Half Has Never Been Told

Edward E. Baptist is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. Author of the award-winning Creating an Old South, he lives in Ithaca, New York.

Wall Street Journal "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." New York Times Book Review "Baptist's work is a valuable addition to the growing literature on slavery and American development... Baptist has a knack for explaining complex financial matters in lucid prose... The Half Has Never Been Told's underlying argument is persuasive." Vikas Bajaj, New York Times "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." Los Angeles Times "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." Daily Beast "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." Nation "Wonderful... Baptist provides meticulous, extensive, and comprehensive evidence that capitalism and the wealth it created was absolutely dependent on the forced labor of Africans and African-Americans, downplaying culturalist arguments for Western prosperity." Providence Journal Best Books of 2014 "Baptist's exhaustively researched, elegantly written and provocatively argued book details the connection between the growth of the institution of human bondage and economic innovations from 1783--1861." Guardian Australia Best Books of 2014 "A compelling case for recognizing slavery as fundamental to the rise of the United States." Seattle Times "[Baptist] presents a detailed case, showing how the American economy benefited from profits gained by forced labor and financial instruments that enabled investors to profit from slavery." Huffington Post Black Voices blog "Quite a gripping read. Baptist weaves deftly between analysis of economic data and narrative prose to paint a picture of American slavery that is pretty different from what you may have learned in high school Social Studies class." Salon "Baptist's real achievement is to ground these financial abstractions in the lives of ordinary people. In vivid passages, he describes the sights, smells and suffering of slavery. He writes about individual families torn apart by global markets. Above all, Baptist sets out to show how America's rise to power is inextricable from the suffering of black slaves." Washington Independent Review of Books "Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told is an achievement of the first order... With Baptist's meticulous research and comprehensive, chronological approach, the other half of the story has now been told, and told very well." Mashable "Baptist has a fleet, persuasive take on the materialist underpinnings of the 'peculiar institution.'"

• Introduction: The Heart, 1937 1. Feet 1783-1810 2. Heads 1791-1815 3. Right Hand 1815-1819 4. Left Hand 1805-1861 5. Tongues 1819-1824 6. Breath 1824-1835 7. Seed 1829-1837 8. Blood 1836-1844 9. Backs 1839-1850 10. Arms 1850-1861 11. Afterword: The Corpse 1861-1937 Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes Index