The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

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The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Edward E. Baptist, Author
From the book description on Amazon.com:

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 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.​

In this book, the author echoes a theme made by many in the slaveholding states: that slavery labor was the key to the wealth of the American nation prior to the Civil War. But unlike pro-slavery advocates, the author talks about how innovations in slave labor practices, and in the exploitation of slaves, came at a significant cost to laborers even as all the rewards went to the owners.

I am scheduled to attend a lecture by the author next week during Monday lunchtime. I will pass on comments from it if I am able.

- Alan
 
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