effects of the violence of slavery—e.g., “Feet” encapsulates the experience of forced migration through intimate stories, while “Right Hand” and “Left Hand” explore the insidious methods of the “enslavers” to solidify their holdings. Baptist moves chronologically, though in a roundabout fashion, often backtracking and repeating, and thoroughly examines every area affected by slavery, from New Orleans to Boston, Kansas to Cuba. He challenges the comfortable myth of “Yankee ingenuity” as our founding growth principle, showing how cotton picking drove U.S. exports and finance from 1800 to 1860—as well as the expansion of Northern industry.Though some readers may find the narrative occasionally tedious, this is a complicated story involving staggering scholarship that adds greatly to our understanding of the history of the United States.
