More than just the Southern enslavers and their Wall Street financiers, as I previously assumed, benefitted financially from this trade.

I've read a lot as a lay person on the Civil War and Reconstruction era, but no book before has done such an insightful analysis of the economic impact of the slave and cotton trade in the United States and internationally. 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 to the victims of the international slave trade and slavery in the United States (and elsewhere). I don't often publicly post reviews of the books I'm reading on Goodreads. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery’s end-and created a culture that sustains America’s deepest dreams of freedom. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. 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.

Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. 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. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy.Īs 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. 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.

Edward baptist the half was never told