Edward E. Baptist. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is a profoundly revisionist history of American slavery and its place in national history from 1783 to 1865. Baptist sharply challenges what he claims are historians’ major assumptions about slavery’s role. These conceptions view slavery as a premodern economic institution, largely separate from American industrialization and conclude that slavery was flatly inconsistent with the political economy principles of the new American republic, so it would inevitably end and free labor and northern interests would prevail (xvi–xviii). Baptist argues to the contrary that slavery was capitalist and economically modern; that the wealth slaves created financed American industrialization; and that slavery’s expansion was principally the result of a long-term, mutually profitable economic and political bargain between northern and southern whites. Historians have also assumed that “the worst thing...