THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD

Just a remarkable work of history. Beautifully structured and written. Bold, heartbreaking, a genuinely moving book that captures the humanity of the enslaved while illustrating their vital importance to the development of American capitalism. Historical writing at its best.

In many ways this book does for the story of slavery what Dee Brown's "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" attempted to do for Indians in 1970 - it recasts the whole of the story of slavery to see it through the experiences of those it affected. But where Brown's speculative approach was criticised, Baptist is forensic in his evidence. He draws the tales of ordinary men women and children from the pages of the scant records and produces a narrative of living, breathing human beings. Baptist fundamentally challenges the bastions of long held slavery orthodoxies and demonstrates how the issues which led slavery to such success not only built modern America but also drove the development of capitalism. Further he cautions, that such practices might still be seen in the world today. A powerful book and required reading for anyone interested in this topic.

The basic framework of the book is the economics of slavery and how it was intertwined with and drove the American economy. That's an important story that I suspect is not well understood by the general public. Most of us just know what we learned in high school, which is tremendously limited (for virtually any historical topic, not just slavery). Such history is necessarily condensed and really understood only in a limited, abstract way. You have to read something more in-depth to truly understand, which is why, for example, works by David McCullough and Robert Caro are so eye-opening and interesting. This book is an excellent example of that tradition, comprehensive with both the total overview and individualized stories that make history come alive. It's also about more than the economics of slavery, unless very broadly defined. The mechanics - coffle, whipping-machine, etc. - and the politics and the geography and the psychology of slavery are also there. It certainly isn't the complete story of slavery and its aftermath. You'll want to supplement with other works. But this is a very important part of the story. I feel that I have a much better (although still incomplete) understanding of that world after reading this. And it's very well written so you won't feel you're wading through a required textbook. Highly recommended.

Far from being a sideshow, a marginal phenomenon, slavery epitomizes American XIXth century capitalism. Enormous fortunes were built litterally on the back of black people transported against their will to the "Southwest" and made to toil eleven hours a day in the cotton fields. "Added value" was extracted with the whip. The "half" which is told here is in fact a main component of American history. Edward Baptist is a professional historian who builds his case on thousands of charts and original documents that make his main thesis absolutely convincing and a valuable contribution to the ongoing revival of studies devoted to slavery. A minor spoiler now: I wish the author had focussed on his point and refrained from telling individual stories, or more precisely, to woe the reader with the premices of individual stories that never fully materialize, probably for lack of documents.

This is a forensic debunking of previous attempts to limit the impact of slavery on the development of the American republic in the nineteenth century. The author comprehensively demonstrates that slavery was central not just to the development of Southern agrarian capitalism but also to Northern finance capitalism.