Slavery and Capitalism: A Review Essay
2015; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 81; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2325-6893
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
ResumoThe Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. By Edward E. Baptist. (New York: Basic Books, 2014. Pp. [xxviii], 498. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-465-00296-2.) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism would have been big, important, and much-debated book even if the Economist hadn't decided to review it. Edward E. Baptist's first book--Creating an Old South, close look at middle Florida, that threshold of competing empires and migrations--was very well received, and it linked up nicely with the work of new southern studies scholars who were pushing their histories and their literary criticisms deeper south into the Americas and farther west into the borderlands. (1) His much-anticipated second study, simply by virtue of the author's already polished reputation, would have been closely read and debated by scholars of slavery and the South. But, of course, the unsigned Economist review of The Half Has Never Been Told, appearing in early September 2014, was not just simple critique; it was also in spectacularly bad taste. Illustrated not with historical image but with photo of actress Lupita Nyong'o, in her role as Patsey in the 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years Slave (1853), the brief review questioned Baptist's emphasis on the role of slavery in the making of American capitalism and reminded the readers of the magazine of much more traditional things, like Yankee ingenuity, the Protestant work ethic, and the readily available land of the sprawling republic. Surely, the reviewer suggested, these things--and not slavery--explained the success of the grand republic. (2) What got the most attention, though, were the last few lines of the review. Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery, it concluded. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy. In the days following the publication of the review, the response of readers--including great number of professional historians--was overwhelming. The Economist pulled the review from its website just twenty-four hours after originally posting it and issued public apology to Baptist. (3) Even now, months later, it is still hard to fathom an alternative vision of slavery--one in which (reversing the review's complaint) the whites were victims and the were villains. And it is harder still to discuss the book--to take it seriously, to interrogate it, to subject it to careful evaluation--without being drawn into the wake of the late unpleasantness. For all the wrong reasons, the Economist's review--and all of the attending fireworks--revealed lot about the many different ways to read The Half Has Never Been Told. The magazine's revolting confusion of character from popular movie with the figures in the historical backdrop and the reviewer's desire for some more benevolent interpretation of the American past, some better accounting of American success, tell us great deal about the persistence of racism. Just as certainly, Baptist's conviction that the review revealed just how many people remain reluctant to believe people about the experience of being black and that it demonstrated a wider, more subtle pattern in how testimony often gets treated--sometimes unknowingly--as less reliable than white clarifies the aims of the book. For Baptist, it isn't just that the reviewer was terribly wrongheaded; it is also that she (or he) seemed to prioritize the words of folks over those of enslaved African Americans. This, Baptist argues, is what historians and their publics have been doing all along, which has resulted in profound misremembering of slavery and willful ignorance of important source material that has always been ready for inquiry but dismissed simply because it is black. (4) There are three ways to read The Half Has Never Been Told. …
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