The Half Has Never Been Told

Edward E. Baptist. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Edward Baptist argues that while the historiography of slavery has evolved, and larger discussions of slavery in American cultural life has shifted away from earlier explanations which either apologized for or even defended slavery; or condemned it as an aberration in American history—the notion that slavery was a fundamentally backward, economically inefficient system has persisted.

This is a fundamental misconception of the role slavery played in American development. Rather, the plantation slave economy that developed in the wake of the explosive growth of cotton growing in the southern United States was integral to American economic expansion—to the contrary, it both drove and financed it.

Baptist relies heavily on WPA Slave narratives, which he reads carefully in order to account for the bias imposed by white-dominated institutional and cultural assumptions. He also looks at economic and census data in order to support his argument for the centrality of cotton in the growth of American capitalism.

Baptist seems to be pushing back against the entirety of the literature on slavery. He doesn’t seem to have any particular argument with any specific thrust of the historiographic tradition, whether Edmund Morgan or Eugene Genovese. Rather, he claims that previous considerations of American slavery all operated under the same basic, flawed, assumption.

This book could be connected to studies about the industrial labor movement as well as studies of 20th century sharecropping and migrant labor. Also, his assertion that John Calhoun’s invention of substantive due process was later used by Gilded Age capitalists is an intriguing idea.

His assertion that, as we noted in discussion, “the half has never been told” is more convincing when focused on the degree to which movement and displacement was an integral part of slavery; less so when he implies that the linkage between slavery and the capitalist development of the USA has never been acknowledged. Despite this overreach, Baptist does suggest that slavery studies will look different in the future if we begin with the assumption that this brutal system of labor extraction was always central to the development of America’s political economy.

Finally, the writing here is superb, far above what most academic writers are capable of. The book is structured imaginatively, inspired by a Ralph Ellison essay that in turned borrowed imagery from Swift's Gulliver's Travels in order to declare that American history had been metaphorically written on the body of African-Americans. This provided the structure of the book; Baptist's impassioned, deeply felt, and keenly observed prose style fleshes that structure out.

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