Baptist, Edward E.
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Basic Books (New York)
2014
OUR SYNOPSIS: Edward E. Baptist demonstrates that slavery was a central driving force of the capitalist development of the United States. By locating slavery at the center of U.S. history, he shows the necessity of reckoning with it. He narrates the histories of politicians, military officers, and financial agents making decisions about the future of the nation directly alongside histories of enslavement, demonstrating the inextricable intertwinement of these narratives. By focusing each chapter on a part of the human body, he heart-wrenchingly illuminates how the U.S. was built on extracting capital from Black bodies. He also makes clear that slavery’s capitalism was not restricted to the South, as the northern economy relied upon the wealth generated by southern enslaved labor.
BIG QUESTIONS:
Is slavery’s role in U.S. history predominantly one of national unity or one of national division?
How can human experiences of enslavement be amplified despite the power discrepancies inherent within the archive of American slavery?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Now a continental empire was possible, one that had vast resources within its reach. But to create vast and sweeping dominions out of the chaos that their own violence amplified, the victors would still need many things: credit, land, markets, crops, authority, and hands—above all, hands, hands to write, to buy, to reach, to grasp, to plant, and to harvest.” (74)
“But the body of African America, stretched, and chained, and stretched again, the body whose tongue and spirit and blood had developed alongside slavery’s expansion, was still alive. For the history in which Cade and Liza and millions of others had been caught up, the history that had been stolen from them and which people were always trying to steal from them, was not over, and in many ways, still is not.” (411)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Lorenzo Ivy, “Lorenzo Ivy Life History (WPA, Virginia Writers’ Project),” Virginia Writers’ Project Life Histories, WPA of Virginia Records, 1943, Library of Virginia (Richmond, VA), https://www.virginiamemory.com/online-exhibitions/exhibits/show/remaking-virginia/item/169.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Relate to Baltimore's histories of and place within racial capitalism.
