Analysis Of The Half That Has Never Been Told By Edward Baptist

The Half that Has Never Been Told, by Edward Baptist, is a book that details the facts of slavery from the late 1700’s up until the late 1800’s. It is not only a book detailing the history of slavery, the book takes a different stance than most and really talks about the economic benefit of slavery. Baptist also talks about how the way the slave owners thought and ran their businesses and handled money relations, it founded the same style of capitalism we as Americans still use today. Each chapter is titled from some body part of the human body and that provides a real unique to a touchy subject and allows the book to be an easy and fun read. Chapter 1, titled “Feet”, describes the unfree movement to enslaved frontiers that were founded between

Chapters 3 and 4 are “piggybacked” of on one another and are, “Right Hand” and “Left Hand”, and they reveal the inner secrets of slave owners power and their spread in networks, whereas chapters 5 and 6, “Tongues” and “Breath”, talk about how slave owners had not only found ways to silence the tongues of their critics they had also built a system of slave trading that served as expansion’s lungs and a way for America to breathe. Chapter 7 is titled, “Seed” and it tells of the horrific time period from 1829 to 1837, and the terrible actions that were performed during that time. Chapter 8, “Blood”, focuses on the economic crash of 1837 and is to blame for the problems that it brought to American families, especially to the families that owned slaves. Staying on the economic theme, chapter 9, “Backs”, explains that by the 1840s the North had built a nice, stable economy on the backs of slaves and their cotton

However, after reading the book I came away with a completely different view point. The Half that Has Never Been Told, tackles a subject everyone nowadays is scared to even think about let alone write a book on. Baptist takes this side of the debate on head on and does an excellent job providing facts and giving the people the rest of the story and making it historically correct. Baptist’s main point is how the slave trade founded the common day capitalist economy we still use to this day. He provides examples of how slave owners used their power to control the aspects they wanted to control. He also shows how they took something like slavery and blew the other forms of providing revenue out of the water! The slave revenue exceeded well over the industrial, mechanical, and farming numbers and even though it was a southern dominated aspect of life, it even funded the northern part of the country. Baptist drives home his thoughts and provides facts in key areas such as: economic thought when it comes to production output, transportation of slaves and its impact on the local and national economies, and the interaction of the northern and southern economies. Baptist demonstrates very soundly that both wage capitalism in the North and slave capitalism in the South interacted