I recently came across a talk by Edward E Baptist on his new book "the half has never been told: Slavery and the making of American capitalism" Then I found out about the controversy surrounding the economist's retracted review. Here is a video where Baptist outlines his ideas
The talk surprised me because I remember doing slavery in the US around this period (not too long ago) and the general impression I got was that (though it was still slavery obviously and not good) standards of living were improving for slaves in the US generally. and that American capitalism properly took root in what was to become the Great Lakes Industrial region, and this in turn was a big factor in bringing about the end of slavery in the US as nascent industry and (slave driven) cash crop, export economies (which also import luxury goods for the elite) are fundamentally incompatible with each other.
Are there any serious reviews of this work that would give me an Idea of what the debate is around this at the moment, or has anyone familiar with the debate.
Edit: this random blog from a Marxist perspective is the best I can find at the moment.
Howdy! I'm a doctoral student in history and my main field is slavery and industry. I just finished reading Baptist's book for a graduate class taught by a slavery scholar and largely her take (and my own) is that what Baptist's book says has been pretty much the consensus view of historians for the past 25 years or more, but that Baptist is very forceful in the way he conveys the evidence surrounding slavery from the past several decades.
The idea that industry and slavery are incompatible is a mistaken one. Many scholars regard plantations as fundamentally like a factory, many factories and industries (ironworking, railroads, coal mining) used massive enslaved labor, and the south was the most financially sophisticated region of the time and the slave trade was one of the most innovative and capital intensive parts of our economy. Recognizing that this level of financial sophistication accompanied slavery and that slavery was a modernizing institution are important facts in understanding how slaveholders operated.
Today the debates mostly focus around individual aspects of slavery like what consumer culture for slaves was like or how slaves formed economies of their own. But..if you have questions I'd love to answer..And you should read the book; it is phenomenal
Dear lurker093287h:
Nice of you to mention the review in WOID (twice)! I wonder if you're not seeing the forest for the trees, however. As I attempted to show, the Economist was inappropriately hostile toward Baptist, based on the suspicion that a) Baptist considered the American system of Slavery that developed in Georgia, etc. to be a sophisticated form of capitalism; and b) therefore Baptist must hate capitalism.
The Economist was right on a), which indeed is no great news, and wrong on b) in that Baptist labors mightily to suggest that any number of features of this type of slavery were actually positive--and these happen to be the features that are usually associated with capitalism. In other terms, Baptist's approach is just another form of the "ledger defense" of capitalism: "on the bad side of the ledger...on the good side of the ledger." I leave it to you to decide whether this is the only appropriate answer to the evidence he presents.
Which brings me to your main point: whether the type of activity Baptist denounces (or exhonerates) is a form of capitalism? As you may know, that issue is a hotly debated one, as in the recent exchange between Thomas Piketty and Frédéric Lordon in Paris. If by "capitalism" you refer to the dominance of all activities (including manual labor) by money capital, then I think Baptist is on target--in fact I would argue that his painstaking research into the financial manipulations attendant on the actual practice of slavery are his most important contribution.
Cordially,
Paul Werner, PhD, DSFS Editor-inter-pares WOID http://theorangepress.com/woid