• New Perspective on Capitalism: Baptist's book positions slavery as a crucial element in the development of proto-capitalism in the 19th century Southeastern United States, challenging traditional narratives that emphasize post-Civil War industrialization.

• Methodology and Narrative Style: The book employs a combination of slave narratives, historical evidence, mathematical tables, and period art to depict the brutal realities of chattel slavery and its role in the profitable cotton trade, which fueled Northern industrial growth.

• Controversy and Criticism: Despite its popularity and literary awards, the book has faced criticism for its use of artistic license and perceived embellishment, with some reviewers arguing it fails to explain the rise of capitalism without slavery.

Introduction

‘New’ New historiography today prompts us to reimagine the past through the oral and written history that technology and the social sciences has revealed and made available in the 21st century.  In his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014), Edward E. Baptist explores a new history of capitalism that is constructed from the narratives of slaves and their descendants in the budding 19th Southeastern United States, dislodging traditional historical narrative and repositioning slavery as a key feature of proto capitalism.  Traditional narratives in the histories of capitalism situate its preeminent importance post-Civil War and into the Industrial Revolution of the early 20th century.  But Bishop offers an informative and alternative narrative through the stories, voices and the historical evidence presented and left behind by black slaves in antebellum America, offering an engaging narrative that is of a style geared toward students of history as well as non-historians.  On publication, The Half Has Never Been Told generated controversy among academics and other professionals regarding the appropriateness of inflecting historiography with non-factual information and the role of chattel slavery in the development of capitalism.  These are the subjects of this essay, presented with an eye toward a ‘New’ New History that incorporates and brings alive the experiences of the ‘other’ for a deeper understanding of our past.

Argument

The Half Has Never Been Told is a graphic exposition on the remembrances of brutal, chattel slavery, its narrative constructed from the fragments of information available to Baptist of the 19th century slaveholding United States.  Overlaid on top of this narrative is a methodology used to identify and critique features of proto capitalism in the labor intensive and highly profitable cotton trade that erupted at the turn of the century, giving rise to Northern capitalists that would spur the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the 20th century in America.  Sampling chapters in the book offers a glimpse into the narrative style of the author, who imagines a social worker and his conversation with a descendant of slaves in the 1930’s, recounts his story and the stories of many others through the experience of chattel slavery, and with mathematical tables and vivid reprints of period art depicts American life in the 19th century. 

Lorenzo Ivy, who had graduated college with presidential advisor Booker T. Washington in 1875 and described by Baptist in conversation with a social worker recalled his parents and grandparents’ experiences. Like 1 million other slaves sold in American during the 19th century they were forced to pick cotton “faster and more efficiently,” generating a cotton market that spanned the globe and revolutionized capitalism, with monopolies and other “innovations” in the U.S. financial market, contributing to a rise in wealth never seen before then.  In their struggle, slaves were mastered in ever increasingly organized and methodical systems, Baptist explains, demonstrating with charts that document cotton production in the U.S. increasing year over year from 1791-1860, and describes “the pushing system” designed to increase the amount of land cultivated by each slave.  Embodied in the story of Charles Ball, a real-life slave who novelized his experience in the late 19th century, the traditional historical narrative of U.S. history suddenly comes alive, as a new ideation of capitalism from the perspective and experiences of the forced laborers that participated in its early growth.

As Baptist’s treatment gained popularity and literary awards, criticism of his methods and artistic license with the source material engendered predictable discord among conservative and other outlets including the Economist and The Chronicle of Higher Education, accusing Baptist of misappropriation, embellishment, and “continually seeing the enslaved as a vehicle for his own need to tell us something new, even when it is not.” Writers for the Economist were even more patronizing, dismissing The Half Has Never Been Told with the insensitive characterization of the novel as “advocacy.” An effluvial, if brief experience with the heat and suffering of 19th century African-American chattel slavery, painstakingly researched and constructed, by a young and emerging scholar who is clearly passionate about bringing historiography to a new generation deserves more than short-shrift that is paternalistic and infantilized.  In The Chronicle, one reviewer remarked casually that “one of the weaknesses of a perspective that focuses almost exclusively on the fabulously profitable slave/cotton complex of the antebellum American South is its inability to explain the emergence of an empire of cotton without slavery.” The crux of a ‘New’ New history lies in exploding traditional narratives by and about ‘big men’ and finding and displaying the voices of ‘the other’.

Conclusion

Students of history are more distracted than ever before, a function of the technological advances and the myriad new inputs that have become features in an inter-connected world.  Indeed, ‘founders chic’ or traditional historiography is part of the larger experience that students of the social sciences including cultural anthropology, linguistics, and history itself have available to them to be incorporated into individuals’ learning processes. Learning online, at a new pace, and with the entirety of documented history, creative and educated historiography must remain engaging, and offer up new hypotheses and evidence to help this new generation of scholars reimagine all history with stories such as those of 19th century slaves, like Lorenzo Ivy and Charles Ball, to become part of the narrative of a ‘New’ New History.

References

Eds., "American Slavery: Blood Cotton," Economist. September 6, 2014.

Edward E Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York. Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. 2014.

Marc Percy, “Shackles and Dollars: Historians and Economists Clash over Slavery,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 63, no. 17. 2016

Sven Beckert, “Slavery and Capitalism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 61, no. 16. 2014.