The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward E Baptist
The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward E Baptist
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The Half Has Never Been Told
Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Author: Edward E Baptist

Narrator: Ron Butler

Unabridged: 19 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 09/14/2021

Synopsis

Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American HistoriansWinner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman PrizeA groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved peopleAmericans 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Tom on October 04, 2014

I don't often publicly post reviews of the books I'm reading on Goodreads. But, for me, this was such an important book that has changed my way of thinking in one sense: I now believe, even 150 years after the American Civil War, that some form of national and international reparations are necessary......more

Goodreads review by Thomas Ray on November 08, 2024

An important and eye-opening book. We learn: Slavery was brutal. People were tortured to force them to pick cotton superhumanly fast and efficiently. Slavery was far more efficient and effective than free labor. Cotton was *the* commodity of the Industrial Revolution. The American economy, South and N......more

Goodreads review by Bradley on July 24, 2020

For those of you who have heard, and hated, the truism: "History is written by the victors," this is the perfect book for you. Make no mistake, the narrative distills the very worst (and confirmed) aspects of the institution of slavery. I've read a number of non-fiction and many more fictionalized ac......more

Goodreads review by Chad on January 21, 2015

This is the review I'd like to have read before buying this book. If I had read it, I probably wouldn't have bought it. 1) The book is "well written" in that its author has a strong command of prose, perhaps too strong for his own good. At many points in the book, which sometimes reads far more like......more

Goodreads review by Ross on July 01, 2020

In his expansive The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Cornell historian Edward E. Baptist fleshes out the incomplete story of slavery most of us received in school. In the process, he punctures many myths that have sought to downplay slavery's horrors or detac......more

Quotes

“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…”—Wall Street Journal

"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

"The overwhelming power of the stories that Baptist recounts, and the plantation-level statistics he's compiled, give his book the power of truth and revelation."
—Los Angeles Times

"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. I saw the legacy of human misery underpinning it all."—Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing

"Baptist has a fleet, persuasive take on the materialist underpinnings of the 'peculiar institution.'"—Colson Whitehead, author of The Nickel Boys

"By far the finest account of the deep interplay of the slave trade...and the development of the U.S. economy."—Stephen L. Carter

"You cannot understand the economy of the U.S. - or even of the world -without an understanding of how its development was driven by 19th century slavery. This book gives you that, in a stunningly readable, heartbreaking form. Genius."—Mark Bittman, author of Animal, Vegetable, Junk

“New books like ‘Empire of Cotton’ and ‘The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism’ by Edward Baptist offer gripping and more nuanced stories of economic history.”—Vikas Bajaj, New York Times

"Thoughtful, unsettling.... Baptist turns the long-accepted argument that slavery was economically inefficient on its head, and argues that it was an integral part of America's economic rise."—Daily Beast

“A stinging indictment of slavery.”—NPR Books

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