The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves

Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians

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. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. 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. 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.
Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.


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• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
• When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
• Major Problems in American History, Volume I
• American Slavery, American Freedom
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• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
• Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution