LINES OF THE DAY

". . . But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past -- or more accurately, pastness -- is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past." p. 15

". . . But we may want to keep in mind that deeds and words are not as distinguishable as often we presume. History does not belong only to its narrators, professional or amateur. While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it into their own hands." p. 153

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Friday, September 5, 2014

Economist Magazine's Reviewer's Feelings Hurt By Book About Slavery and Capitalism

White slave owners and traders are pictured as victimizers and enslaved people as victimized!  This is advocacy not history, shrills anonymous reviewer of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist.


I have read the book. The title is perfect
because the whole story is still not told.
Though most of what is in his book is in
The American Slave Coast, there's a
great deal more in TASC -- but then
TASC is much longer and covers the
entire period of legal slavery in the U.S.
Each book focuses on different aspects of 
of slavery and capitalism in the U.S.

In the wake of Ta-Nehisi Coates tweets about it, The Economist felt it necessary to apologize and withdraw the review:

Apology: In our review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, we said: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so. We have therefore withdrawn the review, but in the interests of transparency the text remains available only on this special page and appears below.

And here it is, and how typically ignorant it is. This anonymous person even drags up that very disproved "fact" that slaves were not badly treated because they were too valuable to be mistreated. That this is mendacious is proved with every account of slavery one reads.  More important than a slave's value were two other parts of a slave society: profit, and in the case of U.S. southern slavery in particular, white supremacy of the "black" body -- though as the generations rolled on the general lightening of the enslaved population became ever more noticeable.


[ " “FOR sale: a coloured girl, of very superior qualifications…a bright mulatto, fine figure, straight, black hair, and very black eyes; very neat and cleanly in her dress and person.” Such accounts of people being marketed like livestock punctuate Edward Baptist’s grim history of the business of slavery.

Although the import of African slaves into the United States was stopped in 1807, the country’s internal slave trade continued to prosper and expand for a long time afterwards. Right up until the outbreak of the civil war in 1861, the American-born children and grandchildren of enslaved Africans were bought cheap in Virginia and Maryland to be sold dear in private deals and public auctions to cotton planters in the deep South.

Tall men commanded higher prices than short ones. Women went for less than men. The best bids were for men aged 18 to 25 and for women aged 15 to 22. One slave recalled buyers passing up and down the lines at a Virginia slave auction, asking, “What can you do? Are you a good cook? Seamstress? Dairy maid?” and to the men, “Can you plough? Are you a blacksmith?” Slaves who gave surly answers risked a whipping from their masters

Raw cotton was America’s most valuable export. It was grown and picked by black slaves. So Mr Baptist, an historian at Cornell University, is not being especially contentious when he says that America owed much of its early growth to the foreign exchange, cheaper raw materials and expanding markets provided by a slave-produced commodity. But he overstates his case when he dismisses “the traditional explanations” for America’s success: its individualistic culture, Puritanism, the lure of open land and high wages, Yankee ingenuity and government policies. 

ake, for example, the astonishing increases he cites in both cotton productivity and cotton production. In 1860 a typical slave picked at least three times as much cotton a day as in 1800. In the 1850s cotton production in the southern states doubled to 4m bales and satisfied two-thirds of world consumption. By 1860 the four wealthiest states in the United States, ranked in terms of wealth per white person, were all southern: South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.

Mr Baptist cites the testimony of a few slaves to support his view that these rises in productivity were achieved by pickers being driven to work ever harder by a system of “calibrated pain”. The complication here was noted by Hugh Thomas in 1997 in his definitive history, “The Slave Trade”; an historian cannot know whether these few spokesmen adequately speak for all. 

Another unexamined factor may also have contributed to rises in productivity. Slaves were valuable property, and much harder and, thanks to the decline in supply from Africa, costlier to replace than, say, the Irish peasants that the iron-masters imported into south Wales in the 19th century. Slave owners surely had a vested interest in keeping their “hands” ever fitter and stronger to pick more cotton. Some of the rise in productivity could have come from better treatment. Unlike Mr Thomas, Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy. " ]

By the way, Lord Thomas concentrates his studies on colonial Caribbean and South American slavery, which are his areas and eras of expertise.  He is by no means an expert on the history of the southern U.S. slave society, which differed so much in so many ways from that further south of us, and particularly from the colonies with French and Spanish imperiums' legal systems and codes.

What I can't figure out though, is why The Economist even allowed this review to run at all? Surely they're brighter than this and better informed than this? Except, surely, they knew something like this would appear in the review since they chose whoever-it-was to review it.  It's so convenient for The Economist and its writers to not have by-lines, and not to have ever allowed them, as far as I know.

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