My Goodreads Review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

I read this book back at the tail-end of BLM I and it was the beginning of a deep examination of history for me which is still ongoing. I don't think this review does justice to how good this book actually is, but I hope folks don't mind that. This was me before I had perfected my reviewing skills to their current state.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It has been said that the Civil War was 'unnecessary' because slavery was already destined to end, probably within a few decades after the 1860 election. Yet this is mere dogma. The evidence points in the opposite directions. Slavery yielded ever more efficient production, in contrast to the free labor that tried (and failed) to compete with it, and the free labor that succeeded it. If slave labor in cotton had ever hit a wall of ultimate possibility, enslavers could have found new commodities. Southern enslavers had adapted slavery before, with incredibly profitable results. Forced labor that is slavery in everything but name remained tremendously important to the world economy well into the twenty-first century. And the lessons that enslavers learned about turning the left hand to the service of the right, forcing ordinary people to reveal their secrets so that those secrets could be commodified, played out in unsteady echoes that we have called by many names (scientific management, the stretch-out, management studies) and heard in many places. Though these were not slavery, they are one more way in which the human world still suffers without knowing it from the crimes done to Rachel and William and Charles Ball and Lucy Thurston; mourns for them unknowing, even as we live on the gains that were stolen from them."

This is the United Nations International Decade of People of African Descent . Here is a preface document that is relevant to this review: http://ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/...

Starting from the heart and ending with a full corpse, this book is a revolutionary, but very familiar (depending on what you already knew) look at how the United States went from laughably broke at the end of the American Revolution to being the 19th century version of Saudi Arabia in terms of world-supplying resource. Ed Baptist quotes from Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act that American history was a drama played on the body of a "Negro giant." He takes this as the theme of the book and looks at how the discovery of how easily cotton could be grown provided the key jewel in the crown of the Industrial Revolution. Baptist looks at enslavers ever growing quest for both making the enslaved pick more cotton and obtaining more land for them to be transported to. He also looks at attempts by the enslaved to resist (until that fails) and simply survive, by any small measure, the process.

Baptist's labor in this book is stunning. He lays any type of pleasantry or "respectability" language aside and gives you the very cold, harsh, brutal truth of what happened between the 1780s and 1860. This book gives an amazing amount of respect and dignity to the people who were, in their words, always being "stolen" and destroyed by enslavers. This book's authenticity moved me in a profound way and really made me feel what people like Lorenzo Ivy, Charles Ball (who is a key character in this book), Rachel, Ben, Amar and other enslaved people whose stories are examined in this book. The examination of the impact that forced migration south and west had on Africans turning into African-Americans in the process (as well as their culture and religion that survives to this day in modern African-American, and really Western, culture). The use of both the primary sources of the oppressed and oppressors was very powerful.

The economics thread of this book (this is an "economic history") really enlightened me. Though I think most African-Americans would have guessed that American slavery built American capitalism, I was surprised at how much it also contributed to Europe's Industrial Revolution, in particular Great Britain. Essentially, blood-soaked cotton was turning Great Britain into the world power that would never see nighttime. As much as the UK loves to mouth-off about banning the slave trade and slavery itself before the rest of the Western world, it was British entrepreneurs, stock brokers, and government officials invested in cotton before the Panic of 1837 and enslaved people directly afterwards, so much for that. The fact that Monaco was still trying to get the state of Mississippi to pay its debts in the 1930s was amazing.

I hope this book gets taught not just as a history book, but as an economics book. This book lays bare the fact that slavery's economic mission...was a rousing success. The numbers do not lie: setting a minimum number that a person had to meet and beating them severely when they did not reach that number while raising that number every time it was met-for 80 years-can turn you from a third world country to a first world country in under a century if you do it on a industrial scale (and never pay the people you beat and also raping them, lots of rape). This is one of those sad, cynical facts about the nature of the world (just look at any 20th century genocide, it usually does what it sets out to do). The after-effects of 250 years of degradation and depravity go un-punished and in-fact, as recent years have shown, can be used to effectively disposes the decedents of enslaved people in the United States (I remind you that Mike Brown of Ferguson is buried just across town from Dred Scott). Please read this book! It is one of the best history/economic texts I have read in some time.

"The militia stood Amar up in the yard at the Widow Charbonnet's place. Herded into an audience, the men, women, and children who knew him had to watch. The white men took aim and made Amar's body dance with a volley of lead. In his head, as he slumped and fell, were 50 billion neurons. They held the secrets of turning sugarcane sap into white crystals, they held the memories that made him smile at just such a joke, they held the cunning with which he sought out his lover's desires, they held the names of all the people who stood circled in silence. His cheek pressed on earth that his own feet had helped to pack, his mouth slackly coursing out blood, as gunpowder smoke gathered in a cloud and blew east. A white officer's sideways boots strode toward him. The dancing electrons in Amar's brain caressed forty-five years of words, pictures, feelings, the village imam with his old book, his mother calling him from the door of a mud-brick house. The memory of a slave ship or maybe more than one, the rumor of Saint-Domingue -- all this was there, was him -- but his cells were cascading into sudden death. One last involuntary wheeze as a soldier raised an axe sharpened by recent practice and severed Amar's head from his body"

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