Edward E. Baptist: "The Half Has Never Been Told" | Talks at Google
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Historian Edward E. Baptist visited Google's Cambridge, MA office to discuss his book, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism". As he shows in the book, slavery and its expansion were central to the evolution and modernization of our nation in the 18th and 19th centuries, catapulting the US into a modern, industrial and capitalist economy. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a sub-continental cotton empire. By 1861 it had five times as many slaves as it had during the Revolution, and was producing two billion pounds of cotton a year. It was through slavery and slavery alone that the United States achieved a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and was transformed into a global power rivaled only by England. Dr. Baptist is Associate Professor of History at Cornell. "The Half Has Never Been Told" is his second book; his first was "Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War".
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This guy is a pure soul. I've learned so much from him.
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The success of the American economy, especially after the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989, has always been a propaganda problem for the Left. In the last few decades this new idea has surged: that American is only wealthy because of slavery and land theft. There are several problems with this idea. Baptist here brings up the "theft" of land from the Mexico, but in fact cotton was not a major crop in the southwest, nor was it in most of the central US purchased from France. Secondly, he assumes that because the Southeast used slave labor, they had "free labor". But it is not obvious that slaves are cheaper than wage workers, since they still have to be given food, clothing and shelter and they have to be taken care of during childhood and old age when they are not productive. It cannot be proven that the cotton industry would not have flourished with or without slavery, thus it cannot be proven that slavery was a necessary condition for the industrial revolution and American prosperity. He (and Sven Beckert and other champions of this idea) posits that cotton was so important we can just ignore other sectors of the economy and the industrial revolution that were unrelated to slavery -- iron, armament, food, housing, and all the other things being produced in the North and in England. Finally, there is the very weak assumption that the success of capitalism after slavery -- the economies of steam, electricity, radio, electronics, atomic energy, computers, the automobile, etc -- are all just the result of the necessary momentum generated by slavery and cotton 150 years ago.
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One thing is glaringly obvious..."whites" ARE NOT "ignorant" about racism "white" supremacy. It is evidenced in the fact that "whites" have recorded the terrorism that they have inflicted upon "Black" people for the ultimate purpose of enriching themselves.
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I was required to watch this by my History Professor and I got quickly bored with how often he mentioned his book and his lack of enthusiasm, however he did present everything else besides the other issue well. I wish that there was a written record of this because the audio was a little funky and I would have much preferred being able to skim through it and find the information I needed for later review vs having to remember what minute and second he said the information I specifically needed.
I wish he was a little more enthusiastic on the way he presented this. Energy like Edward Ayers in his presentation of Slavery and the Early American Economy, Ayers sounds a little preachy, but his energy is great and will keep you awake. He does not touch on capitalism, but he does touch on the slavery stereotypes. -
Google...mind setting up better audio for these lectures? This is a good one if you can here it.
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I got this book a few months ago, and it's a pretty good work. However, Dr. Claud Anderson already broke all of this down in his 1994 called "Black Labor, White Wealth". http://www.amazon.com/Black-Labor-White-Wealth-Economic/dp/0966170210
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Hey Edward, the half that has NEVER BEEN TOLD is that there were BLACK SLAVE OWNERS AND THEY WERE WORSE THAN THE WHITE ONES!!! Why? BECAUSE THEY PRACTICED SLAVE BREEDING!!!
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the reviewer from the Economist was stuck in white privilege, and didn't want to read all the black slave voices, but this writer EE Baptist had not choice but to use oral evidence from actual slaves. Imagine a book on the Holocaust which does not allow the Jewish victims to speak.
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imagine if other countries could be this honest about their atrocities
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must read for all high school students, to counter the endless propaganda in normal high school textbooks,
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I thought this was a religious vid lol
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