One of the most fascinating books I have picked up recently is Edward Baptist's "The half has never been told: slavery and the making of American capitalism". Baptist makes a powerful reassessment of the role played by slavery in the development of America. He takes particular issue with the orthodox view of slavery as an outdated mode of production, effectively brought to a timely end by capitalism and the rise of the free market.

In many ways, Baptist's book brings to mind Dee Brown's "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" in that it makes every attempt to put the African and African American experience right at the heart of the story. Each chapter for example begins and ends with the story of one or more people who were brought into slavery. The chapters in the book follow the different aspects of the slave body (hands, feet, heads, hearts, blood etc.) and the impact of slavery on each. The tale is both powerful and full of anger at the mistreatment of human beings, but also with the sanitized way in which the history of this period has been told. As such, the line of narrative is sometimes a bit harder to follow than in a standard history of slavery and its abolition. I have therefore decided to split this report on the book into a number of sections.

In this first section I want to explore Baptist's main lines of argument of how and why slavery, especially cotton slavery, expanded in the new southern and western territories of the USA after the Revolutionary War. Here Baptist argues, a whole new variety of slavery was born, a modern form of slavery, driven by capitalism and its flows of money, goods and people. I will return at another point to focus on the lives of the enslaved...

I am only really intending to make this a brief review as I plan to revisit some of the claims made here in more detail soon. Never-the-less, I could not finish a book like this and not write anything. 

In many ways Baptist does for the story of slavery what Dee Brown's "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" attempted to do for the story of the American Indians in 1970. His view is clear from the outset: "Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden." (loc.229). The book recasts the whole of the story of slavery to see it through the experiences of those it affected. Baptist also goes on to show how the results of slavery continue to influence capitalism today. There is an almost Marxist overtone to his final section, quite unusual in an American history: