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Half That Has Never Been Told (2014)

by Edward E. Baptist(Favorite Author)

4.27 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0465044700 (ISBN13: 9780465044702)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Basic Books (AZ)

review 1: Baptist presents an interesting fresh take on the history of slavery in the United States, arguing, that slavery was not a premodern construction of mercantile society but a capitalist undertaking of epic proportions. Americans did not actually want the slave system to end, the very fabric of capitalist nineteenth century America was tied to the bondage and labor of the millions of African Americans living in the American South.
review 2: The power of this book derives from the way in which it humanizes the history of American economic and political development through the half of the story that has never been told: the forced migrations, torture and rape of African Americans in slave labor camps where brutality and terror drove American economic expansion and ... morepolitical and cultural development in the first eighty seven years of our history. Anyone who has read Dubois’s Black Reconstruction in America will be familiar with the assertion that slave labor was the driver of America’s political economy prior to the civil war. Whereas Dubois focuses on the aftermath of the Civil War, relegating the pre-civil war history to his opening chapters, Baptist dedicates the whole book to the role of slavery in the development of America’s economy and politics. But he does more. He also gives a platform for slave stories within this context in order to show the very human costs of the South’s slave labor camps and the North complicity and support for slavery as it benefited the North’s financial and industrial development. As he tells the history of individual slaves, he shows how the history of slavery in the United States is integral to the culture, economy and history of the United States. As a result we get a clear picture of America’s own “Great Leap Forward” which integrated slave labor into its economic, industrial and political development.The first half of the book is particularly successful in telling the history of the slave experience as a thoroughly modern story that would have been well at home in the twentieth century’s histories of backward regimes that engaged in rapid industrialization through the use of slave labor camps. Forced migration doesn’t really do justice to the experience of African Americans chained together in coffles during their forced marches from Maryland to Georgia, where they were sold to southern labor camps to pick cotton. Using the terms like labor camps instead of plantations helps in creating a modern window from which to view what it meant for individual slaves to be set to work in the fields of the southern states. These were brutal places where whipping, lynching and terror drove labor efficiency and the per capita increase of the cotton crop that fed the industrializing northern states and Europe. Rape, kidnapping and torture were common practices for the southern entrepreneurs who profited from the slave trade, and the African American experience of resistance, despair and resignation are well documented through the first half of the book.In the second half of the book, the thread of the slave experience dwindles as the economic and political history of the southern states in conflict with the diversifying economic and political institutions of the north takes front and center. This is a weakness. Giving the reader more of the story of Dred Scott, for example, would have helped in telling the story of the Dred Scott decision and the legal institutions of the US. Describing the slave experience of forced migrations to Texas and the west through the innovation of trains instead of in coffles would have strengthened the thread of slavery as a modern institution as well. Instead, the history shifts to the national political debates around the status of slavery’s territorial expansion west. Though essential to demonstrate that the economic questions that lead to the civil war were based upon the slave economy of the South, and therefore slavery, the larger history of these conflicts feels at times to betray the commitment the author makes in the preface to tell the half that has never been told. Perhaps it was necessary in order to ensure that the reader understand that slavery and the status of slavery as an institution in the United States were the singular driver leading to the civil war, but this decision by Baptist nevertheless shortchanges one of the book’s central premises that you cannot tell the history of the United States without addressing the modernity of slavery as an institution and the lives it ground up in the process of expansion. Fifty or one hundred more pages of the experience of the enslaved African Americans and the modernity of the institution of slavery would have enhanced the book.Nonetheless the book is well worth reading. Anyone interested in American history, the history of industrialization, or the ways in which industrialization takes all too familiar patterns through an extended era of forced labor would do themselves a great service in reading this book. Likewise, anyone who wants to further understand slavery, what it meant and the toll it took on the enslaved human beings who suffered under its weight. less

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