Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Edward Baptist
Cornell University
Martin Summers (response)
Boston College
Date: October 4, 2016
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Liberal Arts and the 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 is a professor in the Department of History at Cornell University and house dean of the Carl Becker House. He has published The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) and Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War (UNC Press, 2002). With the late Stephanie Camp, he co-edited New Studies in the History of American Slavery (University of Georgia Press, 2006). Baptist is also leading a project called Freedom on the Move, 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.
Martin Summers 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, 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’ current book project, Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s 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.
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’s work emphasizes the connection between slavery and America’s economic success throughout the nation’s 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 “American capitalism gets some of its dis- tinctive force and character.”
In the early-nineteenth century, new technology and machinery in Britain unleashed an era of industrialization that transformed the economy of slavery and the United States. The emergence 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.
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’ productivity. With each passing year, the average enslaved cotton-picker picked 2% more cotton per work day—a 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.
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 “the whip, not seeds, helped the cotton industry grow” and that freedom and capitalism often do not go hand in hand.
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’s book could be renamed to “Slavery and the Making of American Culture,” 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. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
Baptist, Edward E., and Hyman, Louis. American Capitalism: A Reader. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014.
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton. New York: Random House, 2014.
Camp, Stephanie M.H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
DuBois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction In America: An Essay Toward the Part Which Black Folks Played in an Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Harcourt, 1935.
Gross, Kali N. Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910. Durham: Duke University Press 2006
Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Krauthamer, Barbara. Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Yamhatta-Taylor, Keeanga. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Resistance. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015.
In the News
In 1838, Georgetown University sold 272 slaves to pay its debts. Now, the University is confronting its debt to the descendants of the people they sold. Author James Martin, S.J., 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.