Slavery Impeded Capitalism

t might seem strange, given how much has been written on American slavery just over the past half-century, that yet another book, in its title, could propose that The Half Has Never Been Told. But the half that Cornell historian Edward Baptist believes has “never been told” is revealed in the subtitle: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The half that remains to be told is about capitalism’s complicity in slave labor—at which point we realize that this is not a book about slavery after all; it is a teeming, visceral condemnation of capitalism, and it is of a piece with a “new history” of capitalism which, according to Brown University’s Seth Rockman, sees “southern slaveholders as architects of a capitalist system predicated on commodity production, entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and lengthy chains of trans-Atlantic finance.” The fundamental argument of this new history is that slaveholding and capitalism, which were once seen as antithetical—so antithetical, in fact, that Charles Beard and the Progressive historians built a scholarly empire around the idea that the Civil War was waged so that Northern capitalism could destroy its Southern agrarian rival—are not really opposed at all. “The antebellum South’s economic structures and mentalities” are seen instead as “converging with those of the North,” writes historian Scott Marler, so that “the South and North were more alike than different prior to the Civil War.” Capitalism, in Orwellian juxtaposition, has become slavery.