Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Edward Baptist
Cornell University
Martin Summers (response)
Boston College
顿补迟别:听October 4, 2016
This event is co-sponsored by the听Institute for the Liberal Arts听and the听African and African Diaspora Studies Program.
Abstract
The expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. Until the Civil War, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. The United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence.
Speaker Bio
Edward Baptist听is a professor in the Department of History at Cornell University and house dean of the Carl Becker House. He has published听The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism听(Basic Books, 2014) and听Creating an Old South: Middle Florida鈥檚 Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War听(UNC Press, 2002). With the late Stephanie Camp, he co-edited听New Studies in the History of American Slavery听(University of Georgia Press, 2006). Baptist is also leading a project called听, a collaborative effort in digital history that is building a crowdsourced database of all fugitive slave advertisements, which recently won an NEH Digital Projects Start-Up Grant. At Cornell he teaches courses in US History and the History of Capitalism. Each spring semester he leads a group of Cornell undergraduates to the sugarcane farming community of Petersfield, Jamaica, where they carry out service-learning projects.
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Martin Summers听is an associate professor of history and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, where he regularly teaches courses on gender and sexuality in African American history, medicine and public health in the African diaspora, and the history of masculinity in the U.S. He is currently the director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program. He has published scholarship on gender and sexuality within the African American community, including a monograph,听Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930, which was awarded the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award in 2005. Summers鈥� current book project,听Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation鈥檚 Capital, is a social and cultural history of medicine which focuses on African American patients at Saint Elizabeths Hospital, a federal mental institution in Washington, D.C., from its founding in 1855 to the 1980s.
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Event Photos
Professor Edward Baptist discussed the role of slavery in the production of cotton for the global textile industry at a Boisi Center lecture on October 4. The American system of captialism is rooted in American slavery, according to Baptist.
Boston College Professor Martin Summers (AADS, far right) provided a compelling response drawing connections between the use of slaves by financial institutions and the targeting of black and brown peoples in the subprime mortage scandal of the Great Recession.
Event Recap
On October 4, Cornell University professor Edward E. Baptist spoke about his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) at an event co-sponsored by the Institute for the Liberal Arts, the African and African Diaspora Studies Program, and the Boisi Center. Baptist鈥檚 work emphasizes the connection between slavery and America鈥檚 economic success throughout the nation鈥檚 early history.
Baptist began his lecture by highlighting the varying factors that shaped the growth of industrial capitalism in the U.S. Baptist explained how autobiographies by slaves and former slaves provide firsthand accounts from the historically neglected perspective of the black slave. Thousands of slaves recounted their experiences; more than two-thousand interviews with enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals uncover where 鈥淎merican capitalism gets some of its dis- tinctive force and character.鈥澨�
In the early-nineteenth century, new technology and machinery in Britain unleashed an era of industrialization听that transformed the economy of slavery and the United States. The emergence听of a new factory system that made cotton the most sought after commodity in the world market. Enslavers seized control of the market, going from minor players to the dominant supplier of cotton globally.听
Baptist noted that if cotton entrepreneurs could not supply the ever-growing demand of that cotton, prices would rise. Therefore enslavers relied on slaves to pick cotton at increasingly high quotas, which literate slaves recorded in ledgers. Enslavers used torture and coercion to increase their slaves鈥� productivity. With each passing year, the average enslaved cotton-picker picked 2% more cotton per work day鈥攁 400% overall productivity growth over the course of the nineteenth century. At the height of the cotton industry, slaves were required to pick anywhere between 100 to 160 pounds of cotton a day.听
Against historical treatments of the American South that emphasize the managerial and technical ingenuity of the white enslavers, Baptist maintains that it would be erroneous to ignore the role of enslaved people in the economic growth of the U.S. In short, Baptist emphasized that 鈥渢he whip, not seeds, helped the cotton industry grow鈥� and that freedom and capitalism often do not go hand in hand.听
Professor of history and director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program at Boston College, Martin Summers, provided a compelling response pointing out that Baptist does not attempt to paint a unified or monolithic image of slavery. Instead, he describes the individual stories and childhoods of former slaves in order to humanize their role and overall contribution to the formation of American capitalism. Summers suggested that Baptist鈥檚 book could be renamed to 鈥淪lavery and the Making of American Culture,鈥� as the institution of enslavement and exploitation left a powerful imprint on the church and society as a whole.
Read More
Books
Baptist, Edward E.听The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
Baptist, Edward E., and Hyman, Louis.听American Capitalism: A Reader. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014.听
Beckert, Sven.听Empire of Cotton.听New York: Random House, 2014.听
Camp,听Stephanie M.H.听Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South.听Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.听
DuBois,听W.E.B.听Black Reconstruction In America: An Essay Toward the Part Which Black Folks Played in an Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880.听New York: Harcourt, 1935.
Gross, Kali N.听Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910.听Durham: Duke University Press 2006
Johnson, Walter.听River of Dark Dreams, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.听
Krauthamer,听Barbara.听Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South.听Chapel Hill:听The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.听
Robinson,听Cedric.听Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.听Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.听
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph.听Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.听Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Yamhatta-Taylor,听Keeanga.听From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Resistance.听Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015.
In the News
In 1838,听. Now, the University is confronting its debt to the descendants of the people they sold. Author听, interviewed the chair of Georgetown's working group on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation to discuss the steps the university, and its Jesuit community, is making to atone for its history.