'A compelling case for recognising slavery as fundamental to the rise of the United States.'- Guardian Australia The Half Has Never Been Told has offered the historical backdrop for the stirring declaration 'black lives matter.''- Times Literary Supplement

'A book unusual, even courageous, for its enormous ambition and admirable breadth.Baptist's book is among the best single-volume studies of the relationship between the expansion of slavery and the political economy of the United States. 'A bold attempt to put slavery at the center of nineteenth-century capitalism.'- The Nation ' presents a detailed case, showing how the American economy benefitted from profits gained by forced labor and financial instruments that enabled investors to profit from slavery.'- Seattle Times ' vital and enthralling book.'- Socialist Worker

' The Half Has Never Been Told amounts to a powerful counternarrative of early American 'progress.' It should be valuable, both in and out of classrooms, as a template for remapping readers' understanding of the young country's economic development.' Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.

Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution - the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Baptist.'-Title page verso.Ī groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people Winner of the 2015 Avery O. About the Book 'Afterword to the paperback edition copyright A2016 Edward E.

Baptist the half has never been told