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Edward E. Baptist's The Half That Has Never Been Told: Built On Slavery

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Edward E. Baptist wrote The Half That Has Never Been Told to show readers that American capitalism was built on slavery through focusing on the first eight decades following American Independence. He describes how the Southern United states started as small tobacco plantations along the east coast and eventually became the worlds biggest cotton producer. Baptist tells the story in chapters that are primarily named after body parts, starting with “Feet” and ending with “Arms”. He starts with the foundation of slavery after the American Revolution; then talks about expansion to Mississippi and the tragedies it brought Native Americans. After describing how settlers conquered the south, Edward Baptist writes about the power structure between plantation …show more content…

Edward E. Baptist states, “The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth”. In the beginning, the colonies profited off of the slaves that worked tobacco plantations along the eastern coast of the United States. As land was taken from the Native Americans, it was the productivity of the people who inhabited the land that brought wealth to the country, not the land itself. Leading up to the American Revolution, the United States increased cotton production, calling for more slaves, “By 1775, 500,000 of the thirteen colonies’ 2.5 million inhabitants were slaves, about the same as the number of slaves then alive in the British Caribbean colonies. Slave labor was crucial to the North American colonies”. This number was only to grow as the United States gained its independence from Great Britain. America won its independence 11 years before the creation of the cotton gin. If independence was the green light to expand westward, the cotton gin was the incentive. As slavery became more profitable, population of enslaved people rose and the United States economy grew. Baptist writes, “From 1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation”. The United States economic growth was dependent upon the slaves who drove the economy by cultivating the crops that America

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