About the Book
The classic history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people.
"Gripping." --New York Times
"A stinging indictment of slavery." --NPR Books?
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 the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.
Winner of the Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians
Winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize
About the Author :
Edward E. Baptist is a 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. Ron Butler is a Los Angeles-based actor, Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator, and voice artist with over a hundred film and television credits. Most kids will recognize him from the three seasons he spent on Nickelodeon's True Jackson, VP. He works regularly as a commercial and animation voice-over artist and has voiced a wide variety of audiobooks. He is a member of the Atlantic Theater Company and an Independent Filmmaker Project Award winner for his work in the HBO film Everyday People.
Review :
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
"It taught me so much about slavery and how slavery enabled America to become America. Every time I left my house after reading, I saw the world differently."
-- "Jesmyn War, National Book Award-winning author"
A book unusual, even courageous, for its enormous ambition and admirable breadth...Baptist's book is among the best single-volume studies of the relationship between the expansion of slavery and the political economy of the United States...The Half Has Never Been Told has offered the historical backdrop for the stirring declaration 'black lives matter.'-- "Times Literary Supplement"
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
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 has a knack for explaining complex financial matters in lucid prose.... The Half Has Never Been Told's underlying argument is persuasive.-- "New York Times Book Review"
Baptist has written an important book that is also indicative of a current trend in historiography that takes a highly critical view of the development of modern capitalism. It is refreshing."
--Matthew H. Crocker, The Historian
Baptist makes us see an unpalatable truth: that slavery was a tough central strand of American history and that it was not antithetical to capitalism but rather symbiotic with it. Baptist's fine book deserves to stand alongside Sven Beckert's prize-winning Empire of Cotton: AGlobal History; both books indispensably illuminate slavery's economic significance and its global reach."
--Virginia Magazine
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
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"
In addition to smashing paradigms about antebellum slavery, the book features evocative explorations of how African Americans developed a common culture despite the individual and family devastation inflicted by 'enslavers.' In the final chapters, the author offers a useful interpretation of how sectional conflict emerged and intensified after 1840 despite a half-century of shared support for cotton slavery. The book gained wide notice after a hail of mocking tweets forced The Economist to withdraw an anonymous review, but it should gain fame for its trailblazing substance and style.-- "Choice"
This book provides historical reference for the ways in which the enslavement of people for profit continues to impact and influence today's institutions. A must-read for everyone who has ever heard the statement, 'But slavery is over! Why can't they just get over it?' or 'Well, you know white people were slaves, too.'"
--Alicia Garza, The Atlantic
While on one level this is a work of persuasive and painstaking economic analysis, The Half Has Never Been Told never loses sight of the people whose commodification 'shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation'.-- "Race and Class (UK)"
Wonderful... Baptist provides meticulous, extensive and comprehensive evidence that capitalism and the wealth it created was absolutely dependent on the forced labor of Africans and African-Americans, downplaying culturalist arguments for Western prosperity."
--Nation
