Readers Slam a Book Showing That US Wealth And Power Rests on Slave Labour

Edward Baptist's new book, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism," has come into the eye of a storm after the Economist commented that the book was too critical of slave owners. It portrayed all Blacks as victims and all Whites as villains.

Baptist refuted the review, agreeing that his book was "harsh and embarrassing," yet it pointed out the truth. Facing furious objections from many to its review, the Economist published an apology. But ironically, the controversy has generated a large number of readers for the book.

Unlike social studies textbooks, Edward Baptist depicts most of the history of slavery in a vivid manner, showing that slavery was a key driver of the formation of American wealth, according to Huffington Post. He is very clear that the victimization and commodification of African-Americans has made the U.S. powerful, which is "not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth."

Baptist shows that slavery was the heart and root of American capitalism. It was not just an aberration or a brief throwback to a feudal country. Baptist shows that slavery directly led to the rise of American economy. More than $600 M, or almost half the economy in the United States in 1836, was from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves, which constituted 6 percent of the total US population. In that year, they worked in labour camps. By 1850, he writes, "American slaves were worth $1.3 billion, one-fifth of the nation's wealth."

Baptist teaches at Cornell University. Like the historians of capitalism, he looks at economic enterprise, religion, masculinity and gender, as well as national and Southern politics, according to NY Times. He finds that at its peak, slavery had become more efficient than labour, which disproves northern arguments of that time. Cotton picking quotas that were reinforced by whippings, led slaves to shoot into speeds that overshot "physical possibility." The annual increase in daily picking was about 2.1 percent per year. In the newer southwestern areas in 1860, the rate grew by 2.6 percent per year from 1811 to 1860, and the complete productivity shot up by 361 percent. Moreover, "Slavery's frontier," Baptist writes, "was a white man's sexual playground."

Free wage laborers picked cotton more slowly. While slaves in the 1850s picked over 200 pounds per day, in the 1930s, after a half-century of scientific research, the great-grandchildren of the slaves picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day. Slavery enriched not only the south, but also the North. While cotton drew the textile mills in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, creating a lot of wealth for mill owners, by 1832, Lowell consumed "100,000 days of enslaved people's labor" every year, Baptist writes. The inflation-adjusted price of cotton delivered to the US and British textile mills rose by 60 percent between 1790 and 1860. The "whipping-machine" was releasing millions of dollars for the Boston Associates. Immigrants streamed into the North, as there were fewer jobs available in the South due to slave labour. The North population rose from 7.1 million in 1830 to 14 million by 1850, while the South grew from 5.7 million in 1830 to almost 9 million.

In the 1850s, the production of cotton doubled from 2 million to 4 million bales. There was no slowdown on the industrial West's thirst for raw materials. The global consumption grew from 1.5 billion to 2.5 billion pounds. At the end of the decade, the hands in the U.S. fields were still picking two-thirds of the cotton, most of which went to Western Europe's factories. The South also seceded from the North, so that it could enforce slavery. Baptist says that the main driver was economic. Wealth had to keep growing. Southern politicians wanted to ensure that new western states would own slaves.

It is undeniable, then, that as Baptist says, in the cotton kingdom, the whites tortured the slaves much more than "in almost any human society that ever existed."