forge links that overrode internal divisions” in the new nation, Baptist writes (p. “The possibilities that enslaved people represented, the wealth they embodied, and the way they could be forced to move themselves would. He insists, for example, that forced migration was both central to the African American experience of slavery and crucial for the destiny of the young United States in the years following the American Revolution.

The Half Has Never Been Told is at its strongest when Baptist captures the dynamic, entrepreneurial nature of slavery.

Each chapter of The Half Has Never Been Told is therefore named after a part of the body of the black colossus whose exertions made modern America. Determined to tell the story of this process, Baptist turns to Ralph Ellison’s famous invocation of American history as “enacted on the body of a Negro giant” (p. On the contrary, Baptist maintains, slavery was a thoroughly modern, dynamic, and expansive system in which the labor of enslaved African Americans-extracted by torture and the threat of torture-produced the wealth without which American capitalism could never have been born. Indeed, Baptist, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, has produced 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.īaptist’s book is an attempt to correct what he sees as the dominant (mis)characterization of North American slavery: that it was a pre-modern social order that stood outside of, and had little influence on, the explosive industrial-capitalist development of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Along with recent works by Walter Johnson, Joshua Rothman, and others, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism is a major contribution to this burgeoning subfield. For historians of nineteenth-century America, this has increasingly meant investigating the relationship between slavery and the origins of capitalism. The financial crisis of 2007, and consequent Great Recession, has pushed historians to look anew at the origins and nature of our economic system.

Baptist the half has never been told