Edward Baptist to speak on slavery and capitalism

 

Edward E. Baptist (Cornell) will speak on his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism on Monday, Oct. 6 at 1:00 PM in Strozier Library. In this pathbreaking book, Baptist reveals how the expansion of slavery drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence. The book has received a great deal of attention, not least in the aftermath of a controversial review (subsequently withdrawn) in the Economist.