In the US South, by the late 18th century — and in the case of Virginia and Maryland by the 1730s — what we see is that enslaved families and communities were raising children faster than adults died. In most cases, they seem to have gone through a very disorienting time in which they are forced to pick cotton and also do all the other operations of a slave labor camp. But what I am happy to see is that because of the work of activists involved in the Movement for Black Lives, and activists in the different reparations movements, some of the questions and critiques that a few of us historians tried to amplify are being amplified far more broadly and effectively by these forces in society. The ownership of enslaved people increased wealth for Southern planters so much that by the dawn of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region. And the slavery economy of the US South was deeply tied financially to the North, to Britain, to the point that we can say that people who were buying financial products in these other places were in effect owning slaves and were certainly extracting money from the labor of enslaved people. Sign me up The first form of violence is the violence of the domestic slave trade itself, where people are chained, and forced to march hundreds of miles or are shipped around the cape of Florida. New York: Basic Books, 2014. It was a very close relationship: Cotton was the No. And pretty quickly the price for cotton rises dramatically. I’ll focus on two reasons. The question of reparations, for instance, comes up every 15 years or so as something that the media engages with, and there’s predictably a backlash as you see a massive white resistance to the idea. In rice, there are hits to the market as well. And yet that period is when you see the US go from being a colonial, primarily agricultural economy to being the second biggest industrial power in the world — and well on its way to becoming the largest industrial power in the world. As you detail in your work, the focus on cotton production changes what slavery in the US looks like post-1800. 1 export from the US, which was largely an export-driven economy as it was modernizing and shifting into industrialization. Slavery's Capitalismargues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. Recent works include Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton, Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams, and Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. Through the process of internal natural growth of the enslaved population — the reproductive labor if you will, and the additional importation of roughly 150,000 Africans decades before the international slave trade ended in 1807 — that 800,000 increases to 4 million people by 1860. But as with so many stories about slavery, this is untrue. This is work largely done by women, but also by family networks, and communities in general. So we see that people are forced to work from dawn to dusk, often with direct white supervision, and those who stop working are yelled at to continue to work. So while in South Carolina, there’s a daily task, in contrast to that, the people enslaved on the cotton fields of Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana are forced to work all day; their work is measured and their labor output is increased over time. Can you talk about the ways that violence gets used as a means of forcing increasingly productive labor? The argument has often been used to diminish the scale of slavery, reducing it to a crime committed by a few Southern planters, one that did not touch the rest of the United States. And that increased productivity, you note, is largely a response to the threat and actual use of torture and violence. Staying with that last point about the threat of violent punishment, you write about how, as the desire to increase cotton profits grows, enslavers focus on how to wring more and more profit from the labor of the enslaved. In Desmond’s words, slavery “helped turn a poo Vox answers your most important questions and gives you clear information to help make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. It is a set of internal slave trades, created by enslavers, financed not just by buyers and sellers in the South but by flows of credit into the region, starting with the land speculation of the late 1790s. The bodies of the enslaved served as America’s largest financial asset, and they were forced to maintain America’s most exported commodity. That’s seen as more efficient than the old way of someone sitting there and doing it by hand. The most important development in this shift, the making of this massive cotton-producing engine, is the internal slave trade. So slavery, on one hand, shifts to become a Southern institution. Enslavers in the Southern US realize that they can plant particular kinds of cotton inland almost right at the same time that the US is ensuring its power of what will become Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama. It is the work of enslaved people. Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode October 2016 Abstract: The "New History of Capitalism" grounds the rise of industrial capitalism on the production of raw cotton by American slaves. Industrialization and slave plantations both owed their origins to a capitalist economy marked by widespread market dependence, that is, a capitalist economy with a broad base of consumers who had no claim to the means of production. But before we talk about those changes, can you discuss what slavery looks like before the true advent of cotton? Copyright © 2020 Interactive One, LLC. A transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism / Edward E. Baptist. There’s no justifiable way — in my opinion — to make that argument. Baptist told Roland Martin Thursday on NewsOne Now, “Cotton was in effect the oil of the early 19th century — economic boom that the U.S. experienced.”, “It was 50 percent of all of our exports. What are some of the myths that get told when it comes to understanding how slavery is tied to American capitalism? But they’re a set of voices who are refusing to accept a story that says that what the survivors of slavery endured in the cotton fields has nothing to do with the wealth of the US today or the disproportion of the wealth between white people in the US on average and the wealth of black people in the US on average. One of the things you often highlight is the importance of centering the voices of enslaved men and women in the story of American slavery. I wrote the book over a long period of time, and when I started, people were writing different things and in some cases asking different questions about slavery. In the cotton fields of the Deep South, this system rested on the continuous threat of violence and a meticulous use of record-keeping. But, over the next 20 years, as the US becomes independent and relationships in the Atlantic — transformed by revolutions in Haiti, the revolution in France, and imperial wars associated with those things — several shifts happen. 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