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The Half Has Never Been Told

Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

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The Half Has Never Been Told

Written by: Edward E Baptist
Narrated by: Ron Butler
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The classic history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people.

"Gripping." —New York Times

“A stinging indictment of slavery.” —NPR Books?

Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

Winner of the Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians
Winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize

 African American Studies Americas Black & African American Military Social Sciences Specific Demographics United States Wars & Conflicts
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Critic Reviews

“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…”—Wall Street Journal
"Baptist has a knack for explaining complex financial matters in lucid prose.... The Half Has Never Been Told's underlying argument is persuasive."—New York Times Book Review
"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."
—Los Angeles Times
"It taught me so much about slavery and how slavery enabled America to become America. Every time I left my house after reading, I saw the world differently. I saw the legacy of human misery underpinning it all."—Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing
"Baptist has a fleet, persuasive take on the materialist underpinnings of the 'peculiar institution.'"—Colson Whitehead, author of The Nickel Boys
"By far the finest account of the deep interplay of the slave trade...and the development of the U.S. economy."—Stephen L. Carter
"You cannot understand the economy of the U.S. - or even of the world -without an understanding of how its development was driven by 19th century slavery. This book gives you that, in a stunningly readable, heartbreaking form. Genius."—Mark Bittman, author of Animal, Vegetable, Junk
“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.”—Vikas Bajaj, New York Times
"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."—Daily Beast
“A stinging indictment of slavery.”—NPR Books
“This book provides historical reference for the ways in which the enslavement of people for profit continues to impact and influence today’s institutions. A must-read for everyone who has ever heard the statement, ‘But slavery is over! Why can’t they just get over it?’ or ‘Well, you know white people were slaves, too.’”
—Alicia Garza, The Atlantic
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